Libsyn Directory

378: Summer Series: Healing Your Abandonment Wound with Susan Anderson

Release Date: 08/03/2023

404: Embracing Transformation and Rediscovering Your True Self with Jennifer Dawn

The Adult Chair

Hello, my beautiful Adult Chair family! It’s Michelle Chalfant, and I’m thrilled to be back with you after a few months away. These months have been a transformative journey for me, one filled with deep introspection and change, not just personally but also for our beloved podcast. In this episode, I’m joined by someone very special, Jennifer Dawn, who has been a guide, mentor, and friend to me through this incredible period of growth. Jennifer has a profound connection to energy and healing, and she generously shared her insights on self-discovery and the transformative power of...

403: How To Listen to Your Soul

The Adult Chair

Lately, there’s been something stirring in my soul. I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but I feel like it’s going to be BIG – like something new is coming, and I need to go inward and listen for what it is. Have you ever felt this way? When this happens, I believe it’s our soul tugging at us, trying to tell us something about our mission and purpose on the planet. And I have made it my intention to always listen when the soul calls. It’s something I like to call “soul alignment” — a practice of going within and listening to the...

402: Healing Through Grounding with Clint Ober

The Adult Chair

What if the secret to better sleep, less inflammation and reduced pain was as simple as walking barefoot in the grass? Both the earth and our bodies have an electrical charge, and “grounding” (or “earthing”) refers to the practice of connecting our bodies to the earth – keeping the body’s charge at an optimal balance and unlocking tremendous health benefits. If you think this sounds like something made up by a crunchy tree hugger, think again: the father of grounding, Clint Ober, is actually a cable guy. Clint had a strong connection with nature from...

401: Practical Intuition with Laura Day

The Adult Chair

Have you ever gotten a “gut feeling” that something was going to happen…and then it did? Or sensed that someone wasn’t trustworthy or that you shouldn’t move forward with a decision? This is your intuition at work! Intuition is something we all possess, and something we’ve all undeniably experienced, but how it works remains largely a mystery. Is it something spiritual? Psychological? Biological? Laura Day grew up feeling like her brain was “different” in some way. She knew she had ADD and a number of head injuries, but she didn’t know...

400: The Art of Manifestation: How To Manifest Your Dream Life

The Adult Chair

2023 is behind us, and 2024 is here! The new year represents a clean slate and new chapter where you can begin manifesting the year – the life – you want. I believe that, as creative beings, we are always in “creation mode.” Like gravity, we can’t turn the laws of manifestation on and off – they just are. So, then the question becomes: What do you really want? And what is it that you are creating with every thought you have and word you speak? In this episode, I’m giving you everything you need to get more intentional with your creations...

399: Holiday Replay: The Magic of Surrender with Kute Blackson

The Adult Chair

Kute Blackson is no stranger to miracles. Growing up the son of a spiritual leader in Ghana, Africa, Kute witnessed healings and transformation that were nothing short of awe-inspiring. But when he realized it wasn’t his calling to take over his father’s ministry in the way his family expected, it led him on a challenging and transformational journey of his own: one in which he discovered the magic of surrender and how it can heal our lives. In this episode, Kute delivers so much wisdom about what surrender really is (it’s not passive like you might think), the role...

398: Holiday Replay: How to Become Happier with Gretchen Rubin

The Adult Chair

Whether it’s eating healthier, getting exercise, starting a meditation practice or staying socially connected, figuring out what to do to be happy might be simple – but actually doing these things and living in a way that lets us experience happiness is much harder. When we know there are things we can do that will make us healthier and happier, why do we struggle to actually do them? Why do we get caught in a cycle of chasing happiness instead of choosing joy, even when we know better? This is what Gretchen Rubin wanted to understand when she began studying happiness and why...

397: How Brain Health Affects Mental Health with Dr. Bisleen Attli

The Adult Chair

For too many years, mental health came with a stigma. It was treated as something “wrong” in the mind, with the psychological and physical looked at entirely separately. It’s almost as if we forgot that the brain is part of the body – a physical organ that needs care just like our heart, our gut or any other part of our body. And when we support our brain health, it can have BIG impacts on our mental and emotional health. Dr. Bisleen Attli is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-certified naturopath, which is a fancy way of saying...

