Max Littman, LCSW
March 2, 2026
Posting online can feel incredibly vulnerable and exposing. The more it touches personal and burdened places, the more vulnerable and exposing it can feel. Even more so when the post is not a passing thought but a fully developed, long form article addressing culture, identity, power, therapy, politics, mental health, or spirituality. Parts inevitably come online.
In many healing or mental health oriented spaces, online and offline, there can be an implicit cultural expectation to share vulnerably, bring openness, and lead with exposure. Sometimes this is named directly. Often it is not. But it can be felt.
For some internal systems, that expectation itself can feel activating. Vulnerability may be valued, but it can also feel risky. It can feel that way especially for parts that have learned, through experience, that being seen leads to misunderstanding, labeling, exclusion, or verbal attack. When those histories exist, even subtly, the nervous system may enter the interaction already vigilant.
This means that by the time a comment is written or read, protectors may already be close to the surface.
Then the comments begin.
On platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, or Substack, parts often speak quickly and frequently in the comments section. They do so without the regulating influence of facial expression, tone, pacing, or breath, and often without any shared relational history. Written language can flatten nuance. A sentence may land harder than intended. A question may read like a challenge. A boundary may read like a rejection. A lack of resonance may read like an attack.
And yet, what I have come to believe is that many online comments, perhaps even most, that look like attacks are actually bids: for clarity, dignity, visibility, and attuned connection.
The Pot Gets Stirred
Some of the articles I write and publish stir the pot. They touch upon large cultural dynamics such as race, gender, power, healing spaces, marginalization, identity, spiritual bypassing, mental health, and political polarization. Each of these topics predictably lands in personal places. While activation is not the intention, these subjects often lead to heightened activation in nervous systems and parts.
When I post my articles, especially in spaces populated by thoughtful, trained practitioners of the healing arts (and sometimes clients), including IFS Facebook groups, I rarely see pure agreement or indifference. I see engagement. And that engagement comes in many forms:
- thoughtful resonance
- quiet appreciation (e.g. “likes”)
- nuanced disagreement
- sharp critique
- defensive energy
- dismissal
- anger
Occasionally, there is a comment that feels distancing. This can involve a tone that reads as standoffish or a line that could easily pull a protective part of mine into argument, self-defense, or withdrawal.
On the surface, a comment might read as:
- “You’re wrong.”
- “You’re centering the wrong thing.”
- “You don’t understand.”
- “This doesn’t belong here.”
But when I slow down, I can access my parts who are reacting. These often include parts who feel unseen or misunderstood, harmed, protective of a free flow of ideas and experiences, afraid of losing ground, and tired.
And sometimes, if I am resourced enough, I can sense that the energy of these parts is about wanting proximity and contact. They want to be met and accurately known.
Anger as a Bid
Pam Krause, an IFS lead trainer, once said something that has stuck with me: anger is always a bid for connection.
I remember feeling both resonance and resistance when I first heard that. It felt true, and it also felt incomplete. Something in me wanted to understand more precisely what kind of connection anger might be reaching for. When I think of anger, I think of boundaries, keeping people out rather than in.
As I have sat with it, I have come to understand that boundaries are not antithetical to connection, and neither is anger. Boundaries clarify relationship. Anger is often the force that brings those boundaries forward. It can say no. It can protect. It can draw a line. But even boundary-setting anger is relational. It is saying: this matters. I matter. Something sacred is being violated.
What I have come to believe is that anger is a bid not just for connection, but for attuned connection.
Attunement is:
- I see that something important is happening for you.
- I want to understand.
- I want to know you and continue knowing you better and better.
- I want to know and respect your boundaries while remaining in relationship with you.
That is extraordinarily difficult to communicate and embody in written form, let alone in the comments section of an online post.
The Limits of Written Attunement
In person, attunement lives in micro-movements. Eye contact. A nod. A shift in tone. A breath that matches another’s.
Online, we have text, punctuation, emojis, capitalization, and paragraph spacing. Underneath, we have the hope that our words land as intended.
