Max Littman, LCSW
April 20, 2025
Imagine your body as a beautifully complex piece of hardware. Something like a supercomputer crossed with an ancient instrument. It holds memory, rhythm, responsiveness, and resilience. Now imagine your parts as the software installed on that hardware. Each part has its own code, written over time by life experiences, relationships, traumas, joys, and cultural messages. Some programs run smoothly. Others crash or loop. Some stay in the background, quietly using up all our bandwidth until we feel overloaded or shut down.
And this software doesn’t come from nowhere. Some programs were installed by our families of origin: their rules, fears, patterns, and ways of coping. Others reach back through ancestral lines, carrying the imprints of migrations, oppressions, survival strategies, and hard-won wisdom. Many were downloaded from the environments we grew up in: our neighborhoods, schools, religions, media, and communities. Still more come from our national and global cultures, shaped by social norms, systems of power, historical traumas, and dominant narratives.
Some of these programs even stretch back to the dawn of our species; our inherited human wiring for safety, belonging, vigilance, and adaptation. These primal codes still run in us today.
In IFS, we begin to notice these layers. And with somatic awareness, we learn to feel them, not just as concepts or stories, but as living patterns in our breath, our posture, our nervous systems. We begin to understand that healing isn’t just individual; it’s deeply collective and intergenerational.
Parts Speak Through Our Hardware
While some parts communicate in words, images, or emotions, many rely on the body, our hardware, as their primary interface. A lump in the throat. Tension in the belly. A racing heart. A fog of dissociation. These are not random glitches or malfunctions. They are messages, delivered through the system’s wiring.
In Somatic IFS, we know that the body is not just a passive vessel but an active communication platform. The nervous system functions like internal circuitry where parts send signals, transmit alerts, and store emotional memory. A vigilant part might tighten the jaw to keep things contained. A burdened exile might slump the shoulders as a kind of shutdown response. A survival-based protector might alter the breath or raise the heart rate to prepare for perceived threat.
These somatic cues are not signs of dysfunction. They are intelligent signals from the system’s internal software. Signals to pay attention. Clues that a part is online and needs to be known. When we learn to read the hardware not as a problem to fix but as a communication system harnessed to ask for understanding, we as a single organism made up of many parts can function as one.
When Software Takes Over the Hardware
We’ve all had moments when a part hijacks our system. The heart races. The thoughts spiral. We can’t eat. Or we can’t stop eating. It can feel like we’ve lost control. But from a Somatic IFS perspective, it’s not that we’ve lost control; it’s that a protective part has taken the reins of our hardware in an effort to protect us from overwhelm, failure, harm, or shame.
That part may be running a program written long ago: by a traumatized parent, a cultural message about worthiness, a survival tactic passed down through generations. Or it may be a species-level fear reacting to perceived threat.
Our calling is not to erase these programs, but to tend to them, to mind them.
System Overload: When Too Many Programs Are Running
Every device has its limits. When too many programs are running at once, even the most powerful hardware starts to slow down. The screen freezes. The fan kicks in. The system overheats. Eventually, the only option may be to crash or shut down.
Our internal systems operate in much the same way.
When many protectors are running simultaneously, managing appearances, preventing rejection, monitoring for danger, keeping emotion at bay, it is like dozens of heavy apps working overtime in the background. And why are they working so hard? Because they are trying to keep exiles from flooding the system with the intensity of their pain, fear, shame, powerlessness, or unmet longing.
This overload does not just slow us down mentally. It affects the nervous system, immune function, digestion, sleep, attention, and mood. The body starts sending alerts: fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, pain, numbness. These are not bugs. They are messages.
What is often needed is not more optimization or forceful rebooting. It is contact with what lies underneath. When we pause, turn inward, and begin to hear from these overloaded protectors, sometimes through the body, and eventually from the exiles they guard, the system begins to ease. As an operator of the system, Self can orchestrate what programs need to remain operational and which can be closed for the time being.
Dissociation as Low Power Mode
Sometimes, when a system starts to overheat or run low on energy, it shifts into a kind of conservation state. Think of when your phone dims, disables background activity, and puts itself on low power mode. It is not broken. It is trying to preserve what little capacity it has left.
Many parts use dissociation in a similar way. It is a strategy. An adaptive, intelligent one. When sensations, memories, or feelings from exiles start to surge and the nervous system begins to flood, a protector may quickly activate dissociation to conserve resources.
The lights dim. Awareness narrows. Attention blurs. Emotion goes offline. Sensation becomes distant or fuzzy.
This is not failure. It is an adaptation for survival. The system is doing exactly what it learned to do in order to make it through something overwhelming. That might have been a traumatic event, chronic neglect, relational chaos, or subtle forms of everyday emotional overload.
So Where Does Self Fit In?
If the body is the hardware and the parts are the software, Self is not another installed application, operating system, or user interface. It may be more like the electrical current that powers the system or the bandwidth that enables data to move across components. It is the conductive field where information is transferred, circuits remain responsive, and processes stay in sync. It does not store data or execute commands. It allows the system to run without short-circuiting, overheating, or losing integrity. You cannot see it directly, but you can observe its effects when the system runs more efficiently and with less internal interference.
And none of the hardware exists on its own. Every circuit, processor, and sensor is made from raw elements drawn from the natural world: copper, silicon, rare earth metals, minerals fused through heat, pressure, and design. The chemical reactions engineered into this system do not create energy; they harness it. They channel the natural flow already present in the world, made coherent only when these elements are brought into relationship.
Collective Self Energy: A Networked System
None of us is just one system. Just like individual devices connect to a larger network, our inner systems are constantly interfacing with the systems around us. Our hardware is shaped by shared environments, and our software is updated in real time through relational and cultural input. We are nested in larger systems: family, culture, society, ecology. Our parts are in constant relationship with the nervous systems of others. When we have enough bandwidth to pay attention, we can literally feel in our bodies the reverberations of intergenerational trauma, systemic oppression, inherited shame, and collective fear. And we also carry ancestral resilience, cultural brilliance, and generational strength.
When Self energy arises in a group or community, it changes the field. Healing spreads. Co-regulation takes place. Individuals and ecosystems reorganize. We remember that we’re not alone in our programming or our pain. We are part of the whole.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
