Max Littman, LCSW
July 18, 2025
What No Training Can Teach Us
We can attend all the right trainings. Learn from the most respected teachers. Read every book. Collect certifications and modalities like merit badges. And still: none of it will teach us how to be ourselves with our clients.
There’s a reason no training can hand us that.
Because being a healing presence in someone’s life is not about technique. It’s about being. It’s about relationship. And it’s about learning to listen—not just to our client’s parts, but to our own. To the quiet, often-shaky voice of our inner knowing. To what’s real and alive and unfolding in the moment.
No one else can give us that. And no one else can take it away from us.
We can learn skills. We can study a model. We can internalize maps and frameworks that help us track what’s happening. And that’s important—it gives structure and coherence to the messiness. But at some point, every therapist has to make a leap: from doing therapy right to doing therapy real, truthfully. And that shift is rarely expressed in a manual.
Over the years, this became clearer in my own system through countless hours spent in trainings and consultation spaces—sometimes as a participant, other times as a training assistant or supervisor. I’ve received feedback in both directions, and I’ve experimented with what feels true for me. Some forms of feedback, especially as a participant or consultee, have made my system cringe or bristle. And while those responses sometimes pointed to burdens, they also contained real wisdom—about what actually feels helpful, and what doesn’t. About what fosters growth, and what shuts it down. I’ve come to trust those signals as part of the unfolding. What keeps emerging is a deep commitment to attunement, to creating safe and fertile ground where others can grow into themselves. Rather than impose my own way, I’ve found my role is to support supervisees and consultees in discovering their own truths, their own style, their own rhythm. That clarity didn’t come from a textbook. It came from listening inward, being with others, and letting the work shape me from the inside out.
Finding our truth happens in the messy, confusing, human moments when a client says something and our chest tightens, and we don’t know why. It happens when a part of us panics about saying the wrong thing, and another part wants to throw the book out the window. It happens when we stop trying to prove we’re good therapists and start showing up as human ones.
No mentor can teach us what it feels like to track a client’s energy while also tracking our own. To stay connected to Self in the face of our own protectors flaring. To say something we didn’t plan to say because it feels right. To trust that feeling. To follow it. To repair when we miss. And to repair again. And again.
Those moments can’t be taught. But they can be practiced.
We learn them in the therapy room. We learn them by being willing to get it wrong, to feel uncertain, to notice when something lands and when something doesn’t. We learn them by staying curious—about our client, yes, but also about ourselves. What moves us. What scares us. What parts of us are activated and what parts are present.
We learn by daring to let our own humanity be part of the healing.
Our style isn’t something we discover in a workbook. It’s what emerges when our parts feel safe enough to stop leading with performance and letting us inhabit each moment. It is when we let go of trying to sound like someone else’s idea of a wise therapist and start finding out what wisdom sounds like in our voice, our body, our presence.
This is the work no training can do for us.
And the more we stop chasing the right way to be a therapist, the more space opens to find our way. The more we learn to trust ourselves—not because we’re always right, but because we’re always willing to return to Self. To stay with. To keep learning. To keep listening. To let the work shape us.
Not perfectly. But humanly. Honestly. From the inside out.
That’s something no teacher can teach us.
But it’s something we can all learn.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