Even in healing-oriented online spaces, including groups filled with therapists and practitioners trained in IFS and other trauma informed modalities, and among people who speak fluently about parts, protectors, exiles, and Self energy, misattunement is common.
Curiosity can be interpreted as condescension. Clarification can be interpreted as correction. Silence can be interpreted as rejection. Boundary setting can be interpreted as attacking. Attempts at compassion can be interpreted as performative.
We have all seen it. The overly polished therapeutic tone. The quick naming of parts in a way that feels distancing rather than connecting. The “I’m just curious” that lands as superiority. The spiritual bypassing of real anger.
True attunement online is rare because it requires restraint. It requires tolerating ambiguity. It requires resisting the pull to win. It requires enough Self energy to stay present without needing to dominate, disappear, or fix.
That is hard to access in a comment thread.
Respecting Boundaries Without Losing Connection
If anger is a bid for attuned connection, then responding well does not mean overriding the boundary the anger is protecting. It means respecting it.
If someone says, “this harms me,” the attuned response is not, “let me explain why you’re wrong.” Nor is it to collapse, apologize reflexively, retreat, or disengage. And yet, our parts may move in those directions automatically and instinctively, attempting to protect us, even when there is no immediate threat in a comment thread as there might be in offline life.
If we can pause long enough to notice those protective impulses without immediately acting on them, something else becomes possible.
An attuned response might be, “thank you for naming that,” or, “I want to understand the boundary you are setting.” I recognize this sounds a bit formal, but I am pointing to the energy beneath the words, whatever language carries it.
Connection does not mean boundaryless merging. Attunement does not mean agreement. Compassion does not mean self-abandonment.
The most powerful exchanges I have witnessed online are those where two people maintain clear boundaries and remain in dialogue.
That is rare. And it is beautiful.
The Risk of Staying in Connection
It is often easier to leave a thread, mute it, or disengage. Sometimes that is wise. Not every bid for connection is safe to engage with. Not every system is open to dialogue. Discernment matters. But when it is safe enough, staying in a thread with curiosity can be an act of courage.
Staying in connection can also be humbling. To truly respond with attunement online, I have to notice my own parts first. The part that wants to defend. The part that wants to look good. The part that wants to be right. The part that feels stung.
If I can slow down and tend to them, even briefly, I have a better chance of meeting the other person’s bid rather than reacting to it.
Declarations and Reality Bubbles
There are moments when someone’s comment or response does not come as a question, curiosity, or even disagreement framed as relational inquiry — and instead arrives as a series of statements, assumptions, or ideological certainties. I have found in conversations like this that certain responses can begin to feel like traps, or like talking to a wall. Rather than assuming the other person is closed, I have begun to practice wondering whether the language itself is serving a regulatory function. It can bring coherence and stability to a system. And sometimes that coherence appears to narrow the space for shared meaning or mutual connection.
In those moments, I often feel a tightening inside my own body. It can come as sadness, anger, or a keen, sometimes uncomfortable and at times even fear-inducing awareness that we are not actually in the same relational field together, even if we are using the same words. This does not mean the other person is “wrong” in any objective sense. It may mean that their internal experience of safety, threat, identity, and belonging is organizing their language in a way that is not accessible to repair or connection in that moment.
One of the patterns I notice in these exchanges is a shift from mutual co-creation of meaning to a reliance on certainty. In the attachment theory world we refer to the co-creation of meaning as intersubjectivity. In such cases where intersubjectivity is not happening, the conversation moves from “what is there between us” to “here are the categories that define the world”. When that happens, it is a form of organizing energy that has proven useful to the person speaking; it is a nervous system strategy for regulating threat and protecting belonging, not necessarily an effort to engage relationally.
That observation does not invalidate the emotional truth others bring to the table. Personal experience matters. The lived experience of fear, danger, and not wanting to feel erased or demeaned is real. No matter the intent or the amount of attunement and curiosity, fear, perceived threat, and hypervigilance can impair the formation of a shared reality. In such cases, a parallel reality is created. In that parallel field, persuasion, evidence, clarification, or even nuance can be experienced as attack because the system is oriented around protection and certainty, not dialogue or connection. Connection, or even the possibility of it, may feel threatening.
