Max Littman, LCSW
April 10, 2025
Imagine, for a moment, that the United States isn’t a country, but an internal system, like a single person, made up of many distinct parts. Some are loud and self-assured. Some are frightened. Some are calculating. Some are grieving. Some are trying to hold it all together. All of them carry different stories, wounds, roles, and strategies for survival. And all of them, in some way, are trying to help the system endure.
Now imagine that Donald Trump is not just a political figure, but the embodiment of one extreme protector part of this internal system. He is flashy, dominating, polarizing. He distrusts vulnerability, is driven by performance, and strives to command attention at all costs. Like many manager parts in IFS, he believes deeply, perhaps desperately, that strength, spectacle, and loyalty are the only paths to safety.
But the Trump part is only one part of a much more complex American system.
A Messy and Multiplicitous System
The U.S. is made up of a vast web of parts: political parties with their own internal factions, cultural movements, branches of government, millions of government workers and public servants, judicial interpreters, local officials, career diplomats, community organizers, media outlets, ideological movements, and, most significantly, everyday people, all carrying their own burdens and beliefs about what it means to survive, to matter, and to belong.
Some parts strive for justice and equity. Some cling to tradition and fear change. Some are deeply disillusioned, checked out, or numb. Some are fiery with hope. Some are fiercely protective. Others feel exiled: forgotten, scapegoated, or punished simply for existing.
And there are parts within this system that have been exiled by design: Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, disabled, and poor communities who have borne the brunt of this system’s unresolved traumas and legacies. Their pain is not new, and it is not metaphorical. It lives in bodies, in policy, in land, in memory. And yet, these exiled parts carry wisdom the system needs to heal, if the system can learn to listen.
America’s exiles are also parts of the system trying to tell the truth: about violence, about inequality, about history, about what it feels like to live in a body or a neighborhood or a courtroom where the rules don’t apply equally. These exiles aren’t just calling for inclusion; they’re calling for reckoning, redistribution, and repair.
And exile doesn’t only live on the margins of race, gender, or sexuality. It lives in geography and class, too.
Many people living in rural towns, post-industrial regions, and more conservative states, often with limited access to wealth, education, or national recognition, have long felt exiled by parts of the system that see them as ignorant, regressive, or disposable. Progressive parts of the system, often concentrated in coastal cities and liberal institutions, can be quick to shame or dismiss these more traditional, religious, or less formally educated parts of the country. They may not intend harm, but they carry a legacy burden of elitism: the belief that intelligence, compassion, or modernity only look a certain way, speak a certain language, or vote a certain way.
These exiled parts, often made up of working-class white communities, disillusioned laborers, farmers, and people in economically depleted regions, turned to Trump not necessarily because they trusted him to care for them, but because he seemed to be the only part willing to acknowledge their existence. He named their pain (albeit selectively), spoke in a register they recognized, and mirrored back their rage and resentment. For parts that had long felt dismissed or mocked by the cultural and political elite, even by liberal institutions, this recognition, however manipulative or incomplete, was a form of validation.
Protector parts in power often panic when exiles speak too loudly. And so they try to silence, punish, or discredit them: sometimes through policy, sometimes through force, sometimes through indifference.
The danger is that when these exiles, regardless of their experiences or histories, go unheard, protector parts rise to shield them, sometimes through resentment, sometimes through backlash, sometimes through alignment with charismatic figures who promise revenge or revival.
This is how polarization works in systems: when we exile some parts, others take extreme forms to defend them.
The Trump Part: A Burdened Protector
The Trump part is burdened personally, culturally, and ancestrally. Born into wealth and a family system that equated worth with domination, he likely internalized the message early on that vulnerability was dangerous, that love had to be earned through performance, and that empathy was weakness. He came of age in a culture that prized control, hierarchy, and spectacle; a culture that came to exile truth, nuance, and relationality.
