Max Littman, LCSW
April 28, 2025
Over the past year, I’ve come into clearer awareness of a polarization that’s been with me for a long time, likely since I was around 10 or 12 years old. It lives between two distinct groups of protectors within me. One group holds things together tightly, manages. The other group urges surrender: to soften, to let go, to slow down, to open into something larger and quieter. But not in a peaceful or passive way. These parts come with urgency. With force. They’ve been pushed aside for so long. They are fed up. Their messages arrive sharp-edged: angry, insistent, and charged with resentment. They have an important message, want to be listened to, are tired of not getting the attention they need, and are angry that their way of tending to vulnerability has not been valued within my system.
But I’ve begun to wonder: what if this polarization isn’t only personal? What if it’s archetypal, living inside many of us shaped by Western culture?
The Unnamed Divorce
In Eastern Body, Western Mind, Anodea Judith writes of a divorce that was never named. The masculine and feminine, once partners in shaping our inner and outer worlds, split quietly but decisively. And in that separation, the masculine was granted custody of our society and of our parts, especially our most vulnerable ones. Logic, structure, reason, and control became the dominant values. The feminine—intuition, softness, wildness, and receptivity—was left behind, not fully exiled, but certainly not in charge. This unspoken cultural rupture, Judith argues, is at the heart of many individual and societal struggles.
Judith’s metaphor stuck with me for some time after reading her book. But only recently has it started to resonate in a much more personal and visceral way.
My feminine-coded protectors have only recently begun to assert themselves with this kind of force.
That’s in large part because for most of my life, the other group of protectors has been in charge. These are the ones who hold me together, and tightly. They track my thoughts, my body, my relationships. They try to understand what’s happening internally and how it links with the external world. They strive to do the right thing, to manage well, to carry responsibility with diligence and precision. They organize, anticipate, adapt. They’ve structured how I function. Their vigilance has often made everything else possible.
For a long time, I moved between these energies without fully seeing the split. But as the somatic work in my life and in my practice has deepened, something shifted. These feminine-coded parts, the ones that had long been dismissed, ignored, or quietly bypassed, began rising up. And not politely. They came in like a tidal wave: furious, determined, unignorable.
What I first noticed wasn’t balance. It was an escalation. More pressure. More contradiction. The system didn’t settle; it flared. But alongside that flare-up came a sharper understanding. I could start to see that these two sets of protectors weren’t just doing different jobs; they were fighting for space inside me. Each had its own way of trying to keep me safe. Each had been shaped by its own history of being heard or ignored.
When Judith’s words about the unnamed divorce re-entered my consciousness, they suddenly clicked into place alongside this internal dynamic. What had once felt like two separate threads, an intellectual idea about cultural history and a personal experience of inner conflict rooted in how my parents related to and interacted with me, began to intertwine. That weaving didn’t soothe the system. But it helped make sense of it. And it gave me language for something I’d been living inside for decades.
Cultural, Ancestral, and Personal Threads
I don’t know for certain that this polarization in me is purely cultural or archetypal. I didn’t arrive at that conclusion right away, and I still hold it lightly. But the more I sit with it, the more sense it begins to make. The dominance of the holding-together parts, the ones that strive, track, and manage, feels familiar in a way that goes beyond my own psychology. It echoes the values I’ve seen reflected in the wider world: control over surrender, order over feeling, productivity over presence. Even in environments that were supportive and well-intentioned, qualities like competence, self-reliance, and the ability to keep it together were often rewarded more readily than vulnerability, softness, or deep listening to the body. This was true in my environment growing up despite having parents that both valued feminine-coded qualities (my father a therapist, my mother a special education teacher).
I don’t think this polarization is only cultural. It feels layered, woven through my lineage, my upbringing, the emotional currents of my family system. I imagine it wasn’t just modeled for me; it was absorbed. Passed down through nervous systems. Inherited in ways no one explicitly named, or perhaps even noticed themselves. And it was likely absorbed by my parents, and their parents, and their parents. The masculine-coded protectors may not have been born in me, but they certainly found fertile ground to take root.
The more I understand the subtle rules of what was allowed to be expressed, what got valued and what got suppressed, the more I begin to see this as part of a larger story. One that stretches beyond my own system. A story of what gets custody of our vulnerable parts in a society that hasn’t fully remembered how to hold contradiction as our ancestors did long, long ago. A society that still struggles to make space for feeling, for slowness, for uncertainty. For anger that doesn’t rush to resolution. For surrender that isn’t collapse.
What I do know is that I didn’t invent this split. And I’m likely not alone in carrying it.
What Happens in Therapy Rooms
I see this split echoed in the therapy room, both in the parts clients bring and in the parts that get engaged in me as a therapist. It shows up in systems that are tightly held together and terrified of unraveling, right alongside parts that are furious no one’s ever let them fall apart. It shows up in the ways clients orient to me, to the process, and to themselves. Sometimes the controlling parts are front and center, doing the work of managing therapy itself. Sometimes the parts that want to let go enter the space already carrying a charge, angry at how long they’ve gone unmet.
It also shows up in the kinds of therapy we’re drawn to, as clients and as therapists. Some approaches mirror those masculine-coded protector energies: organized, structured, insight-oriented, active, solution-focused. Others lean toward feminine-coded energies: softness, slowness, body awareness, energy, patience, presence, receptiveness. Masculine is a “doing” energy and feminine is a “being” energy. There’s value in both. But when we over-identify with one pole, the other can become pathologized, or worse, completely bypassed.
Even in modalities that claim to honor the body and spirit, the bias can persist, especially when the therapist’s system is highly identified with the feminine pole. Feminine-coded energies are often only welcomed when they’re orderly or transcendent: when they soothe, harmonize, or inspire awe. But the parts that come alive when the feminine reclaims her voice are not always calm. They can be messy, fierce, disruptive. Their return often shakes the system, sometimes in ways that are deeply uncomfortable. And yet, it is often this very disruption that opens the door to deeper healing.
The old divorce lives on: not only in our internal polarizations, but in the models we practice, the healing we seek, and the parts of ourselves we still struggle to fully welcome.
Toward Something Unfinished
I still move between these parts every day. Some mornings, the ones who hold me together take the lead before I even fully arise to take on the day. Some days, the parts that urge surrender press in so strongly that it feels hard to stay steady.
There are moments when I catch glimpses of something else: not balance, not resolution, but the beginning of a different kind of relationship. Something less about winning and more about witnessing. Something that can hold the sharpness with care, without needing to resolve it or be consumed by it.
I don’t know if the split inside me will ever fully close.
If there will ever be resolution between the two poles.
If they will reunite, or even become something like divorced but cordial co-parents.
And I wonder this same thing on a societal and cultural level.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