What these moments reveal doesn’t necessarily mean that engagement is impossible. It may mean that not all communicative acts are bids for relational connection in the same way. Some are bids for safety. Some are bids for structure. Some are bids for certainty. These are all human and understandable. They do not disprove the existence of relational bids; they point to the differentiations among them, and to the deep human longing for safety and coherence that underlies all of them.
Sometimes the most relationally respectful move we can make is to invite our parts to relax their efforts to pull someone into our relational and reality field, and to notice with clarity that we may not be in the same field to begin with. Connection may not be possible, at least for now, and helping our parts live with that can be important. Often it is the most fitting response, and also very, very hard.
Neurodiversity, Misattunement, and My Own Edges
There is another layer here that feels important to name, and I do so with humility.
I am not an expert in neurodiversity. I do not have extensive formal training in this area. I have personal and professional relationships with neurodiverse people. I work with neurodiverse clients. I likely engage with neurodiverse colleagues, friends, community members, and readers daily, often without knowing it. And I am increasingly aware that I have much more to learn in this area.
Online communication is already stripped of tone, pacing, facial expression, and nervous system cues. When we add neurodiversity into the mix, the potential for misattunement increases significantly.
A post by a neurodiverse person read by a neurotypical person may involve: directness read as aggression, precision read as rigidity, blunt honesty read as contempt, or reduced emotional signaling read as indifference.
And the reverse is also true.
A post by a neurotypical person read by a neurodiverse person can play out as: indirect language feeling confusing, implicit cues feeling exclusionary, subtext feeling like a trap, or emotional tone feeling overwhelming.
What one nervous system experiences as clarity, another may experience as harshness. What one system experiences as warm attunement, another may experience as vague or performative.
In online spaces, we are often reacting not only to content, but to differences in communication style, processing speed, sensory tolerance, and relational signaling. Neurodiverse individuals, especially those who have been chronically misunderstood, shamed, or pathologized for how they communicate, may have protectors that are understandably vigilant. Likewise, neurotypical persons may have parts that feel destabilized by communication that does not follow expected relational rhythms.
I have noticed, in myself, parts that tense when I encounter certain tones online. Parts that interpret brevity and intellectuality as dismissal. Parts that interpret strong certainty as domination. Parts that assume intent quickly. And I am increasingly aware that some of those interpretations may be less about the other person’s intention and more about my own patterned expectations of how connection “should” look and sound.
There are parts of me that want to get this right. Parts that fear harming or marginalizing neurodiverse people unknowingly. Parts that feel behind. Parts that feel defensive when I sense I have misstepped. And parts that would prefer to avoid the discomfort altogether.
It is an ongoing practice with my parts to bring more curiosity, compassion, clarity, respect, dignity, and connection toward neurodiverse people and communities as a neurotypical person. I don’t see this as an abstract value, but in the lived reality of dialogue, especially when communication styles diverge from what my system finds regulating, attuned, or “normal”.
This is ongoing work for me.
It complicates the idea that anger is always a bid for attuned connection, because attunement itself may look radically different across neurotypes. What feels attuned to one person may feel invasive or patronizing to another. What feels neutral to one may feel cold to another.
And yet, I suspect the core remains similar: most of us want to be understood without being reshaped into someone else’s template of understanding or acceptability.
In online forums, where so much relational data is missing, differences across neurotypes can heighten both vulnerability and misunderstanding. This makes slowing down even more essential. This calls for asking clarifying questions rather than assuming intent, naming uncertainty rather than projecting meaning, and allowing communication styles to differ without immediately pathologizing or moralizing them.
I do not write this as someone who has mastered this. I write it as someone who is in it. Someone who recognizes that parts of me still react before they reflect. Someone who is trying to widen my window of curiosity when something feels off. Someone who has blind spots I cannot yet see.
