Max Littman, LCSW
December 31, 2025
Words can clarify. They can organize. They allow one person to reach another across distance and difference. They can give shape to experience. They can awaken the senses and a sensing for and of others.
And then there are moments when words become clutter.
What was once felt becomes described. What was once known in the body, and elsewhere, in imagination and in realms beyond consciousness or comprehension, becomes translated into something thinner, more portable, and easier to manage.
This is not an argument against language. It is an observation about how easily language can limit us in our being and becoming.
There are kinds of knowing and being that do not move well through words. They are slower. They are layered. They may arrive through sensation, image, resonance, or rhythm. They are often understood more fully through presence than through explanation. When words are applied too early or too heavily, they can litter these inner landscapes, leaving behind concepts where a natural flow once lived.
Sometimes language functions like scaffolding. Sometimes it becomes debris.
When Words Wear Me Down
There are parts of me that have grown tired of words.
They are tired not just of speaking them, but of living inside them, thinking in them, reading them, writing them, and absorbing them through media, conversations, posts, commentary, analysis. Words arrive constantly, inside and out.
These parts are not anti-language. They are overexposed to it in the form of words.
There is a particular fatigue that comes from being surrounded by words that do not land. Words that gesture without touching. Words that explain instead of meet. Words that perform certainty while avoiding contact.
Social spaces can amplify this exhaustion. So much talking. So much narrating. So much positioning. Words can be to signal alignment, intelligence, goodness, and belonging. They can be used with awareness, intentionality, and patience. In today’s culture, saturated by the burdens of materialism, individualism, racism, and patriarchy, among others, space for pauses, and tolerance for not knowing are devalued. Silence can quickly be interpreted as absence, disinterest, or withdrawal.
Even writing, which I love, can become overwhelming when words stop feeling like invitations and start feeling like obligations. When they pile up rather than open space. When they multiply without deepening.
The parts of me that are tired of words are not asking for less meaning. They are asking for more space, more freedom, and more love, which are all interrelated.
They long for language that is earned, words that arrive after listening, speech that builds coherence rather than noise, and moments when silence is a sign of respect and trust.
WAIT: Why Am I Talking
There is an acronym Dick Schwartz uses that I return to often, especially when I feel language starting to rush in ahead of experience. WAIT: Why am I talking?
It is a deceptively simple question. It interrupts momentum. It slows the reflex to fill space. It asks for orientation rather than output.
In the therapy room, WAIT often arrives when I notice myself reaching for words too quickly. When an interpretation wants to land before something has fully emerged. When reassurance, explanation, or even curiosity risks replacing contact. The question is not whether what I am about to say is intelligent or kind. It is whether speech is serving the moment or protecting me from it.
Sometimes talking is an act of attunement. Sometimes it is an escape hatch.
WAIT brings me back to function. Am I speaking to clarify something that is ready to be named? Am I offering language as scaffolding that can be set down later? Or am I trying to manage uncertainty, soothe my own discomfort, or tidy something that needs to remain wild?
Outside of clinical work, the same question applies. In conversations with friends. In moments of conflict. In parenting. In silence shared with another person where words feel both available and unnecessary.
Why am I talking?
Am I trying to be understood? Am I trying to be useful? Am I trying to feel relevant, competent, reassuring, or good? Am I narrating because I have been taught that silence is absence rather than presence?
WAIT does not argue against speaking. It invites consent.
There are times when language opens something that could not open otherwise. There are other times when speech closes a door that had just begun to loosen. WAIT helps me sense the difference. It reminds me that meaning does not always require commentary, and that some forms of knowing arrive only when we stop narrating them.
WAIT: Why Am I Thinking
There is a subtler, adapted version of WAIT that I have begun to notice and put into practice, one that operates beneath speech. Why am I thinking?
So much of my inner life involves narration. Sentences form before sensations register, if they register at all. Concepts appear before images have time to settle. The mind, and the parts that operate through it, move quickly to describe what is happening and to scan for what might be done about it. There is an urgency to control outcomes rather than stay with what is happening.
This kind of thinking is efficient. It also distances me from the love inside and all around me, what we might call local and collective Self in IFS.
Asking why am I thinking opens a door back toward love. It creates a pause between experience and commentary. In that pause, love appears, like the sun peeking through clouds. A feeling without evaluation. An image without a storyline. A bodily response that does not need to be understood in order to be respected or trusted. Unconditional love.
Thinking in the words of my mother tongue is a form of orientation. Words organize. They help me track, remember, and integrate. They can also buffer. Thinking in words can become a way of staying ahead of experience, keeping it at a manageable and safe distance.
WAIT helps me return to function. Are my parts using language to support contact, or to avoid it? Are they burdened? In other words, are they protectors who are afraid? If so, what do they fear would happen if the thinking slowed or stopped? What are they concerned might happen if presence replaced commentary? Do they trust my love? Do they know I am here? Do they know I exist? If not, what fearful protector is blocking this, and why?
Sometimes these questions arrive as words. Other times they come through abstract forms of communication that feel inner and non-verbal, something one might loosely call telepathic.
Speaking toward this, there are moments when stepping out of words allows other forms of intelligence to surface. Sensation. Memory. Intuition. The slow, symbolic logic of images. A sense of rightness or wrongness that does not argue its case.
This does not require stopping thought. It requires befriending it. Loving it.
The Inner World Is Not Verbal First
Most of inner life does not involve words. Yes, there are parts that may dominate our attention with thinking. But there is so much more happening inside. There is language, but not one that seeks to control or manage meaning. This language can manifest as pressure in the chest, as warmth behind the eyes, as a tightening in the jaw, as a snapshot memory without a storyline, as a mood that cannot yet say what it wants or needs.
Before words, there is attunement. Before naming, there is recognition. Before description, there is a shared rhythm. Infants do not need words to know whether they are safe. They know through tone, pacing, breath, touch, gaze. They learn the world through pattern and repetition long before they learn it through nouns and verbs.
Words come later. Useful. Necessary. Powerful. And also narrowing.
Words are excellent tools for navigating the external world. They allow us to coordinate, to plan, to explain, to persuade, to teach, to ask for what we need. They help us survive inside systems that require clarity and speed. But the inner world does not operate by the same rules. It is less linear. Less efficient. More associative. More symbolic. More relational. More expansive.
When we mistake linguistic fluency for depth of understanding, something subtle is lost.
Speaking to My Infant
Lately, I am being encouraged by family, friends, and professionals, gently and repeatedly, to speak to my infant daughter. I am advised to narrate what I am doing, to label objects, to fill her environment with language so that her brain can begin organizing sound into meaning, meaning into words, words into thought, and thought into action and communication.
This guidance is well intentioned and largely accurate. Words will help her move through the world. It will allow her to efficiently express her needs, build relationships, advocate for herself, and make sense of complex systems. It will give her access to education, culture, history, and story.
And still, I notice something in me that hesitates.
I watch her take in the world without words. The way her eyes track light. The way her body settles when held. The way she responds to tone rather than content. The way she recognizes us without needing names. Meaning is not absent here. Messages are being passed back and forth between nervous systems, mine and hers, through continuous feedback and adjustment.
The part of me that hesitates wonders what happens as words become dominant.
What happens to forms of knowing that do not rely on speech? What happens to the capacity to feel into another being rather than explain oneself to them in words?
Words will help her be safe in the external world. I do want to give her that. And I want her to know love that lives beyond the confines of words.
I am grateful for the parts of me that share their wisdom through their exasperation with words. They are hopeful for my daughter because I am listening to and learning from them now.
Out of respect for them, my words will end here.
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.
