3 Ingredients Required for Intimacy (Empathy, Vulnerability and Accountability) and What Most People Get Wrong About Them

Community Conversation

In this engaging panel discussion, we'll explore how these three relational skills work together to create emotional safety, deepen trust, and transform the way couples communicate, repair conflict, and experience intimacy. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of why each ingredient is essential, how the absence of even one can undermine connection, and simple strategies for cultivating healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

October 22, 2026 Thursday 12:00PM-1:30PM PT Virtual (Zoom)

Facilitators

Monica Tanner

Facilitator

Monica Tanner, Relational Life Therapy Certified, Relationship Coach and host of the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast, transforms marriages with simple communication, connection, conflict resolution and commitment strategies. Her mission is to lower the divorce rate and improve marital satisfaction. Through her engaging podcast, new Amazon Best-Selling book, Bad Marriage Advice, vibrant social media community, and couples' coaching practice, Monica's expert guidance has impacted thousands of couples by helping them ditch resentment and roommate syndrome and get back to living their happily ever after love story.

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Melissa Ryan, MS, LPC, NCC

Presenter

Melissa Ryan, MS, LPC, NCC, is a Colorado-based counselor, writer, and relational practitioner specializing in helping couples find their way back to play, creative spark, and embodied intimacy, including those navigating substance use impacts. Her work is somatic, in relationship with the living world, and unapologetically outside empire parenting and relationship norms. Drawing from Relational Life Therapy, somatic, experiential, and nature-based training, including Somatic-Concentric Sex Therapy (S-CST) and Horticulture Therapy, Melissa helps individuals and partners reclaim relational authority and each other. She tracks the living current of her own experience and invites others to do the same, moving with the full intensity of being human rather than around it, transmogrifying what no longer serves or never served, including the inherited patterns of empire that were never designed for anyone's aliveness, and cocreating a vibrant relational ecosystem. She writes for everyone handed a breathing exercise while the world was on fire. Find her at https://counselormelissa.substack.com/.

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Grant Gosch

Presenter

Grant Gosch is a Portland-based relational leadership consultant and writer. He helps executives, teams, couples, and individuals dismantle adaptive child defenses to step into Wise Adult agency, radical accountability, and deep connection. For over fifteen years, Grant has brought his relational leadership framework to Nike’s global headquarters, helping executive leaders navigate complex power dynamics, drop grandiosity, and build high-functioning culture. Grounded in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), he holds up a firm, compassionate mirror to the self-defeating patterns that breed distance and resentment. Grant cuts through the noise so partners and leaders stop managing through control or compliance, cultivating the grounded presence required for real intimacy and true collaboration.

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Carol Bastien, LCSW

Presenter

Carol Bastien, LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 30 years of experience. As a Certified Relational Life Therapy Coach her passion is to help couples transform their relationships with themselves and with one another by teaching them the skills to: foster deeper understanding; better hold themselves accountable for how they show up in their significant relationship; and strengthen their intimacy. Her direct and compassionate approach allows couples to feel seen, empowered, cared for, and appropriately challenged.