Max Littman, LCSW
January 23, 2026
Lately I’ve been noticing how quickly some of my parts look outward for answers, especially toward people who are perceived as experts or authorities. It often happens quietly, almost automatically, and I don’t always realize it until I feel a subtle loss of contact with myself. When that happens, I’m no longer listening closely to what my body, emotions, or imagination are registering in the moment. I’m orienting toward whether I’m doing it “right,” rather than toward what feels true or alive in the interaction in front of me. There’s a kind of grief in noticing this, not dramatic or overwhelming, but real, in recognizing how often my own inner assessment gets overridden before it has a chance to speak.
When this happens, a voice enters. Sometimes more than one.
They sound like people I respect. They often carry the tone or language of teachers, authors, clinicians, supervisors, cultural figures, mentors, or role models. Some are people I know personally. Others I have never met. They offer guidance, corrections, or warnings. They tell me what the right response might be, what not to say, what a “good” therapist would do here. They reference what is attuned, what is ethical, what is Self led.
None of this arrives as hostile. That is part of what makes it difficult to notice.
What I am becoming more aware of is how invasive it can feel, not overtly, but quietly. It interrupts something that was forming. A bodily sense begins to fade. An emotional movement loses momentum. A relational cue gets overridden. The subtle information that comes from being in contact with who is actually in front of me is replaced by a consultation with someone who is not here.
When that happens, I am no longer fully present. I am referencing experiences that are not my own. I am placing trust in voices that do not have access to my nervous system, my senses, or the specificity of this moment.
I recognize these voices as parts of me that learned to orient outward. They carry the internalized presence of experts and trusted authorities. Their intentions are protective, both toward me and toward others. They want me to get it right. They want to prevent harm. They want to keep me aligned with values I care deeply about. I am not trying to get rid of them.
However, I do notice parts polarized with them, defending my own internal reactions and intuition, protecting an exile holding the experiences and senses of being invaded, barged in on without consent.
I am now noticing the cost of this inner conflict.
The cost shows up as a loss of immediacy. Presence flattens. My connection to intuition, imagination, emotion, gut response, and the quiet, often nonverbal information that arises in relational space becomes thinner. What matters most in the moment gets replaced by what has mattered elsewhere.
This has been especially apparent in my work with clients. I notice parts of them that look to me for answers, particularly parts of me that have an agenda of being clear or reassuring. I also notice parts of me that want to provide those answers, to offer something solid, to ease uncertainty, to be useful.
Alongside this is another concern. I worry that in answering too quickly, I may become another external authority they internalize, another remembered voice that later tells them what to do or say instead of helping them stay connected to themselves and the moment. I can feel the tension between offering guidance and preserving enough space for their own inner knowing to emerge.
This is not something I feel resolved about. It feels ongoing.
Francis Weller’s writing on grief has helped me name something that previously felt vague. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, he writes about losses that go unrecognized and therefore unmourned, including collective losses that shape us without our awareness. I wonder if part of what I am feeling now is grief for a way of knowing and trusting oneself that is rarely nurtured: a way of orienting that has been slowly displaced in a culture that teaches us, often implicitly, to exile our own inner knowing and to outsource trust about what to do, how to respond, and even what to feel.
This feels related to familiar critiques of capitalism, particularly the way we become disconnected from our means of production and from the lived costs and consequences of what is made. That distance dulls our relationship with each other and the natural world. We lose a felt sense of what we are engaging with, using, or consuming. Something similar seems to happen internally when knowing is rerouted elsewhere and no longer lived from the inside out, moment by moment, in contact with what is actually here.
I am not talking about dramatic intuition or certainty. I mean a more basic trust that my own system can register what is happening and respond from within the moment. That trust was not explicitly taken. It was gradually overshadowed, corrected, and replaced by “better” answers from outside.
There is sadness in realizing how normal this is, and how familiar it feels to second guess an internal sense and defer to a remembered voice instead. Presence gives way to consultation more easily than I would like to admit.
What I am experimenting with now is small. I pause more often. I notice when those voices enter. I let them be present without letting them take over. I stay with the sensation of being with someone, rather than stepping out of the room internally to check whether I am doing it right.
What emerges is often less polished, less certain, and more alive and connected.
Lately, that feels like the point.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide consultation and therapy for therapists.
Purchase my new book IFS Therapy for Gay and Queer Men here.
