Max Littman, LCSW
February 18, 2026
Healing spaces require safety, but they are not neutral, comfortable, or free from activation. Healing requires touching pain, seeing power, and recognizing history so that hurt can be finally metabolized. Without those prerequisites, we are at risk of displacing our hurt onto others in group healing spaces, not truly healing it. In justice-oriented and healing communities, activation is inevitable. Old wounds surface. Internal protection comes online. Systems collide. The question I contemplate and wish to be tended to is not whether this happens, but what we do with it when it does. What we do in those moments often determines whether rupture hardens into disconnection or becomes the beginning of repair.
When healing spaces function well, they support transmutation: the slow, relational process of staying with discomfort long enough for something new to emerge. When they function poorly, pain is more likely to be transferred than transformed, passed between people and groups in ways that mirror the very systems those spaces hope to undo. This is not a failure of values. It is often a failure of containment, attunement, and nervous system awareness.
It is from this lens that I am writing.
I am writing with white cis men in mind who may find themselves resonating with what follows about dynamics in progressive and healing spaces. I am also writing with those who are not white cis men in mind, especially white cis women and white trans, non-binary, and queer people, with an invitation to notice what becomes activated and to approach both their own parts and the parts of white cis men with greater curiosity, compassion, and connectedness.
Background
I’ve spent years immersed in progressive, queer, feminist, and anti-racist communities, personally, professionally, and politically. I do so as a white-bodied, gay-identified, cisgender man. Many parts of me hold an awareness of the good fortune and inherited advantages that accompany some of these identities. These spaces have shaped my values, my work, and my sense of belonging. At times, they have also activated anger, grief, and discouragement in my system, especially when well-meaning values become distorted by fear, shame, or rigid protector energy.
In these spaces, especially in trainings, workshops, organizations, and other settings intended for the growth of healing professionals, I have witnessed a painful and often quiet dynamic that rarely gets named out loud:
White cis men can become targets of exile, shame, or social demonization.
I’ve also seen this dynamic play out in many well-meaning justice-oriented communities, including ethical non-monogamy spaces, queer circles, DEI groups, and feminist networks. This can occur even in the absence of white cis men, but it tends to intensify when we are in the minority, which is often the case in these healing spaces that are more populated, though not exclusively, by white cis women and other white-bodied people who are not cis men. While these reactions are legitimate and rooted in real experiences of predominantly white cis men using personal and systemic privilege to intentionally and unintentionally transmit harm, they can also be damaging. The harm does not stop with the individuals on the receiving end. It reaches the collective healing these spaces are intended to support.
This article isn’t about centering white cis men as victims.
It’s about making room for complexity—about asking what happens when shame, fear, and protector energy dominate spaces in ways that reinforce the collective burdens we’re trying to release.
Recently I read Lissa Rankin’s piece Blowing The Whistle On Deepak Chopra, The Epstein Files, Cancel Culture, & Holding My Influencer Peers (& Myself) Accountable. In it, she names harm, power, and complicity in mindfulness and healing spaces that often avoid such directness. Specifically, she calls out and calls in, by name, powerful authority figures in such spaces who have either abused their power or failed to speak out about those whose abuse they have platformed.
Reading it clarified something for me: naming what is uncomfortable or activating can be a form of care when it serves repair, dialogue, accountability, and relationship rather than defensiveness, attack, or moral superiority. I am aware that what I am doing here in this article may, on the surface, appear to be the opposite of Lissa’s aim. She focuses on calling out powerful perpetrators and enablers of harm toward women. I am naming the impact of dynamics in similar healing spaces on those with more privilege and power (white cis men). Lissa’s willingness to name complexity at great social, professional, and legal risk strengthened my own resolve and courage to do the same. Borrowing from Lissa: truth telling can be an expression of care when it is rooted in love for what and who we hold sacred, and naming harm need not be divisive when it arises from devotion to what and who matter.
What This Article Is Not
This article is not a defense of fragility.
