Max Littman, LCSW
September 18, 2026
Curiosity gets talked about a lot in IFS. We ask our clients: How do you feel toward the part? Can you get curious about it? What does it want you to know? We also ask ourselves how we feel toward our client in assessing our own openness and curiosity, something I’ve learned from Pam Krause. Bob Falconer has said that curiosity is the most respectful stance toward parts and that it is perhaps the most important quality a therapist can bring to the healing process. Curiosity can be a useful marker that we have enough space from our own reactions to stay with what is happening rather than immediately trying to change or fix it.
But what do we do when our curiosity feels constricted?
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’ve noticed repeated moments in my own work when curiosity does not come as easily as I would like. Sometimes I can feel myself working hard to find it. I may understand what a client’s part is doing, recognize the protection involved, and even have compassion for why it developed, while still noticing that my own genuine curiosity feels constricted.
There are plenty of IFS answers available at that point. Get curious about the lack of curiosity. Find the part of me that is reacting. Ask it to give me some space. Notice what I’m afraid would happen if I didn’t intervene.
Still, I’m increasingly wary of turning those moves into another way I am supposed to get myself into the correct, most therapeutically useful internal and relational state.
If I do not find myself curious, I can very quickly become curious about why I’m not curious, then concerned about why I’m not curious enough about my lack of curiosity, and before long I have created a fairly elaborate incident review. What began as a useful IFS principle has become another standard I’m failing to meet. And, paradoxically, it leaves less room for curiosity.
With all the curiosity and self-compassion I may muster, I begin to consider a variety of possibilities. Maybe something happening between the client and me is difficult to metabolize. Maybe I am frustrated, confused, bored, protective, skeptical, impatient, or simply tired. Maybe I have been working with the same pattern for months and something in me has begun to lose confidence that what we are doing is helping. Maybe the client is frustrated with me, and I know it. Maybe I’ve received criticism from a client or a consultant that is still reverberating in my system. Maybe what the client is holding or what is happening between us is too close to my own history to see clearly.
When this happens, it is tempting to believe I must be doing something wrong.
Still, we as therapists also live outside the therapy room. Shocking revelation, I know. Caseloads become too large, too small, too activating, or not stimulating enough. Money gets tight. Family members need us. Relationships become strained. The news is frightening. Violence happens in our communities. We get sick, lose people, sleep poorly, care for our children, worry about our practices, and wonder whether we are helping anybody at all. Sometimes our capacity is genuinely narrower than it was six months ago, or even six minutes ago.
I have parts that dislike this open admission. They think therapists are supposed to manage their own material. They remind me that a client should not have to pay for what is happening in my life.
It is true that our responsibility to our clients does not disappear because we are under strain.
But being responsible to our clients is different from pretending that external constraints and personal histories have no effect on us.
I wonder whether there is sometimes more room for curiosity when we give ourselves permission to stop demanding it of ourselves.
Instead of forcing curiosity, I might first acknowledge, I am having a hard time staying open here. Sometimes the constriction is strong enough that I cannot even get much space from the parts of me involved. I can try to give myself some grace there too. I suspect this happens to IFS therapists more often than our parts would like us to admit.
I find that my lack of curiosity does not necessarily mean something is going wrong in the therapy. It doesn’t necessarily mean a client’s system is rejecting me or the therapy itself. It also does not necessarily mean that the problem is entirely mine. Something may be happening in the relationship that neither of us has named yet.
This is where I think relational checking-in becomes especially useful. Sometimes it gives me a back door into the kind of spacious, engaged curiosity I cannot produce internally on command. Rather than solving the question entirely inside myself, I can ask the client what they are experiencing with me. I can check whether my interventions are landing in the way I intend them to. I can ask if something I keep doing feels helpful, irritating, distancing, repetitive, or beside the point.
Good intentions matter, but they do not tell us the impact we are having.
There are periods when I have more internal room for some clients than others. I suspect that is true for many therapists, even if we rarely say it so plainly. I don’t want to use that reality to excuse harm or stop examining myself. I also don’t want self-criticism to become the main method by which I try to make myself a better therapist.
I’m trying instead to take the constriction seriously without automatically believing whatever story I have about it. It may be telling me something about myself, the client, the relationship between us, or the circumstances surrounding the work. Often I don’t know which, at least not right away.
Maybe sometimes the first move is much less ambitious: notice that curiosity has constricted, give myself some grace, and trust that the constriction is telling us something important, even if we don’t yet have access to what that is. Curiosity may return quickly. It may not. I’m increasingly interested in what becomes possible when I stop treating either outcome as evidence that I’m doing therapy wrong.
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.
