Café psycho - Learn from the self and others

☕ Paris Café Psycho - English speakers only

Paris Café Psycho is a space for those who want to better understand themselves and others through the experiences we have actually lived.

Throughout our lives, certain experiences remain deeply rooted in our memories. A meaningful encounter, a breakup, an achievement, rejection, fear, criticism, a difficult choice…
Because they stirred something powerful within us, they may have changed the way we see ourselves, the way we see others, or the way we move through life.
The idea behind Café Psycho is to put these experiences into words.

Learning from ourselves, but also from others

At each gathering, we choose a few topics to serve as starting points. Everyone can then take some time to reflect on an experience from their own life that resonates with the topic: a moment that stayed with them, a situation that made them think, challenged them, or simply left a mark.

Putting that experience into words allows us to take a little distance from what we lived through: to reconnect with what we were feeling at the time and the thoughts going through our minds, to understand why we reacted the way we did, and to notice how we now look back on that earlier version of ourselves.

While someone is sharing, the others listen without interrupting. They don't try to analyze the person, judge their choices, or tell them what they could have done differently.
The aim is to understand their experience as they lived it, even when we might have felt or acted very differently in their place.

This is where one of the principles of Café Psycho comes in:
We respond to an experience with an experience.
When someone's story brings something up in us, rather than commenting on what they have just shared, we can look within our own lives for something that resonates with it.
“What you're sharing reminds me of a time when I went through something similar…”

We can then share our own experience: what we felt, how we reacted, the choices we made, and how we see that experience today.
Two people may have gone through very similar situations and yet experienced them in completely different ways. It is through these differences that we can learn from one another.

The point isn't to compare our stories to decide who reacted better, nor to use our own experience to tell someone else what they should do.
We are simply sharing another human way of experiencing something.

Little by little, one person's experiences can resonate with another's, help us put words to our own experiences, and sometimes introduce us to a way of feeling or understanding a situation that we had never considered before.

The theme : Friendship - what makes someone a friend?
An evening of conversations, stories and unexpected discoveries.

What makes someone a friend rather than just an acquaintance? Is it trust, shared experiences, humour, honesty, or simply the feeling that you can be yourself around someone?

Friendship means different things to different people. Some friendships happen naturally, others take time to build. Some survive distance and time, while others gradually fade away.

During this Café Psycho, we'll explore what friendship means to us, what we look for in others, and what kind of friends we want to be.

Through a few playful exercises, storytelling and open conversations, we'll discover different perspectives, share personal experiences and perhaps learn something unexpected about ourselves and the people around us.

No psychological knowledge or perfect English required. Just curiosity, an open mind and a willingness to share.