Max Littman, LCSW
April 19, 2026
I keep seeing announcements in emails, listservs, and facebook groups. They stack on top of each other. New trainings, advanced trainings, specialized trainings, books, blogs, consultation groups, retreats, workshops, experientials, intensives, healing circles, interpersonal process groups. Each one thoughtful, warranted, and addressing something real: cultural difference, attunement, ethical responsibility, embodiment, precision, working with people in extreme vulnerability or life threatening states, and overall better care.
However, lately I’m at capacity. There are plenty of advertised trainings that don’t appeal to me because I’ve covered the topic thoroughly before or have found my own way within it, but there are times when a topic is captivating, yet soon after that spark comes a “oh great, another full day, weekend, or week in front of a screen or book, for takeaways that might move things forward an inch with clients” or “Will I actually get a chance to connect and practice with others here?”. And I don’t fully trust my own dismissal of those inches. I’ve had moments in sessions where something small I picked up somewhere, a phrasing, a shift in pacing, a way of listening, made a difference that wasn’t small at all to the person sitting across from me. That makes it harder to write the whole thing off, even when my body reacts like it’s too much.
There is a culture of more that pervades even our healing profession, especially IFS, which is otherwise so grounded in less is more, in nothing needing to be added to access wholeness, and often the need to unlearn what we have learned when it comes to mental health treatment (e.g. a reductionistic, unhumanistic medical model). I feel guilt about a voice inside saying: enough already with being told I don’t have enough knowledge to help people, or that I need more competence, more skill, more experience, more embodiment, more interventions, more ways of assessing.
There’s a part that feels annoyed. Sometimes it’s annoyed at the saturation itself, other times at what feels like redundancy in what’s being offered. It’s annoyed at the pace, the volume, the sense that the onslaught never really stops.I am aware that I stay connected to the spaces that advertise these trainings, in part because I myself am advertising my offerings in these spaces, primarily my writing. That overrides a part of me that wants to stop going there altogether, to shut off the noise. It starts to feel less like a set of options and more like a current already moving, whether I step into it or not.
There’s something strange about participating in the very system that I feel overwhelmed by. I rely on these same spaces to share my work, to be visible, to reach people. So I stay. And staying means I also absorb the full volume of what moves through them.
Another part reacts to that annoyance almost immediately. It feels guilty for having that response. These are good offerings. Thoughtful people doing meaningful work. Effort and risk taken by well intentioned people. Some of it is addressing harm or blind spots that need attention. Turning away from it too quickly doesn’t sit right in me.
The guilt doesn’t feel abstract. It feels relational, as guilt always is. The guilt is saying that turning away is, in some small way, turning away from colleagues, from a community that is trying to do better, from efforts to help others heal and to repair harm. That makes it harder to simply opt out without consequence, even internally.
And then there’s another part that adds pressure in a different way. It tracks what I might be missing, what I’m not keeping up with, whether I’m current enough.
There hasn’t been a resolution to this. The tension remains. And it exhausts my psychic reserves. I notice a pull to resolve it, to land somewhere clean: to either fully opt out or recommit with clarity. But neither quite holds. It keeps shifting depending on the day, the state I’m in, what I’ve just seen or read, how resourced I feel.
Parts are looking for permission to dismiss the offerings. Some criticise the offerings internally, which seems to track to the harsh internal expectations of more, more, more. Parts of me are asking me to speak this out loud, wondering and hoping that others resonate so that aloneness and guilt may dissipate. Parts of me are asking me to speak this out loud, not to arrive anywhere, but to place it somewhere outside of me. To see if it changes when it’s shared. To see if it softens when it’s not held alone.
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.
