Max Littman, LCSW
April 9, 2025
A Shared Struggle: When Wellness Becomes a Transaction
In today’s wellness and mental health culture, the line between healing and selling is increasingly blurred. Inner peace is packaged, and wholeness is marketed. Some of us have parts that think the next thing we buy, whether it’s a training, a method, or a mindset, might finally make us feel whole. Others have parts that feel pressure to sell something in order to be seen as worthy, valuable, or safe. Many of us live in both dynamics at once.
This article explores the internal and relational dynamics that arise in the sale and consumption of wellness, therapy, and healing. It’s about the parts of us that feel not-enough and look outside for validation, legitimacy, or relief. And it’s about the parts that try to prove we’re enough by selling clarity, confidence, or authority. Whether you’re a therapist, a coach, a seeker, or all three, this conversation lives inside us and between us.
In a culture built on performance, image, and consumption, it makes sense that our systems adapt. Whether we’re trying to get it right as a therapist, a client, or a human, parts of us start to believe:
- I’m not enough.
- I don’t have enough.
- I need to look outside of myself to be okay.
Selling Wholeness: The Therapist and Healer’s Dilemma
Marketing yourself as a therapist can bring up a swirl of discomfort—hesitation, doubt, guilt, even shame. Many therapists, especially those in private practice or offering additional services like consultation, workshops, books, or trainings, struggle with self-promotion. We want to reach the people who need our work, yet something inside us pulls back.
I know this struggle personally. I have parts that are deeply anti and critical of self-promotion, which has meant that I don’t have much practiced skill, competence, or knowledge when it comes to marketing. These parts hold strong beliefs that marketing is tied to ego, self-interest, or even exploitation. As a result, I’ve often avoided engaging with it directly, leaving me feeling stuck between wanting to connect with those who could benefit from my work and feeling resistant to the very idea of promoting myself.
Often, parts of us equate marketing with pride, ego, or even narcissism. Other parts worry about being perceived as self-serving or greedy. There may be personal, legacy, societal, and cultural burdens at play. In other words: deep-seated, internalized messages about humility, service, and the “right” way to be a healer.
Many therapists exile pride, associating it with arrogance or self-importance. Perhaps growing up, we were taught that taking up space was selfish, that praising ourselves was boastful, or that good work speaks for itself. These messages can become burdens carried by our parts, especially exiles who hold early experiences of shame around self-expression or visibility.
When pride, conviction, and confidence are exiled, they do not disappear; they find other ways to make themselves known. They might show up in a secret longing for recognition, frustration when our work is overlooked, or resentment toward those who market themselves more freely. It may also lead to a persistent sense of “not enoughness”, that no matter how skilled or experienced we become, we never feel worthy of promoting ourselves.
And this shows up not just in marketing—but in the internal drive to accumulate more knowledge, more certifications, more trainings. Many mental health professionals have parts that believe if they just learn more, they’ll finally feel competent enough, safe enough, or respected enough. So we keep consuming—books, courses, workshops—hoping they’ll finally unlock our legitimacy.
Seeking Wholeness: When Consumption Becomes a Coping Strategy
We live in a time where “wellness” often overlaps with marketing. It’s easy to find ourselves following someone who insists they’ve found the way—the right combination of food, movement, breath, mindset, sleep, and discipline to feel whole. And it’s easy for parts of us to think, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe if I do exactly what they did, I’ll finally feel okay”.
It’s not that structure, movement, or support are bad. Sometimes they’re deeply helpful. But when something is offered without curiosity, without space for difference, and without room for our full humanity, it can leave our systems feeling more fractured, not less.
This happens a lot in the fitness, wellness, and coaching spaces. Especially when someone’s personal transformation story is used as a blueprint for how others should live. The underlying message is often: “If you don’t get the results I got, you must be doing it wrong.” Or worse: “You must be wrong.”
Parts of us that are drawn to these services and products are often exiled ones—young, tender, and burdened with shame or fear. They may carry deep beliefs that they’re unworthy or broken. So when someone charismatic comes along with confidence and certainty, it makes sense that our systems lean in.
But here’s the cost: in trying to follow someone else’s way, we might push away our own. We override the wisdom of our bodies. We stop listening to our minds, our guts, our emotions, our organs, our fatigue, our desires. We disconnect from the deeper, older wisdom that lives inside us—the kind we can’t buy, sell, or brand.
Shared Cultural Burdens: Certainty, Scarcity, and Shame
Whether we’re promoting our services or trying to follow someone else’s method, these burdens are cut from the same cloth. Both arise from societal, cultural, and institutional systems that reward certainty, control, and performance, and shame anything less.
This pursuit of wholeness-from-the-outside doesn’t stop at products or coaching programs. It shows up in therapy too.
Some therapeutic models invite us into deeper relationship with ourselves. They help us turn inward, trust our bodies, reconnect with disowned parts, and reclaim access to the innate wisdom already living within us. They don’t promise quick fixes or offer rigid protocols. Instead, they help us remember that healing is relational, emergent, and unique to each of us.
But not all approaches are like that. Some models, especially when blended with branding or packaged for scale, can start to feel like just another system of right and wrong. There can be an implicit message that if you just do this method right, you’ll feel better. That the answers lie in the model, not in you. That if it’s not working, you’re the problem. This can replicate the same patterns we’re trying to heal: striving, self-doubt, disconnection from internal knowing.
IFS and the Path Back to Self
In IFS, we see how systems adapt to survive. And in a world where image is currency, it makes sense that some parts of us start selling certainty while others keep spending energy, money, and time trying to feel okay.
As therapists, we’re not immune. Many of us have parts that believe we need to market ourselves in a certain way to be successful, safe, or taken seriously. Parts that feel pressure to sell certainty. To package our work into something clean, digestible, and branded. To become the “right kind” of therapist for the “right” kind of client. All of that can come from understandable protectors trying to manage fear, scarcity, visibility, or rejection.
But when those parts run the show, it’s easy to lose touch with the deeper why beneath our work. Self knows healing isn’t something we deliver. It’s something we make space for and we’re simply helping people rediscover that it was never lost, only obfuscated.
And we need our own support systems to stay grounded in that; to keep turning toward our parts with care; to remember that even as we participate in an economy and a culture that rewards performance and image, we don’t have to sell out our presence, our integrity, or our own Self energy in the process.
Closing: You Were Never Broken
This capitalist, individualist culture thrives on our parts believing we’re not enough; that we need fixing; that there’s a secret we haven’t unlocked yet.
But wholeness isn’t something we acquire. It’s something we uncover. It’s something we already are.
That doesn’t mean we never seek support, or structure, or resources. But it means our systems get to decide on their own timelines, in their own ways what’s actually helpful and what’s just noise.
And the more we build relationships with the parts of us that have been trying to find wholeness through consumption or performance, the more space we create for something more true and subtle to emerge. Something that doesn’t need to be bought or sold.
It doesn’t always feel fast or shiny. But it feels authentic, like who we are.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