If online spaces are already difficult arenas for attunement, then neurodiversity asks us to expand our definition of what attunement can look like. It may be less about tone matching and more about respect. Less about emotional mirroring and more about clarity. Less about softness and more about explicit consent and boundaries.
And perhaps, again, the work begins the same way: noticing our own parts first.
Because if I can meet the parts of me that feel confused, irritated, anxious, or defensive in the face of difference, I may be less likely to project those reactions outward.
And that, even imperfectly, might make room for a different kind of dialogue that invites more connection, attunement, and co-regulation.
When Bids Are Missed
There have been moments when a comment hit me in a way that activated my own protectors. A part of me wants to clarify, sometimes aggressively. A part wants to withdraw and delete. A part wants to gather allies. A part wants to prove. A part wants to mediate and calm the activation in the other person so that they might like me or accept more of what I have to say.
If any of those parts are the ones posting replies, the thread tends to escalate or fragment, or it can escalate within me. Outwardly, managers talking past each other, firefighters amplifying, and other protectors fixed on each other as threats.
The original bid, whatever it was, gets buried.
I have written comments myself, on other people’s posts, that were likely bids. These comments I am sure held intensity and carried an edge. I can look back and see parts of me that wanted to be met more deeply than I was being met.
Online forums amplify polarization because parts usually speak faster than Self can metabolize and respond.
When Curiosity and Attunement Spread
One of the most surprising experiences I have had online has been what happens when I respond to comments from as much Self as is available to me in that moment, especially on posts that carry charge. I noticed this most vividly in response to my pieces about white cis men in healing spaces and therapist dissociation, which evoked a wide range of reactions across readers. Some responses were warm. Some were skeptical. Some were sharp. Some carried unmistakable intensity. Many, I sensed, were written by protectors guarding something deeply meaningful.
There were moments when I could feel my own protectors mobilizing as I read certain comments. A tightening in my chest. A quickening in my thoughts. The familiar pull to clarify, defend, persuade, or retreat. When I could pause long enough to notice those internal shifts and allow even a small amount of Self energy to come forward, something different became possible in how I responded.
Instead of replying from urgency, I could reply from curiosity. Instead of explaining, I could ask for clarification. Instead of correcting, I could reflect on what was beneath the words. Instead of positioning, I could connect.
And what struck me most was not just an internal shift, but a relational one.
The tone of the exchange shifted in the response from a commenter. Comments that began with edge transformed into replies that were focused, kind, and connecting. Clarifications emerged. Nuance entered. People elaborated rather than escalated. Even when disagreement remained, the field between us felt different. More breathable. More dimensional. Less adversarial.
It sometimes felt as though Self energy, when accessed by even one person in a thread, had a multiplying effect. I do not mean in a mystical or grandiose sense, but in a very observable relational one. My system would settle. The exchange would feel slower, better paced. The other person’s language would often become more specific, more reflective, more connected. It seemed as if something in their system recognized the absence of threat and no longer needed to push as hard to be heard.
What moved me most was that this could happen despite the limitations of the medium. We were strangers. We were geographically far apart. We had no access to each other’s tone of voice, facial expression, pacing, or nervous system rhythms. And still, something regulating seemed to occur in the space between us.
It reminds me that Self energy exists not only when in physical proximity to another. There are moments when it becomes field-like, across distance and mediums of connection. This field opens when one person’s groundedness invites another person’s system to soften, curiosity evokes clarity, respect summons courage, and compassion elicits honesty.
I do not believe this dimension of Self energy is something I or anyone produces. I believe it is more something we can either obstruct or allow. When our protectors take over, the field tightens. When they are witnessed and given space, the field opens.
These exchanges have reshaped how I understand online dialogue. They have made me less interested in winning arguments and more interested in attuned contact. I am less invested in being agreed with and more invested in being in relationship. I am less focused on managing perception and more focused on staying present.