It is not a plea for centering whiteness, for protecting those with privilege from discomfort, or for placing the burden of teaching white cis men about white supremacy culture on marginalized people. It is not an argument for softening the truth about systemic harm. This piece is a call to embrace complexity—to look at what gets reenacted when protector-led systems try to liberate marginalized systems. It’s about staying in relationship with the pain, the people, and the parts who are trying, in imperfect ways, to matter and belong.
How Exiling Happens
One of the most common ways I see shame take hold in progressive and healing spaces is through moments that begin as attempts at accountability and quickly become relational pile-ons. A microaggression is named, sometimes appropriately, and rather than slowing the process or staying with the person who spoke, multiple voices rush in, each adding another layer of correction, interpretation, or judgment.
Similarly, I often see shame arise around the naming of identity itself. Someone names their identifiers in a way that is deemed “incorrect,” incomplete, or insufficient. Someone forgets, hesitates, or declines to name them at all. In these moments, identity markers can quietly shift from tools of context and visibility into proxies for moral standing, becoming a measuring stick for how aware, safe, or privileged someone is presumed to be.
The same pattern shows up around land acknowledgments, where using an outdated tribal name, the currently recognized name, or forgetting to name ancestral lands altogether can elicit swift correction without relational containment. In each of these situations, the original intention may be education or harm reduction, but the impact often lands as exposure, collapse, and exile rather than learning or repair.
I am certain you have experienced and can name other examples.
Systemic Harm and Personal Wounding: Both Can Be True
Let’s be clear: white supremacy, patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia exist.
White cis men continue to hold disproportionate power in nearly every sphere. I say this as a white cis man. And yet, being part of a dominant group doesn’t exempt someone from pain, wounding, or the internalization of harmful messages.
We can grow our capacity to hold this complexity and nuance, and IFS can help us with this. A white cis man might carry unearned privilege and be carrying a burdened exile that believes he’s inherently bad, incapable of doing good, or unworthy of belonging. He might have managers that posture as woke, compliant, or agreeable—not out of integrity, but out of fear of being rejected. He might have firefighters that rebel, shut down, or secretly resent communities that claim to be liberatory but feel shaming, demanding conformity, and unsafe. All of these parts may be protecting the pain of lonely exiles and from the nervous system becoming overwhelmed, rooted in early experiences of being told he was bad or being ostracized by peers. Yet these actions can unknowingly uphold white supremacy culture and stir exiles in marginalized systems, even as his own exiles carry the pain of loneliness and exclusion.
None of that negates the need for accountability. But it does point to the need for more curiosity.
And while it’s true that healing shame requires connection, it’s also true that this work cannot be extracted from others—especially not from the marginalized who are harmed. The burden of repair need not be placed on those already carrying the weight of systemic harm. If support or compassion is offered from a marginalized person to a privileged person, it is a gift. It must be consensual, not assumed, expected, or forced.
And still, the work of healing can happen—with courage, accountability, and support from those who are willing.
Who Reinforces the Exile
While it may feel risky or even taboo to name, my experience is that it’s often white-bodied individuals who uphold and reinforce the culture of exile that white cis men experience in many progressive or healing spaces. And more specifically, it is frequently white-bodied people who are not cisgender, male, or heterosexual who carry this out—consciously and unconsciously.
I name this not to assign blame or single anyone out, but to recognize the relational and cultural dynamics at play. The burdens white cis men are often exiled for, including privilege, harm, and domination, are real and have caused real damage. And yet, in many cases, those most directly harmed by white supremacy culture, Black and Indigenous people and people of color more broadly, are not the ones actively exiling white cis men from conversations or communities. More often, this role is taken up by other white-bodied people, many of whom carry their own histories of marginalization, erasure, or oppression related to sex, queerness, gender identity, or gender expression.
This dynamic can become complex quickly. I’ve witnessed protectors in white female, queer and trans systems stand up for justice by rejecting white cis male presence or participation. This can look like a moment where a white cis man speaks clumsily, hesitates, or misnames something, and the response moves quickly from naming impact to withdrawal of relational contact. I believe what’s also happening is a reenactment of their own exile—displaced onto a group now perceived as safe to marginalize. The speed and certainty of the rejection often reflect not only the harm named, but protectors’ need to prevent further vulnerability. In these cases, the value system of white supremacy culture remains intact and unnamed. It simply reconfigures who is worthy of inclusion and who is not, using a new metric: identity-based virtue.
