Max Littman, LCSW
June 7, 2026
As I become more recognizable in the IFS community, I find myself encountering an uncomfortable experience more often. I meet someone through a consultation, a podcast, a training space, an email, or a professional group, and they already know something about me. They know my work, what matters to me, how I sound, or something about how I carry myself.
They may know an article title. They may remember a sentence I wrote. They may know an internal or external dynamic I’ve highlighted. They may have sent something of mine to a friend, a family member, a client, a colleague, a trainee, or a consultation group. They may say, “I have been following your work for a while,” and I suddenly find myself in the unusual position of being known before I have formally introduced myself.
A part of me usually knows what to do. I say thank you. And I genuinely mean it. I feel grateful. I also feel a mix of things that do not immediately seem to belong together: shyness, pleasure, pride, guilt, anxiety, and exposure. I monitor my face, my tone, my response, and my level of visible delight. I want to receive the recognition without looking too eager for it.
Here is where I find myself lingering. I like being recognized for my writing and work. I like hearing that something I wrote helped someone name an experience, understand a client differently, feel less alone, or think about IFS with more spaciousness. I like hearing that people in the IFS community take my voice and how I approach and practice therapy seriously. I like having clout. I like feeling relevant. I like feeling important. I like feeling like I have a defined, clear place in the community.
I feel embarrassed to admit this plainly.
I can write and share more comfortably about insecurity. I can write and share about shame, longing, fear, grief, protectiveness, and other tender places. Pride is harder. Pride is often followed by judgment. It can be heard as arrogance, self promotion, grandiosity, neediness, or humblebragging. It can change how people see you. It can make others pull away, diminish what you have accomplished, question your motives, or become less generous toward you. I have spent much of my adult life watching for the moment when pleasure in being good at something, and wanting that goodness to be recognized, becomes embarrassing for me.
Still, I feel pride here, even as a part of me tries to deny it because pride can feel socially dangerous. I have worked hard. I have practiced and honed my craft as a therapist. I have written often and with depth. I have sat with clients, consultees, therapist struggles, my own inner life, training material, clinical mistakes, personal history, community tensions, and the beauty and exhaustion of trying to live close to the spirit of IFS while remaining open to where experience complicates, challenges, and expands the model.
I am wrestling here with more than the wish to matter. There are real signs I do matter, and I feel both proud of the work that made it happen and embarrassed by how good that feels.
For much of my life, I have known the comfort of becoming a big fish in a small pond. Because I knew that comfort, I often chose smaller ponds to swim in. Academic settings. Training programs. Skill areas. Hobbies. Places where I could learn the language, understand the rules, work hard, and become recognizable, respected, and dependable within that space.
Competence helped me find a role. Recognition helped me feel grounded. If I could be good at something, I would feel less uncertain about my place. I often sought out those kinds of spaces for exactly that reason.
That pattern has tenderness in it. It also has strategy in it. Being good helped me feel safer. Being useful helped me feel included. Being seen as thoughtful, skilled, perceptive, or unusually capable gave me a way to belong in places where belonging did not feel guaranteed.
Something similar seems to be happening now, but the pond is larger than the ones I’m used to. IFS is still a subculture within the wider therapy world, but it is not small to me. It is a sprawling community of trainings, teachers, assistants, consultants, authors, podcasts, organizations, local circles, affinity spaces, arguments, loyalties, and different ways of practicing and relating to the model. Some of those worlds feel more like home than others. Some feel more spacious. Some feel more status driven. Some feel tender. Some feel strange. Some feel lively.
Becoming recognizable in the IFS community feels different than the smaller ponds of the past. It is reassuring. It is gratifying. It is also embarrassing, because the recognition is no longer confined to a small community where I already know the rules and visibility is much more of a given. With more recognition comes more gratification and more exposure.
For me, the wish for recognition goes beyond belonging. I want my presence to make a difference. I want the community to have a sense of my voice, my clinical sensibility, my writing, my way of seeing, my way of practicing, and the style I bring to the craft of therapy. I want to feel that I have a noticeable impact on our shared field.
This does make me cringe a bit. I can feel the old fear of being made fun of for wanting importance, of being seen as self absorbed, of becoming the person who thinks his own work matters more than it does, or at least more than other people see it to be.