I’ve observed this new agenda, if it can be called that, has shifted the emotional climate in the online spaces I engage with and within my internal world. My sense is the two of us leave the exchange feeling more seen, understood, and connected than when we entered it. And I believe this cascades to those witnessing the exchange as well.
The Rarity of It
What disappoints much of me is how rare this is, even in spaces explicitly devoted to healing.
We can know the language of parts. We can be thoroughly trained. We can value compassion.
And still, our online protectors can run the show.
There is something about public visibility that activates legacy burdens, status concerns, fears of being wrong, fears of being shamed, and fears of losing belonging. Social media is a petri dish for manager parts and firefighter parts.
This makes the moments of real attuned exchange even more meaningful.
Known More in Words Than In-Person
There is a reality I find myself sitting with lately that feels strange to admit.
At this point, more people in the IFS community likely know of me through my writing and podcast appearances than from having met me in person. That is an odd thing to feel, especially given how many trainings, workshops, and retreats I have attended over the years. I have spent a great deal of time physically in rooms dedicated to this work. And yet the reach of written words travels farther than a body can.
It creates a kind of asymmetry.
Many people encounter my thinking before they ever encounter me. Some may never encounter me beyond the page or a recording. They may know my voice, my ideas, my language, my positions. But they do not know my pacing, my facial expressions, my hesitations, my humor, my silences, my uncertainty, my ordinary humanness in a shared room.
And for someone who cares deeply about attunement, that is a curious tension to live inside.
Because no matter how carefully I write, writing is not the same as presence. Even when I am intentional about tone, pacing, and clarity, the experience of reading my words is fundamentally different from the experience of being with me in real time. In person, or even over Zoom, attunement is mutual, fluid, and co-created moment to moment. On the page, it is necessarily one-directional and imagined.
I am also aware that the season of life I am in shapes this reality. I am a relatively new father. My available time and energy are different than they were five years ago. Earlier in my career I devoted enormous amounts of time to trainings, intensives, retreats, and professional development. I was in many rooms, absorbing, practicing, refining. That season mattered deeply and still informs everything I do.
Now, I notice something shifting.
It is not that I have stopped learning. It is that I have reached a kind of plateau in terms of how many areas feel worth the level of energy investment that immersive training requires. The threshold for what I say yes to has changed. My available bandwidth has changed. My priorities have changed.
Which means, in a very practical sense, I will probably be in fewer live spaces than I once was. And in parallel, my writing has increased significantly.
So there is a paradox I am learning to hold: I am becoming more visible while being physically present in fewer places.
There are parts of me that feel grateful for this. Parts that feel relieved. Parts that feel protective of my time and family. And there are also parts that feel the strangeness of being recognized by people I have never met, or being spoken to as though we know each other when we have never shared space.
It has made me appreciate even more how much attunement depends on real-time contact. How much nuance lives in the unspoken. How different it is to be read than to be experienced.
And it reminds me, again, that when we encounter each other online, we are almost always meeting representations, not whole nervous systems.
The Possibility of Connection
I do not expect comment sections to ever become sanctuaries, not even in healing centered places.
Online platforms are not therapy rooms. They are not built for co-regulation. They reward speed and certainty more than reflection and humility. And that is without even naming the role of algorithms, which tend to reward escalation and drama. Similar to how sex sells, drama draws eyeballs. It generates comments. It generates likes. The algorithms amplify it and feed it back to us, and the loop continues.
And yet, every once in a while, something different happens. Two people remain in disagreement while neither collapses, attacks, or performs. Both speak for parts, respond from Self, even if imperfectly, honor boundaries, and stay connected.
Those exchanges may be few and far between, but they matter.
They suggest that even in the most compressed and flattened form of communication, attunement is still possible. Rare. Incomplete. Fragile. But possible.
I invite you to keep an eye out for those moments, notice how it feels to witness them, notice what happens inside, and perhaps slow down when you feel activated by a comment section. Consider what is being shared as a bid for connection, and experiment within your internal system to see what responding with curiosity, connection, and compassion in a non-performative way might look like, and see what comes.
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.