When these patterns go unexamined and unnamed, the result is not transformation. It’s just another iteration of white supremacy, exile, disconnection, mistrust, and burdening. And for white cis male systems already burdened by fear of being seen as harmful, or carrying their own personal experiences of being shamed, neglected, or exiled, being pushed out of progressive spaces can further entrench protective postures, deepen shame, or reinforce isolation.
Self-Loathing Parts
In my consulting and clinical work with men—especially those who identify as white, cis, and queer or progressive—there’s often a deep, unspoken pain beneath the surface: a part that self-loathes, that doesn’t just acknowledge privilege, but internalizes it as a sort of “original sin”. These parts don’t just say “I’ve benefited from systemic harm”—they quietly internalize, “I am the harm.” I have a part like this, too.
These parts tend to form when we are told implicitly or explicitly we are unsafe, bad, or shameful and do not have access to a reparative relational experience. Sometimes this starts in childhood. Other times, it comes from being publicly shamed in adulthood, especially in spaces that seemingly promise connection and growth.
When that exile gets exiled again, it doesn’t lead to transformation. It leads to performance, collapse, or resentment. It leads to managers and firefighters feeling the need to step in with reactivity, masking, performing, defensiveness, or posturing. The internal system then becomes rigid, inauthentic, and guarded.
Layers of the White Cis Male Monolith
It is also important to name that the category of “white cis man” is often treated as a monolith in ways that erase other profound sites of wounding and marginalization. When we flatten a person into their most visible markers of privilege, we risk missing the less overt identities—such as neurodivergence, disability, socioeconomic status, citizenship status, body size, trauma history, or religion—that further complicate an internal system’s relationship to the collective. For a white cis man, these burdens can make the “perfectionism” or “moral standing” of progressive spaces feel like a confirmation of their unworthiness, triggering protectors that prioritize survival over the vulnerability required for repair. Without acknowledging these layers, we may believe we are holding a powerful person accountable when we are actually triggering a part of them that has been historically marginalized in ways the room has not yet seen.
Furthermore, these unnamed markers of identity and others compound the experiences of those who already hold marginalized gender, racial, or sexual identities. For these individuals, the “cost of tending” to harm is not just a matter of addressing a single rupture; it is a navigation of layered systemic neglect and abuse that can leave a system too unresourced to offer the curiosity or compassion that healing spaces often implicitly demand. When we ignore these complexities, we move away from Self-led witnessing and toward a performance of identity-based virtue that reinforces the very binaries we hope to dismantle. True liberation requires a commitment to seeing the whole person, recognizing that while systemic power is real, the internal landscapes of both the privileged and the marginalized are shaped by a complex web of cultural, legacy, and personal burdens that require more than just a surface-level analysis of identity.
What Gets Reinforced When We Shame
It’s tempting to believe that shaming someone into awareness will lead to growth, progress, and a bend toward justice. But shame almost never leads to sustainable change. Instead, it triggers protectors. People shut down, lash out, or try to say the “right” thing without actually connecting to what they believe or feel.
In white supremacy culture—something I continue to unpack in my own system—there’s a heavy emphasis on perfectionism, binary thinking, urgency, and control. These are not just abstract ideas; they’re lived patterns, internalized from the systems we were all raised in. Tema Okun and others have done vital work naming these characteristics and showing how they play out even in the most well-meaning communities. When we exile people for being messy, imperfect, or holding unconscious biases, we’re not undoing those patterns—we’re reenacting them.
And those who do the shaming? Often, they’re speaking from their own protectors—parts that are fed up, hurt, disillusioned, or carrying burdens of injustice. These parts need care, too. But when they lead from righteousness and without Self energy, the result can be further relational harm.
It’s also worth naming the distinction between feeling shame and being shamed. Sometimes, a person’s system interprets disconnection, disagreement, or critique as rejection—even when no one is actively trying to shame them. In those moments, protectors flare up to protect a vulnerable exile already burdened with a deep sense of badness. The difference may seem subtle, but it matters: the intention may not be to shame, but the impact is still real and worth tending to. And while no one is responsible for someone else’s emotional regulation, the dynamics between us matter.
