Max Littman, LCSW
May 6, 2026
One way I think about therapy is that it helps people respond to their lives with more proportion, accuracy, and choice.
A person comes in because something in their life keeps evoking a response that feels more extreme than the moment seems to call for. They are flooded by a short text. They shut down when a partner changes tone. They feel devastated after a small mistake at work. They become rigid, suspicious, apologetic, performative, numb, enraged, pleasing, frantic, or absent in ways that seem disproportionate to what is happening now.
Or the response is undersized. They stay quiet when something harmful is happening. They minimize disrespect. They intellectualize a betrayal. They keep functioning through tremendous grief. They keep returning to a person, job, family system, or institution that is repeatedly injuring them, while something inside says, “It’s fine. I’m fine. This isn’t a big deal.”
Therapists are not immune to these mismatched reactions. We are human, too, with personal histories that can shape how we meet present-day moments.
With both over- and undersized reactions, the mismatch may eventually become hard to keep managing alone. Something has reached a boiling point. A part of the person may know they need help, even if other parts feel ashamed, skeptical, or afraid of what therapy will ask of them.
Internal Family Systems gives us a generous way to understand the mismatches that bring clients to us. A response that looks outsized is often not only responding to the present moment. It is often responding to past moments that are being echoed in the present.
The response may look too big or too small from the outside. From inside the system, it always has its own logic.
A mismatched response may be carrying the charge of a vulnerability attached to a moment in history when a person was humiliated, abandoned, threatened, unseen, invaded, or left alone with something impossible. A protective part may be reacting with urgency because urgency once made sense and was right-sized. A part may be scanning for danger because danger used to hide in small shifts of tone, eye contact, silence, disappointment, or unpredictability.
A person who becomes intensely ashamed after a mild piece of feedback may not be reacting only to the feedback. A part of them may be back in a classroom, a childhood home, a church, a peer group, or a family system where being wrong meant being exposed. A person who shuts down when a partner asks for closeness may not be rejecting love. A protector may be guarding against engulfment, loss of self, obligation, or the old feeling of being needed beyond capacity. A person who becomes highly activated when a friend does not reply may not be “too much.” A young part may be inside an old terror of not mattering to a caregiver.
The goal is not to force proportion from the outside. It is to understand why the response once made sense, and what inside may need care now for the system to have more choice.
The work is not to make a person calmer in some generalized way, or more rational, or more mature, or more self-controlled, or more self-regulated. That may all come as a secondary benefit.
The work is to help their internal system sense more accurately where and when they are, who they are with, what is actually happening, what options are available, whether the old response is still needed in the same way, and what the right-sized response is now.
A right-sized response does not always look calm. It may involve anger. It may involve leaving. It may involve setting a boundary with force. It may involve grieving intensely and “ugly crying”. It may involve saying no without a long explanation. It may involve being “messy” and not having it all figured out or in a neat, tidy story.
Right-sized does not mean polite, palatable, tidy, or convenient for others.
It means the response fits the reality of the situation.
This is where we need to be very careful and practice discernment. Clients often come to us already assuming their reactions are the problem. They may have been told they are too sensitive, too needy, too dramatic, too angry, too avoidant, too guarded, too intense, too emotional, and so on. By others and by themselves. They may have internalized the idea that their symptoms, behaviors, and reactions are evidence of personal defect.
When we listen more closely, their external responses may not be outsized at all.
A client may be anxious because they are living with ongoing financial instability, caregiving strain, discrimination, chronic illness, housing insecurity, workplace exploitation, family coercion, or political threat. A client may be enraged because they are repeatedly being disrespected by a boss, friend, partner, or parent. A client may be withdrawn because their environment is not emotionally safe. A client may be hypervigilant because the people around them are unpredictable. A client may be grieving because something devastating happened and their system has not had enough companionship in it.
In those moments, our job is not to help our clients soften the response or make it more regulated. It is to help them understand the response in context: in their body, their relationships, their history, and the reality of what they are facing now.
