The Adult Chair

Book excerpt: Take a seat and let this be your guide to living an emotionally healthy life, with real-world examples and easy-to-understand tools to help you create lasting change—from the therapist behind the popular podcast The Adult Chair. Through decades of working with countless clients, Michelle Chalfant found that most forms of therapy, while well-meaning, help with the symptoms but rarely address the root cause. That's why she developed a new model of personal transformation called The Adult Chair. The Adult Chair model breaks life into three relatable stages of development, helping you gain awareness of how you became who you are today and what to do to transform. Take, for example, a client named Sara, who had trouble staying in relationships. As Chalfant guided her through the model, Sara discovered: • The Child Chair (age 0-6). Sitting here, Sara recalled her father's strong temper and realized this was when she learned to suppress her negative emotions. • The Adolescent Chair (age 7-24). At this stage, Sara turned to survival mechanisms to numb her feelings: first with food, then later with substances. • The Adult Chair (after age 25). Sara realized that even though she was a physical adult, she was still emotionally acting from her Adolescent Chair, by numbing herself. From this new empowered perspective, she was able to heal old wounds, feel and process her emotions, and enter relationships more open-heartedly. The Adult Chair walks you through each of the chairs in your life, giving you a framework to understand why you do what you do and the root of the common challenges humans face. Chalfant then provides the “five pillars of healthy adults” that serve as fundamental building blocks of living as your healthiest adult self. Along the way, she offers processes, tools, exercises, and journaling prompts that you can plug into your life to get unstuck and transform your life each day. Revolutionizing the way you understand yourself and others, The Adult Chair will help you break unhealthy patterns and live with greater balance and peace.