Max Littman, LCSW
April 1, 2025
One of the fundamental challenges in therapy is knowing when to intervene and when to allow a client to remain in their process without interruption. As therapists, we hold a powerful tension between being fully attuned and present, resisting the impulse to direct, reflect, question, or analyze, and to intervene or interrupt in ways that can deepen a client’s experience, internal clarity, self knowledge, and self love. This tension is not just theoretical; it plays out moment to moment in sessions, where our choices shape the client’s unfolding experience.
The Challenge of Letting Clients Stay in Their Process
Staying with a client’s process means allowing their internal world to unfold organically, without interjecting interpretations, insights, or even invitations to deepen awareness. This approach respects the client’s pacing and their nervous system’s capacity to integrate their experience. It can foster profound self-discovery, allowing unconscious material to surface naturally. However, it can also risk stagnation, avoidance, or dissociation if the client lacks internal resources to stay engaged with their experience without external support. Patiently allowing the client to be in their own process can also inadvertently reinforce wounds about neglect or abandonment if, in our silence, the client’s internal system perceives it as a lack of presence and attunement.
On the other hand, when we guide a client’s awareness, whether through reflections, questions, or directing their attention to internal or external dynamics, we run the risk of disrupting a process that might unfold more meaningfully on its own. It also may disrupt a client’s emerging confidence, calm, and self compassion, reinforcing a belief that these qualities can only be accessed from outside of themselves. The art in this tension is in knowing, sensing when a gentle intervention facilitates deeper awareness versus when it inadvertently pulls a client away from a deeper, more embodied unfolding.
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Each Approach
- Letting clients stay fully in their process can create a space of deep trust and organic emergence. It respects their inner wisdom and can foster a sense of ownership over their healing. However, it can also unintentionally enable avoidance patterns, allowing protector parts to dominate without the client recognizing it. Clients might also feel unsupported if they struggle to navigate their experience alone.
- Intervening through reflections, questions, or interpretations can provide clarity, structure, and attunement that helps clients recognize patterns they might not see on their own. However, it can also impose the therapist’s framework onto the client’s experience, subtly shifting the power dynamic and making the client more reliant on the therapist’s perceptions rather than their own inner knowing.
Enabling, Accepting, or Justifying
It’s important to discern whether our therapeutic choices are enabling avoidance, genuinely accepting a client’s process, or justifying our own discomfort.
- Enabling happens when we allow a client to remain in an unconscious cycle of protection or dissociation without gently inviting awareness.
- Accepting means we honor the client’s pacing and recognize that pushing awareness too soon may not be in service of their system’s healing.
- Justifying can arise when we, as therapists, lean on an approach because it feels comfortable for us, even when it may not be what the client truly needs.
The Alchemy of the Therapeutic Relationship
Every therapeutic relationship is a dynamic, evolving interplay between two nervous systems, two lived experiences, and two unfolding processes. The therapist’s attunement and presence, to themselves and clients, act as a crucible where transformation can occur, but only if we hold the space with both humility and discernment.
Alchemy in therapy isn’t about getting it “right” but about being with the client in a way that fosters an emergent process of healing. This requires both surrender and skill; the ability to trust what is unfolding while also knowing when to gently introduce an awareness that the client’s system may be longing for but unable to access alone.
The Therapist as Artist: Honoring Authentic Style
There is no singular right way to do therapy. Yes, ethical guardrails and risk factors are important, but what happens in between is much more gray to be played with. Each therapist brings their own artistry to the work, and finding one’s style is an ever-evolving journey. Just as an artist learns from different techniques without losing their unique creative voice, a therapist can integrate new approaches without sacrificing authenticity.
The challenge is in balancing flexibility with integrity; adapting to what serves the client while staying true to one’s innate way of being. Too often, therapists fear that adopting a new approach will dilute their authenticity, when in reality, it can enrich their work if integrated thoughtfully.
A Personal Note on My Own Parts
I have therapist parts that do not like to take people out of their internal process with statements like “just notice that” or “just be with that” out of concern that these invitations might be misattuned or disruptive. These parts of me value deep attunement and are cautious about imposing awareness in a way that could interrupt something unfolding naturally.
At the same time, I have parts that react strongly when these kinds of micro-statements are posed to me in my own therapeutic work. Perfectionistic parts arise, striving to “do it right” and feeling pressure to notice exactly what is being asked of me or to yield to what is being noticed. Other parts desire more structure and resist the falling, yielding sensation that comes with shifting into process over content. These parts prefer something more concrete, something to hold onto. Beneath all of this are more vulnerable parts that are both longing to yield and terrified by it.
This internal push and pull mirrors the very tension I navigate in my work: how to trust a client’s unfolding process while also sensing and knowing when and how to offer awareness in a way that deepens rather than disrupts. It’s a dance, and one that I’m continuously learning as I refine my practice and my relationship with my own internal system.
Navigating My Own Integration of Somatic IFS
In my own practice, I am currently sitting with this tension as I integrate Somatic IFS, an emerging and relatively new approach for me. I find myself exploring how to balance attunement and non-interruption with the benefits of bringing clients’ awareness to their somatic world. The body often reveals what the mind cannot yet name; through breath, subtle movements, touch, and unconscious physical expressions. How do I honor the unfolding process while also gently guiding awareness to these somatic cues in a way that supports deeper integration rather than feeling or being directive, self-serving, misattuned, or imposing?
This is an ongoing exploration, and perhaps one without a definitive answer. I sit with my parts in their various perspectives on this matter. What I do know is that finding this balance is not about choosing between silence and intervention, or between somatic awareness and internal unfolding. It is about listening deeply to the client, to their internal system, to my own intuition, to my own internal system, and to the relational field that emerges in being together, sharing the same intentions. It is about embracing the paradoxes, trusting the unknown, and allowing the work to be as alive and dynamic as the clients who step into the room.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
