The Adult Chair

The Adult Chair

Chapter One

The Child Chair

Mary Ann came into my office asking for help with her anxiety. “I live with a lot of fear,” she told me, explaining how scared she was of being trapped, which affected her when getting on airplanes. She also feared her kids were going to get in car accidents, and she found herself constantly worrying about her oldest child, who was away at college.

When she told me she’d felt like this for as long as she could remember, I knew we needed to start with the beginning of her story. “When you think back to your childhood, what stands out about the first six years of your life?” I asked.

Mary Ann thought for a moment, then responded that the biggest thing was the lack of stability at home. Her parents fought all the time, and her mother would scream at her father and threaten to leave and never come back. “I remember hiding with my little sister in her bedroom closet when they would fight. We’d be so scared of Mom leaving and not coming back.”

I asked how sharing this made her feel. She looked at me through tears and said, “I can’t breathe. My whole body is tight.”

“Mary Ann, how old do you feel right now?”

She immediately responded, “Four.”

I knew immediately that Mary Ann’s current anxiety and feelings of fear were coming from her earlier childhood programming, or her road map that was formed between the ages of zero to six years old, the time period I call the Child Chair. By starting here, with the Child Chair, Mary Ann was able to understand the story of her life: who she is and how she got this way.

So, let’s begin here, with the Child Chair. First, I’ll walk you through understanding how we are shaped by our parents and our childhood experiences. Then we’ll take a look at how these formative experiences shape us when it comes to emotions, identifying our needs, healthy attachment, vulnerability, intimacy, passion, creativity, play, and fun. These are the parts of our road map that are meant to be formed during this stage of development. If you did not get what you needed in any of these areas during this stage of life, you will likely find you struggle in them as an adult.

Next, we’ll take a look at the common ways we might be wounded as a child and how this can impact the rest of our lives. Finally, I’ll teach you how to reconnect with your inner child so that you can learn from them, check in with them and identify their needs, and re-­parent them in a healthier way.

I invite you to journey with me back to your younger years, open to learning and gaining new awareness about your past that will give you the understanding you need to move more solidly into your Adult Chair.

What Is the Child Chair and Where Does It Come From?

As mentioned earlier, the Child Chair phase begins at conception and ends at around age six. A 2011 study published by the Association for Psychological Science found that “as a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. This includes signals about the mother’s mental state.”

This is incredible! As our bodies, brains, and nervous systems develop in utero, especially from the twenty-­fifth week until birth, we are sensing, feeling, and absorbing what is happening in our external environments, especially that of our mother.

Think back to when your mother was pregnant with you. If you have access to this information, see if you can answer the following questions: What was the energy like in your home with your parents? Was it a stressful environment or peaceful? Were your parents fighting or were they eagerly awaiting your arrival? Did your mama sing to you and caress her belly with anticipation of your birth? Were you a planned baby or a “mistake”? Was there mental illness or addiction in the home? Was your mother afraid to bring you home? Were you given up for adoption? What might have been the conversation happening around you while you were developing? Answers to these questions can give you some important information as to what your early self was already taking in and attempting to make sense of.

At birth, we enter into the world as a pure essence of self: innocent, vulnerable, and curious about the big world we are born into. We are “blank slates”—­no mental programming or wounding, no beliefs or thoughts about how the world works or who we are.

We open our eyes to a new world and are 100 percent dependent on our parents to feed, soothe, protect, nurture, and love us. They are our teachers of life, and they model for us how to act as healthy humans. Because we don’t have a self-­image or an understanding of who we are yet, our parents show us this by reflecting who we are, serving as mirrors for us as we build our sense of self.

Our parents have huge jobs. Raising a child is not easy; in fact, it can be quite overwhelming. How our parents show up for us during the first phase of development is paramount to how we develop into adults. They model and teach us the art of feeling and expressing emotions, how to speak up for ourselves and protect our personal space with boundaries, and how to be brave and confident people. They affect how we see, love, and nurture ourselves as well as others whom we develop relationships with in our future, from friends to romantic partners and even colleagues.

We are like little sponges in this phase, absorbing everything we hear, sense, and experience as 100 percent truth. Our brains grow the fastest during these years; in fact, we develop more than one million new neural connections per second during this time. This stage of development is exciting, but the issue with this super-­learning phase is that as we absorb, we take in everything as normal and healthy—­regardless of whether it actually is or not. The ability to discern good from bad and right from wrong does not fully develop until around the age of twenty-­five, when the prefrontal cortex develops in our brain. That means that we store all of our childhood experiences as truth, and based on these experiences, we develop a road map for life.

The problem is that most of these beliefs, as well as our road map, live in the unconscious mind—­“the shadow,” as Carl Jung coined it. In fact, we live 95 percent from our unconscious mind and only 5 percent from our conscious mind. Most of us are unaware of the thoughts and beliefs we have (our “childhood programming”); we simply live from them.

Think about that for a moment: What you learned and experienced in the first six years of life is what you are using to navigate your life as an adult! This is how many of us live our lives—­we’re trying to find our way through adulthood using old information. The work of living in your Adult Chair is updating that road map with the truth you now know about your adult self.

Even though the Child Chair is developed during the first six years of life, this part is very much alive and with you. The energy of this precious part of us exists inside as what we call “the inner child.”

When you are feeling emotions or tapping into your needs, you are connecting with your inner child. When you are living with your passion and creativity, you are very much connecting to the energy of the inner child. Likewise, when you feel disconnected from your emotions, needs, passion, or creativity, this means you are blocked from your inner child. “Inner child work” is a process where you are tapping into and opening up the energy of this part of you.

Let’s pause here for a moment so you can reflect on what you absorbed in your Child Chair that might now be directing your adult life. Then we’ll move on to look at the key developmental milestones of this phase, so that we can identify the areas that may need to be addressed in order to move forward.