Without awareness and care, we risk deepening the wounds of each other in the name of justice.
Rupture We Know. Repair We Don’t.
In a conversation about this article with my colleague, friend, and editor of my recent book, Kirin Alolkoy, we found ourselves returning again and again to one shared observation: we are profoundly under-practiced in repair. Not just personally, but culturally. In Western contexts, we especially tend to know how to identify rupture, name harm, and assign responsibility. What we are far less practiced at is staying in relationship long enough for repair to become possible.
This shows up everywhere, including in moments involving microaggressions and macroaggressions across identities. We may be able to recognize harm. We may even be able to name it clearly. But recognition is not the same as repair, and naming is not the same as healing. Repair requires pacing, consent, attunement, and nervous system capacity. It requires relational skills most of us were never taught and rarely witnessed. It also requires staying in relationship with the system that caused hurt, whether the harm was intentional or not, long enough for repair to even become possible. That can be a big ask. And it is also true that without it, repair cannot happen.
Without those capacities, rupture often becomes the end of the story rather than the beginning of transformation. And when repair is absent, protectors learn something powerful and dangerous: disconnection is safer than relationship.
Another complexity also lives here, one I want to approach carefully. In many justice-oriented and healing spaces, there is rightly strong emphasis on centering the experiences of those who have been harmed, especially those in marginalized bodies and identities. That shift is necessary and corrective. At the same time, there are moments when the understandable urgency to protect those experiences can leave little or no room for the systems of those who hold privilege to remain present enough to participate in repair.
This is not because anyone is doing something wrong. Often it is because protectors are working exactly as they were shaped to work. When systems have endured repeated harm, there may be neither capacity nor desire to witness the internal experience of someone who represents that harm. That response is not a failure. It is intelligence.
And yet repair, when it does occur across difference, tends to involve some form of mutual witnessing. Not symmetrical witnessing. Not equal labor. But enough shared presence for each system to remain human to the other. Without that, interactions can flatten quickly. Individuals become stand-ins for histories, identities become proxies for harm, and complexity collapses into categories.
I want to be clear that witnessing from marginalized people toward those with privilege can never be assumed, expected, or required. When it happens, it is a choice, and often a generous one. White people doing witnessing for other white people is important and necessary work. And still, when repair unfolds across difference, it is often the moments of unexpected recognition between systems that make transformation possible in ways that cannot be replicated alone.
Naming this tension does not resolve it. But leaving it unnamed can quietly foreclose possibilities for repair before they ever begin.
There is another layer that can be difficult to name. At times, harm can occur in the other direction, when someone with a marginalized identity says or does something that wounds a person who holds more structural privilege. In some spaces, the understandable effort not to center dominant identities, especially white cis men, can mean that those experiences receive little room or acknowledgment. When that happens, the injured system may find itself holding pain without a relational pathway for repair. Naming this does not negate power differences or systemic realities. It simply recognizes that when any experience is exiled from relational space, even for principled reasons, the conditions for repair can quietly disappear.
When repair is rare, backlash becomes predictable.
Backlash as a Symptom
We’re already seeing the ripple effects of these dynamics on a much larger scale. Many white heterosexual cisgender men—especially younger ones—are turning away from progressive communities and toward voices that validate their pain through misogyny, supremacy, or domination. The rise of influencers who offer rigid gender roles, hierarchy, and simplistic solutions is not happening in a vacuum. It’s a backlash to expectations of perfection to be deemed as “good” and accepted. This backlash often grows in the absence of spaces that make room for complexity, accountability, and care. Let me be clear: curiosity, compassion, and attunement are hard when faced with these intense protector energies.
I notice versions of this dynamic inside myself as well. There are parts of me that feel resentment and want to retreat from these spaces entirely, and other parts that feel alarmed by those impulses and orient instead toward accountability, toward recognizing white supremacy culture, and toward not placing additional burden on marginalized people. All of them live here.
It is worth asking:
What might happen if we could stay with our internal systems in the face of these energies and respond with and from Self energy?