There is loneliness in it. There is ambition in it. There is the love of the work. There is something innocent and youthful around belonging and recognition. There is also more of an adult knowledge of my actual capacities. I am good at some of this. I am good at listening for underlying processes. I am good at naming certain therapist dynamics. I am good at tracking protection, shame, and performance. I am good at noticing how a model can become a refuge, a language, a shield, a devotion, and sometimes a performance. I am good at giving language to the emotional and relational experience of practicing IFS. I am good at writing from the edge between personal experience and clinical observation.
It feels vulnerable to write those sentences without coating them in apology.
Maybe the deepest recognition I want is recognition in the craft of therapy itself. I care about the writing. I care a lot about writing. I revise words, sentences, and paragraphs with fervor because I want the writing to accurately express and evoke. I want the language to carry the experience, not just describe it. But ultimately, I want the writing to reveal the craft beneath it: the clinical attention, the lived experience, the listening, the mistakes, the repair, and the ongoing effort to stay close to what is actually happening in the work.
By craft, I mean the alive work we share as therapists, consultants, mentors, assistants, and practitioners. The craft of knowing how long to stay with a silence. The craft of noticing a client’s protective compliance, respecting what it is trying to preserve, and not getting recruited into helping it keep the work too safe, too agreeable, or too far from what needs attention. The craft of feeling mistrust in the room before it has been named. The craft of sensing when a question has become too much for the client’s nervous system. The craft of recognizing our own attachment to depth, access, repair, or a clean piece of IFS work. The craft of staying relationally present. The craft of tracking a system without turning the person into a static diagram.
I want to be seen as good at all of that. And I want my writing to help people sense the practitioner behind the writing. I want someone to read a piece and feel, “He understands something about the work itself. He’s naming something I’ve felt before but could not put words to. He is helping me understand something I had felt but had not yet named. I resonate with him.”
There are definitive signs this recognition has happened.
Susan McConnell invited me into her training world as an assistant, and later wrote the foreword to my book. Dick Schwartz expressed excitement to me directly about my work. Trainers have reached out about using my writing in their trainings. I have been invited onto major IFS podcasts. People I do not know regularly tell me that my writing has been meaningful to them, that it has helped them name something, that they have shared it, and that it has mattered in their own development or practice.
I can feel how quickly I want to minimize those markers. I can compare myself to people with larger platforms, more seniority, more institutional authority, more public recognition, more letters after their names, more official roles, and more proximity to power. I can make my own recognition small enough that I do not have to feel the danger of receiving it. I can turn something meaningful into something modest before it has a chance to touch me.
But it has touched me. These moments have been gratifying. They have reached the wish to know whether my work has a place here. They have reached the wish to be taken seriously by people who take this work seriously. They have reached the wish to be seen as carrying something of value in the shared craft.
There are other perhaps more concrete reasons I write. I write so the right people can find me. I want prospective clients, consultees, and mentees to have a feel for my voice before they reach out. I want people who resonate with my way of thinking, practicing, and relating to know there may be a fit. I want the work I do with people to feel alive and useful. I want to be found by the people most likely to benefit from the way I practice and relate.
I also write to understand my own experience. Writing helps me gather what I keep noticing in sessions, consultations, trainings, community spaces, and my own inner world. I often do not know exactly what I think until I start writing. The writing gives form to something that has been moving around in me. It helps me make coherence out of the living material inside of me and my practice.
Those reasons are real. They are easier to say. But, this piece is about the more embarrassing reason. I write because I want to matter in the community I write into.
If you have made it this far into this article, thank you for witnessing so much of me here. I hope something in this has been illuminating, or at least companioning, as you consider the ways you may also want your work, your voice, your care, or your presence to matter somewhere, and the embarrassment that may come with wanting that.
IFS gives me a way to hold all of this without forcing one feeling to cancel out the others. The pride is real. The embarrassment is real. The longing is real. The wish to be useful is real. The wish to be recognized is real too. I am glad to be here. I appreciate being seen, welcomed, and valued by a community that has shaped me, challenged me, frustrated me, and given me a place to bring something I could not have brought in quite the same way anywhere else.
That is still embarrassing to say.
It also feels true.
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.