He is, in many ways, a reactive part shaped by legacy burdens: of white supremacy, patriarchal entitlement, exceptionalism, and fear of decline. He didn’t invent these burdens. But he embodies them. And his rise to power reflects how susceptible the larger system still is to those messages, especially when other parts of the system feel unheard, threatened, or abandoned..
Why It Feels So Hard to Stay in Self
For many people in the U.S. system, especially those directly impacted by systemic violence and political rollbacks, the invitation to stay in Self energy might feel naive, impossible, or even offensive. Parts that hold rage, terror, numbness, grief, or deep distrust are showing up for good reason.
And if you’re someone who’s feeling overwhelmed, shut down, or flooded, it may be because your own inner system is reacting to a collective trauma still unfolding. You may be feeling your own exiles stir, or your own protectors trying to shield you from despair. That makes sense.
Staying connected to Self doesn’t mean being detached or above it all. It means staying with it all, especially when things feel impossibly broken. It means being honest about the harm, and curious about the conditions that gave rise to it. It means seeing both the pain and the polarizations for what they are: survival strategies in a system that hasn’t yet learned to hold all its parts.
A Polarized and Dysregulated System
Many parts of the American system have been polarized for decades, but the current moment reveals a new level of fragmentation and mistrust. Some parts identify with Trump and see him as a last stand against erasure or irrelevance. Others see him as a direct threat to the entire system’s integrity. Still others, across the political spectrum, feel alienated and unrepresented; suspicious of all sides, and protective of their own families, identities, or beliefs.
Meanwhile, the other branches of government, the courts, Congress, each contain their own constellation of parts. Some are trying to protect democratic norms and ethical frameworks. Others are enacting or enabling regressive strategies to preserve power. And within the machinery of the state are thousands of federal employees, career civil servants, policy workers, analysts, archivists, teachers, first responders, many of whom are doing their jobs with care and integrity, even while the system above them lurches and frays.
These quieter, steadier parts of the system are often overlooked, and yet they offer a glimpse of what Self-led functioning can look like: grounded, deliberate, responsive. But even they are not immune to burnout, pressure, or politicization in this dysregulated landscape.
The Path Forward Is Messy. And It Matters That We Name That.
This is not a hopeful, tidy moment in the American system. For many, especially those in marginalized communities, this is a time of profound fear, grief, exhaustion, and trauma. People are losing bodily autonomy, access to care, voting rights, educational freedoms, financial stability, and physical safety. The Trump part of the system and its allied parts are not just ideologies, they are actively inflicting harm. Psychological harm. Policy harm. Interpersonal harm. Cultural harm. Bodily harm.
And for those who have already been carrying the weight of exile, especially immigrants, people of color, and trans people, that harm is not new, but the scale and boldness of it may be.
To suggest that all we need to do is “see Trump as a burdened part” without holding the full scope of the impact would be dismissive and untrue. It’s not that simple. We don’t need to “understand” him as a way to forgive or excuse. But we do need to understand him and what conditions, legacies, and fears allowed a part like his to rise and take power if we hope to transform this system meaningfully and prevent it from happening again.
The work ahead is not linear or clean. It will require fierce boundary-setting, protective action, and strategic resistance, all of which can be expressions of Self energy when grounded in clarity, compassion, and connection to the whole. And it will also require us, when we’re resourced enough, to stay in relationship with the parts of our system we’d rather exile, not because they deserve redemption, but because systems don’t heal through avoidance. They heal through courageous witnessing, radical accountability, and a redistribution of power.
So if you can’t feel Self energy toward Trump or his allies, that’s okay. That, too, is a part of the system responding to real harm. Your rage, fear, numbness, disgust, these are intelligent responses from deep within us. They’re worthy of care, not correction. But when and if it becomes possible, even just for a moment, to wonder what pain or legacy burden gave rise to a part like Trump, that moment might help loosen the grip of despair, and reconnect us to the clarity we need to keep showing up.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