That doesn’t mean we should pander to fragility or water down justice. But it does mean we need to examine whether our spaces offer a path toward transformation, or simply reenact exclusion in a different direction. When shame is the dominant motivator, the result is rarely growth. More often, it’s collapse, retreat, or radicalization.
Self Energy Is Not Compliance
I’m not advocating for fragility, defensiveness, or spiritual bypassing. When we come from Self energy, it doesn’t mean we avoid hard conversations, bypass systemic realities, pretend everyone’s intentions are good, or value intention over impact. It invites us into a place that’s centered, grounded, courageous, and connected—even when we’re naming harm or setting boundaries. It is a way of calling someone in rather than calling someone out.
It invites us to ask:
How do I stay with what is here and in relationship with who is here, inside and outside, especially when it is hard?
For white cis men navigating progressive spaces, connecting to Self energy calls upon us to hold our own pain without collapsing into it, and holding our privilege without dissociating from it. It’s the ability to say, “Yes, I’ve caused harm and I’m capable of repair.” “Yes, I’ve benefited from systems of power and I want to show up with integrity and humility.” “Yes, I feel shame sometimes and I don’t have to be led by it.”
For everyone else, Self energy reminds us that no one heals in exile. And if we want liberation, not just retribution—we have to create conditions where change is possible. Where people can be held accountable and seen as more than their worst behavior. Where protectors don’t set the tone for and define entire communities.
When Curiosity Is Not Yet Possible
I want to share two perspectives offered to me, with consent, by two friends and colleagues whose identities differ from and carry less privilege than my own, which feel important to hold alongside everything I am naming here.
Teacher, author, and certified level 3 IFS practitioner, Michelle Glass, spoke to how early and repeated victimization, particularly at the hands of men, can leave systems understandably organized around protection rather than curiosity. For people who have lived with chronic threat, objectification, or abuse, even subtle reminders of those dynamics can activate protectors quickly and fiercely. In those moments, context, nuance, or curiosity about what may have shaped another person’s behavior can feel not only inaccessible, but unsafe. She shared this both from decades of her own lived experience of being highly activated, and from witnessing the same pattern in clients and workshop participants who simply were not resourced yet to care about intention or complexity.
She also reflected on how our broader culture often mirrors this dynamic, particularly in systems like criminal justice that privilege punishment over relationship or repair. What made her reflection especially meaningful was her willingness to name how long this shift took in her own internal work. Years into therapy, she described a profound unburdening process with angry parts carrying justified rage toward her father for abuse and betrayal. Only after those parts were fully seen and given their own reparative experiences did something soften. Compassion emerged not as a moral stance, but as an organic realization of how wounded he was, even as she remained estranged and clear about harm. She shared this with me to underscore just how difficult, and at times impossible, curiosity can feel for systems that have not yet had sufficient safety, witnessing, and repair.
Michelle’s experience underscores a central tension I am hoping to address: while accountability matters, demanding curiosity or compassion from unresourced systems often deepens exile rather than creating the conditions for healing.
I also want to share reflections from another colleague and friend of mine who holds a marginalized gender identity. I am not naming them here out of respect for their privacy, though I do so with appreciation for their willingness to engage thoughtfully with this piece.
After reading the article, they told me that several sections resonated deeply, especially the ideas about reenactment in justice spaces, the limits of shame as a motivator for growth, the risk of demanding curiosity from unresourced systems, and the challenge of holding both pain and privilege without collapsing or dissociating. Hearing which parts of the article spoke most strongly to them mattered to me. It helped me understand how these reflections land not only intellectually, but relationally and somatically, in systems whose lived experiences differ from mine, especially in regard to gender.
They also shared something that moved me. As they read, parts of them became activated. Parts that long to participate in healing spaces centered around diversity and repair. Parts that rarely experienced repair growing up. Parts that want those spaces and fear them at the same time.
They described a past group experience where they named a microaggression and the facilitators mishandled it so severely that their system felt unsupported rather than held. Some of their parts still hesitate to enter such spaces again. Not because they oppose dialogue, but because they do not trust that group leaders always know how to create sufficient safety for this kind of tender work.
