About The Adult Chair
About The Adult Chair
I was at one of my lowest places in life when I found the The Adult Chair® model. I was at work, sitting in a small, four-wall, enclosed temporary office space that had no windows and one door. The space really represented how I felt: stuck and closed off.
I was searching for podcasts about navigating the early childhood phase of life because parenting young children was wearing me out! That’s when I came across The Adult Chair® Podcast Episode 002 The Child Chair. I thought, “This sounds interesting because I need all the help I can get with my children.” Little did I know it would be an episode that spoke directly to me!
Michelle started describing The Child Chair as where the true feelings and needs of a child are. She said, “This is where we learn to trust, this is where our creativity comes from. This is where our vulnerability sits and is born.” I was so intrigued I continued to listen. She said, “If a client comes to me and says, ‘I’m not passionate. I just don’t love life anymore,’ that’s an indicator the child part is gone.” I felt like she was talking to me, and I immediately became hooked on the podcast and started doing the work.
Every time I listened to an episode, I shared it with friends and family, and they started sharing stories and experiences on how the model was helping them. I knew there was something special about this model.
When the chance to become an Adult Chair® Coach became available, I knew it was the next step for my life. I believe this model can help so many change the dynamic of their life story.
The Adult Chair Model
The Adult Chair is a manual for your life. It’s a tool that helps you feel empowered, confident and equipped with a clear roadmap to your healthiest, most authentic self. Through The Adult Chair, you will understand how your life experiences have shaped you, give a voice to the different parts of who you are, gain greater self-awareness and respond to life in a healthy way.
The Child Chair
Your inner child forms between ages zero and seven, and it is the foundation of your true feelings and needs. The inner child is deeply vulnerable, which makes it the source of deep, connected relationships. It is also where early wounding can occur, which shapes our view of the world as we grow up. When seated in the Child Chair, we find creativity, passion, spontaneity, trust and intimacy.
The Adolescent Chair
In adolescence, you begin to develop your own identity and realize that you are separate and unique from the world around you. As the ego forms, so does the desire to protect yourself, whether the daggers are real or imagined. When seated in the Adolescent Chair, we become perfectionist, judgmental and controlling, and we develop a mask to hide our authentic selves from a world that seems cold and rejecting. In this chair, we lack the ability to really discern our experiences, and this is usually where we create stories and assumptions about our experiences that aren’t always based in fact and truth. Most of us live from this place until we awake and decide we are ready to change.
The Adult Chair
The Adult Chair represents your highest self: living in the present moment, dealing with facts and truth over stories and assumptions and being able to set boundaries from a place of patience and compassion. While seated in the Adult Chair, we can deeply connect with our inner child’s needs and feelings and objectively observe our adolescent’s behaviors. It is here, and only here, that we can become aware of—and overcome—the emotional triggers and negative patterns that hold us back. This is the chair where we rewrite our stories and get clear on who we truly are.
