Ball's reflective account moves through several dialogues she attended at the inaugural conference, identifying threads that connected them. The first concerns the instinct to help: when helpers assume they possess greater skill or knowledge than those they assist, they risk disempowering the very people they intend to support. Ball asks whether practitioners have genuinely been invited into a relationship, and whether their impulse to help is rooted in something they themselves have experienced rather than in the other person's actual need. One participant's phrase captures the tension at the heart of this: 'I want to be connected but I also want to be different, I still want to be me.' The second theme, emerging from a dialogue set in a prison context, extends this into questions of power and powerlessness: if rehabilitation is the stated aim of incarceration, Ball asks how systems built on control might begin to return agency to the people inside them.