They reflected, too, that they have had very few opportunities in their life to experience white cis men being Self-led. Because of that, earlier negative experiences understandably take up more space internally, leaving protective parts cautious and tired when imagining extending themselves relationally.
Hearing the perspectives of my two friends who move through spaces similar to mine brought up a deep sadness in me. I felt sadness for them, and for the parts of them that were not met with presence, attunement, or humility. At the same time, I felt connected to and compassionate toward the parts of them, and the people they spoke of, who cannot reasonably or safely make room for Self-led witnessing of the burdens carried by white cis men.
Embodied, Relational Alternatives
It’s one thing to name what isn’t working—how spiritualized language or Self energy can be co-opted in service of white supremacy culture. It’s another to witness moments where something else happens: where presence, love, and courage coalesce into relational responses that interrupt the usual patterns.
While Self energy can be misunderstood and misused to bypass accountability or preserve comfort, I’ve also witnessed moments where Self and love led without reinforcing white supremacy culture. These moments weren’t sanitized, harmonious, or comfortable—they were raw, real, and relational. What made them powerful was the collective commitment to stay with the activation, to remain in connection, and to prioritize repair without collapsing into either dominance or deference.
One example took place in a healing space composed mostly of women, where a white cisgendered female participant made a well-intentioned but microaggressive comment. The impact on several brown-bodied participants was immediate and visible. The facilitator, who was white-bodied, cisgendered female, named the microaggression, creating space for the harm to be acknowledged. The white participant became flooded with shame and embarrassment, visibly shrinking in the circle, looking fearful, and becoming tearful. During the next break in the training, several of the impacted BIPOC women chose to move toward her—not to dismiss the harm, but to remain in relationship with her. They offered her physical and emotional embrace, and named that white supremacy burdens white people, too. It was a moment of accountability, yes, but also one of profound generosity and shared humanity. Their act wasn’t about excusing the behavior or centering her pain—it was about interrupting the cycle of dehumanization by embodying love, presence, and truth in the face of rupture.
In another space, an anti-racist space, a gendered rupture emerged between participants after a white, heterosexual cis man made a comment that landed as dismissive and objectifying. Angry protectors arose quickly and fiercely in multiple people. Rather than shutting it down or rushing toward regulation, one of the facilitators invited us to stay with the activation. We breathed, we witnessed, and we remained in the mess together. Eventually, a participant turned to the man and said, with remarkable Self energy, “Please stay in relationship with us—even through this—we want you here.” It was not a bypass. It was a call into something deeper: responsibility that doesn’t require perfection, and relationship that doesn’t depend on moral purity or perfection.
Writing from Self, Not Just Truth: The Parts Behind This Article
It feels important to name that this article did not emerge from a single, unified place inside me. Several parts have been involved in its creation, often in tension with one another.
There is an angry part that wanted to write this as a defense, as a corrective, as a way to say, “Something here isn’t working, and I’m tired of pretending it is.” That part carries years of feeling quietly unwelcome in progressive spaces I care deeply about—especially within the IFS community, including trainings and workshops where belonging can be implicitly tied to how safely one performs certain values. That part wanted relief. It wanted acknowledgment. It wanted repair.
There is also a fearful part that worries about how this piece will be received, how I may be perceived, and whether my words will be flattened, misread, or weaponized in ways I do not intend. That part is tuned to real risk. It knows that speaking about exile from a position of relative privilege can easily be misconstrued as fragility, entitlement, or deflection.
Another part—a hyper-liberal inner critic—has argued passionately against publishing this at all. It raises important concerns: the necessity of affinity spaces, the reality that white-bodied people, especially white cis men, need to take responsibility for educating ourselves about white supremacy culture rather than placing that labor on BIPOC bodies, and the truth that marginalized people are already carrying more than their fair share, and that asking for more care from them would be denigrating and misattuned.
I respect this part deeply. It holds values I share. And still, it is not the only voice inside.
What has been hardest is writing from a place that is not only truthful, but loving. I do not mean love as sentimentality or appeasement, but love as presence. I mean love that can hold anger without being led by it. Love that can tolerate fear without retreating. Love that does not outsource responsibility for learning, while also refusing the belief that exile is the only ethical response to harm.
