The Adult Chair Podcast with Michelle Chalfant

Of all the relationships in our lives, the relationship we carry on with our self is most notable. It is the one relationship that is with us all our lives, through our highs and lows, and yet it is most often neglected, ridiculed, or downgraded. To reach peace and concert with the world around us, we must first reach peace with the world inside us.

Today on the show, Michelle Chalfant shares her process for helping others to determine the source of inner struggle through a challenging and practical experience leading Pete through some of his fears as a father.

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• Pete Wright on Twitter

Happy holidays to all! And with the holiday season upon us, let's make a collective promise to keep cool heads as we're tossed in all sorts of crazy directions!

To do that, we have to understand our triggers. Triggers are the emotionally charged reactions that we have when our comfortable state of "normal" is somehow tested. Did someone cut you off recklessly on the highway? Did you feel that surge of anger? That's a trigger. Did you find out all your friends were invited to a holiday party and you weren't? Did you feel that surge of jealousy? Another trigger!

This week on the show, we're talking about triggers, how they hit us, how we can better understand them, and most importantly how we can create a new habit of curiosity in our triggers as we learn to understand ourselves in the process!

Over the past two weeks, our conversation has centered on the child and adolescent chairs, moving from the creativity and trust of the child to the judgment and doubt of the adolescent. Today, we take on our namesake, the adult chair.

The adult speaks in truth and fact. The adult is conscious, connected to the higher self. The adult is our keen observer, rational and patient. This week, we offer an exploration of the adult, and share insights into how the adult supports our growth from child and adolescent every day.

The adolescent represents the formative emotional years erupting from the child. The adolescent is developing the ego, conceptualizing right and left brain activity, and is tested through new experiences of fear. But there are some terrific strengths of the adolescent, and coming to terms with this part of us can bring greater balance and overall emotional health.

This week on The Adult Chair, Michelle Chalfant and Pete Wright talk about the critical developmental milestones of the adolescent and provide a foundation for understanding when we're getting stuck in our adolescent chair as adults.

As humans, we've worked for years to understand our inner child and the role the child plays in our adult psyche. It can be an enormous and elusive challenge, facing our child as we struggle with what challenges us as adults. Why is understanding the role of the child important to our overall emotional balance and health? This week on The Adult Chair, Michelle introduces us to the child chair and brings into focus the path we can take to discover our relationship with our own inner child as we continue our series on the three chairs.

Welcome to The Adult Chair with Michelle Chalfant.

Michelle Chalfant has been a seeker her whole life. Through her own journey of discovery and her decades of work as a therapist, she has developed an approach to understanding the struggles we all experience as we move through the world each day. In The Adult Chair, we'll be using Michelle's framework as a foundation for better understanding our relationship with ourselves. Along the way, we'll host an ongoing conversation around stress, anxiety, physical health, and how our understanding of ourselves impacts the most important relationships in our lives.

This week on The Adult Chair, Michelle shares a bit of her own story with Pete Wright, the story that lead to this podcast. She introduces the chair model — originally created by Susan Austin Crumpton, one of Michelle's most inspirational teachers — and how this model inspires her own work to this day. She provides an overview to her guided approach to living authentically that she uses with clients each day.

For more information on Susan Austin-Crumpton, visit The Estuary.