396: Healing Generational Limiting Beliefs with LaShonda Walker

The Adult Chair

As you think about your life, do you ever wish your story was different? You wish you more of this, less of that, that an event had never happened, that you had done the thing you will always regret not doing. But what if the story you tell yourself about your life is just as important as the story of what happened to you? And what if you could change your entire life by consciously changing how you think about your past? LaShonda Walker is a Certified Adult Chair® Coach who has created an incredible healing process called “A New Life Story,” inspired by her training in The...

Managing Triggers at the Holidays

The Adult Chair

‘Tis the season…for triggers! At the holidays, stress, drinking, spending money and spending time with others all increase. And with that, comes a decrease in patience, sleep, time for self and all the things that make us more resilient to stress. Add in the fact that we tend to be around people we aren’t normally around for longer periods of time, and it’s a landmine for triggers. But as you know, I love triggers because they are such a powerful opportunity to look at and work on our limiting beliefs. So, I invite you to view this...

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Rejection is one of the greatest fears we have as humans. Even simple rejections like not making the team or being chosen for a job – things we know aren’t personal – still sting deeply. Why does rejection seem to hit at the core of who we are?

Susan Anderson began asking this question when she went through a personal experience of abandonment. The love of her life left her suddenly for another woman, and although she was a practicing psychotherapist with immense knowledge of the human mind, she still found herself in emotional crisis and doubting herself and her worthiness.

As she dug more into this topic, she discovered that we as humans have a primal abandonment wound – a universal experience that begins when we are born and go from deep union and connection with our mother to a feeling of being separate. This creates deep shame and causes us to search for belonging and worthiness throughout our lives.

And this is why rejection hurts so much: it triggers this deep fear that we might not belong and we might not be worthy.

In this fascinating and important episode, Susan shares her discoveries on the topic of abandonment, why we experience it the ways we do and how a whole host of other issues in our lives can stem from this wound. We discussed why healing abandonment trauma looks different from healing other traumas, the five stages of healing and the tools (all of which are part of The Adult Chair® model) that can heal it.

Listen to discover:

The hidden shame we all have and the root of it
The different defenses we put up against shame
How to raise our awareness to our abandonment wounds
Why healing from abandonment looks different from other forms of trauma healing
Steps to healing abandonment wounding
How working with abandonment wounding can help with people pleasing, codependency and self-sabotage
5 stages of processing abandonment hurt

The primal wound of abandonment is also an opportunity for primal healing. When we learn to love and accept ourselves as worthy and recognize how deeply connected we truly are, we not only heal our abandonment wound, but we can change almost anything in our lives.

"The loneliness is sort of a secondary feeling. The primary is the primal fear and the shame of maybe never being worthy of keeping someone." - Susan Anderson

"The personality itself is a defense against the shame." - Susan Anderson

"When we look at a relationship that ends, it is a retraumatization of what we experienced as a child." - Michelle Chalfant

"The history that leads to a strong reaction in adulthood to abandonment could be very subtle." - Susan Anderson

"You have to take this step, and you go through it...The pain is there, but you go through it, and you get to the other side." - Michelle Chalfant

"Your adult self can now develop an intense, loving, reassuring relationship with your inner child." - Susan Anderson

"It turns this awful emotional crisis that's so painful into an opportunity for something that's probably long overdue, which is self-love." - Susan Anderson

"Doing these steps, you will become an even better, stronger, more self-loving person on the other side of it...even stronger than you were prior to this abandonment wound." - Michelle Chalfant

"The kind of self-love that we're developing is deeper, more mature self-love...the kind of love you give yourself because you respect yourself so much." - Susan Anderson

"We have to stop looking outside of self and turn our attention inward. That's where healing, that's where love, that's where hope, that's where peace, that's where all the things are that we're looking for outside of ourselves." - Michelle Chalfant

"When the adult gets strong and is in command, it limits all of this self-sabotage." - Susan Anderson

LINKS & RESOURCES

Susan Anderson Website

https://www.abandonment.net/

https://abandonmentrecovery.com

"The Journey from Abandonment to Healing" (Susan Anderson book)

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Abandonment-Healing-Surviving-Recovering/dp/0425273539

Green Chef

https://www.greenchef.com/adult50

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