Self energy, for me, has invited me to slow this process down, to let these parts speak, and to not let any part’s narrative dominate. It calls me to ask, again and again: Can I say this in a way that invites relationship rather than defends a position? Can I stay connected to my values without turning away from people—inside or outside—who are activated by what I am naming?
This article is my imperfect attempt to do that. To write from a place that holds accountability and compassion together. To name patterns without demonizing people. And to remain oriented toward healing, wholeness, and love, not winning an argument.
A Living System, A Living Article
This article took over a year to come into being, shaped through ongoing revision, hesitation, conversation, and repair, as well as by significant world events that rippled through both internal and external systems and embodied the very dynamics it explores. At different points, parts of me wanted to rush it out, parts wanted to abandon it altogether, and parts worried about the impact it might have on people I care deeply about. What ultimately allowed the piece to take the form it has now was treating it not as a fixed statement, but as a living, breathing article.
Throughout the process, I sought and received feedback from people this article hopes to speak to, and from people whose systems might be activated by it. That included white cis men, white cis women, non-binary and queer white people, and BIPOC individuals. What emerged from those conversations was complex, sometimes uncomfortable, and deeply instructive.
Several people reflected that what I am naming does, in fact, happen in progressive and healing spaces. Others shared that they had felt similarly shamed or silenced by unspoken norms of progressive conformity, even when they were not white cis men. I heard from a mixed-race (white/Black) cisgender lesbian woman who named that many BIPOC people are so accustomed to being impacted by microaggressions and macroaggressions that they often do not expend much energy responding to them. Not because the harm is insignificant, but because the cost of constantly tending to it is too high; they have become desensitized to racial aggressions, and there is little evidence that speaking up will lead to meaningful repair. I heard from a Black cisgender heterosexual male friend who said the piece resonated deeply and felt important, while also expecting that I will be “cancelled” for publishing it.
Alongside this feedback, something else unfolded that feels just as important to name. In the midst of writing and revising, I engaged in healing work with a Black cisgender heterosexual male friend. Without sharing identifying details, I want to name that this work centered on tracing the burden carried by an angry part of me, a part that had been closely intertwined with the writing of this piece. As we stayed with it, that anger revealed itself not as a demand for recognition or retribution, but as a protector standing guard over a much younger part of me, one shaped by early experiences of being dismissed, told to calm down, or not believed when something felt unfair or wrong.
What emerged through this work was a slow, relational process of listening and repair. Rather than trying to reason with the anger or bypass it in the name of insight, we followed it back to the moments it was formed. There was space for grief, for confusion, and for the relief of finally being taken seriously. The younger part did not need agreement about facts or outcomes. It needed attunement, permission to feel what it felt, and the reassurance that it had not been wrong to react. Over time, the intensity of the anger softened, not because it was corrected, but because it was no longer carrying the burden alone.
As that process unfolded, something important shifted in my relationship to this article. The part of me that had once wanted the piece to lead with heat, urgency, or defense no longer needed to. It felt sufficiently witnessed by the relational work itself. What remained was a steadier sense of clarity and care, and a growing trust that this article did not need to convince, provoke, or preemptively protect itself in order to matter. I could speak more from a place of connection rather than charge.
I recognize that the relationships mentioned here that I have with people whose identities carry less privilege than my own are built on earned trust, repeated safety, and lived experiences of rupture and repair. These relationships exist because something in them felt safe enough to share hard truths with me.
Not all white cis men have relationships like these. Many do not yet have access to the kinds of relational experiences that have shaped mine, and that reality matters. I also received feedback that I feel safer to non white cisgender males because I am gay and deeply understand what it is like to be marginalized and because my book and other writings others have read reflect how deeply I engage with these challenging topics and the humility and self-awareness I bring to them. All this means I may be speaking from a position that is, in some ways, an exception rather than the norm for white cisgender men. If that is true, then what I am inviting here may be an even greater ask than I fully grasp for those whose systems have rarely, if ever, experienced white cis men as safe enough to risk openness with. Naming that possibility feels important, because it reminds me that what feels imaginable to me may still feel implausible at best and unsafe at worst to someone else.