There are times when the most therapeutic intervention is some version of, “Given what you are describing, your response makes sense.”
Sometimes a client does not need to become less reactive. They need help seeing that their reaction is proportionate to what they are enduring. They may need support trusting their own perception. They may need help differentiating between an old burden and a current constraint. They may need help recognizing that the problem is not their sensitivity, but the conditions they have had to keep adapting to.
If we too quickly assume our client’s response is the problem, therapy can become another place where a client’s system is asked to accommodate the very conditions that are harming it. A client learns to push through exploitation, reframe neglect, regulate around disrespect, soften their anger toward ongoing injury, or become more skillful at staying in places they may need help leaving.
We can help to slow this down, contextualize, and clarify. We can ask, with care: Is this response connected to the past, the present, or both? Is this protector reacting to what is happening now, or to what it fears will happen? Is the client’s system carrying an old burden, or is it accurately registering a current reality? Is the work to unburden a part, or to support action in the external world?
The answer is often not simple.
A part may be over-responding to a partner’s delayed reply because of old abandonment wounds. And the relationship may also contain real inconsistency. A client may be under-responding to a parent’s intrusion because compliance was once necessary. And the parent may still be intrusive. A person may feel shame after a mistake because of childhood humiliation. And the current workplace may also be punitive, perfectionistic, exploitative, and unsafe.
We become more respectful, and effective, when we do not rush to locate the problem entirely inside the client.
This respectful approach is one reason I find the frame of right-sized responses helpful. It gives us a direction without turning healing into a vague, endless project. Therapy can otherwise become intimidating in its indefiniteness. There can be an implication that because our systems are so complex, and because our histories are layered, and because parts do and carry so much, the work must stretch on without a meaningful sense of short- or long-term containment.
For some clients, an indefinite ending may feel nourishing, reassuring, and safe. For others, it can feel counterproductive, daunting, endless, overwhelming, overly expensive, or subtly disrespectful. A person’s system may not want to be treated as an infinite excavation site. Protectors may understandably bristle at the idea that therapy will continue until every wound is found, every part is known, every burden is released, every attachment injury is metabolized, every reaction is understood.
Most systems are not asking for this sort of infinite insight.
They are often implicitly asking: Can I live with more choice? Can I stop losing hours or days to reactions that no longer fit? Can I feel what I feel without being overtaken by it? Can I know when my anger is wise? Can I know when my fear is old? Can I respond to my child, my partner, my work, my body, my family, my community, my grief, my limits, and my life with more accuracy? Can I get enough relief that is sustainable enough?
That is no small ask, but it may feel less daunting than the vague promise of complete, system-wide healing.
Here is where the idea of right-sized responses can bring clarity and hope. A right-sized response means there is more relationship between the present moment and the internal response to it. The system is not simply reacting from the most frightened part, the most practiced protector, the most defended strategy, or the oldest expectation. There is more room. More contact. More internal listening. More capacity to notice, “Something in me is very scared right now,” without the scared part having to run the whole body. More capacity to notice, “I am minimizing this,” without the minimizing part being shamed. More capacity to notice, “My anger is telling the truth,” without needing to burn everything down to prove it.
A right-sized response to life is not a life without activation. It is a life where activation can be listened to, contextualized, and met. It is a life where parts are less often forced into extremes because no one inside is available to hear them otherwise. It is a life where external reality matters, internal history matters, and the person and their responses are not reduced to either one.
Our job as therapists, then, is not an indefinite project of helping our clients become healed enough.
A right-sized frame does not promise quick therapy. It does not decide in advance how long healing should or will take. It simply gives the work a shape.
With some shape, some container, the client’s internal system and nervous system may be more likely to relax enough for the work to really begin. This frame can help prevent therapy from becoming an endless excavation of every wound, every part, and every burden, especially when that excavation is not needed, not wanted, or not safe.
We are helping the person notice where responses feel mismatched to their life now, where those responses may come from, and where the system may already be responding with more wisdom than it has been allowed to trust.
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.