All of this to emphasize: healing does not happen through declaration alone. It happens through dialogue, pacing, consent, and the willingness to stay with complexity long enough for something new to emerge. This article and my relationship to it evolved because the relationships around it changed. In that sense, it has been shaped not just by my words, but by the people and parts who were willing to engage with it and me as a living systems.
A Necessary Caution About Relationship and Tokenism
As I write about conversations with friends and colleagues whose identities carry less privilege than my own, I also want to name a risk inherent in even sharing those interactions. Naming such relationships can unintentionally reinforce the idea that proximity to marginalized people proves goodness, awareness, or moral credibility. It can subtly imply that if someone has relationships across difference, they must be “doing the work.”
But relationships alone do not equal integrity. Proximity is not the same as embodiment. It is entirely possible to maintain relationships that appear progressive while the underlying dynamic remains performative, disembodied, or transactional. At best, that can create connection that lacks depth or mutuality. At worst, it can quietly reenact the very cultural burdens of white supremacy the relationship seems to challenge.
This is something I continually examine in myself. I listen for parts that want reassurance, validation, or moral safety from being in relationship with people whose identities differ from mine. I listen for parts that might subtly seek exemption from accountability because of who I know or care about. I do not assume I am immune to these dynamics simply because I can name them.
I risk saying this here because dynamics that remain unnamed tend to gain power beneath the surface. And in my experience, the more subtle a relational pattern is, the harder it is to stay in authentic connection around it. Naming these tensions does not resolve them. But it can create the possibility of relating to one another with more integrity, consent, authenticity, and embodiment.
Hope at the Scale of One-on-One Relationships
In the many conversations, internal and external , that have unfolded while writing and rewriting this piece, I find myself holding two truths at once. One is hope. The other is pessimism.
I hope for change in how we relate across difference, harm, and history, especially in healing and progressive spaces. But I do not currently expect sweeping transformation, either internally or culturally, at large scales. There is simply too much accumulated hurt, too many unprocessed burdens, too much danger, and too many systems organized around protection rather than repair for change to arrive quickly or universally.
What I do believe in is smaller-scale change. The kind that happens quietly, relationally, and often invisibly. A conversation that helps a protector relax. A moment of being heard that loosens shame’s grip. A racial or gendered rupture that seems impossible to repair actually does get repaired.
This article is long, dense, and emotionally demanding. I expect it will not receive close or wide attention. If it does, many of my parts are expecting controversy and notoriety. Regardless, I hope it might loosen something in at least one system. Because when even one system softens, that shift does not stay contained. It travels. Through relationships. Through communities. Through time.
I hope what I share here increases the odds of these possibilities. I hope, if something here resonates with you, that you share it with someone you feel called to connect with. I hope you do it with courage and vulnerability, partnering with your internal system in doing so. And I hope it creates a dialogue and a deepening of trust and connection in your relationships, inside and outside.
A Note on Risk
Knowing this article has the potential for negative impact, especially for those of marginalized bodies and identities, please know I am open to hearing from you or any parts that may need to be understood and witnessed. Dialogue and connection are more important to me than “being right” on this.
And yet, the courage of Self within me trusts there is value in saying hard things with an open heart. If we truly want to build a culture of healing, we have to look at how we relate to everyone’s pain—including the pain held in systems of privilege.
This is not “all lives matter.” This is: all parts need witnessing and care. And some parts—particularly those inside marginalized bodies and identities—carry greater risk, exposure, and systemic weight.
Who does the witnessing and caring matters too. The most potent and necessary source is our own Self. Simple, but not easy. What and who comes next is a gift, not an obligation. Witnessing and care offered by those who have been harmed, again and again, toward those who do or symbolize harm, in this case white cis men, is powerful when it arises freely, from Self, rather than from pressure, duty, or moral demand.
The systems we seek to change don’t just live outside of us. They live within us, too. The same forces that burden and oppress also shape our internal landscapes. And we have Self energy to meet them with more curiosity, compassion, clarity, courage, and connection.
Healing asks more of us than who to protect and who to punish. It asks us to stay in relationship—with the pain, with the people, and with the parts who are trying, imperfectly but earnestly, to grow and to belong.
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.
