Relationship

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 14 – The Adult Chair


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The Adult Chair, the Adolescent Chair and the Child’s Chair

The Adult Chair by Michelle Chalfant is a practical framework for emotional maturity, self-awareness, and healing old patterns that unconsciously drive adult behavior. The central premise is that most people move through life reacting not from their grounded adult self, but from unresolved emotional states formed during childhood and adolescence. She organizes this idea into what she calls the “three chairs”: the Child Chair, the Adolescent Chair, and the Adult Chair.

The Child Chair represents the emotional self formed in early childhood. This is the place of vulnerability, fear, shame, abandonment, loneliness, and unmet needs. When people react from this chair, they often feel helpless, emotionally flooded, overly dependent on validation, or afraid of rejection. Many adult relationship conflicts, according to Chalfant, are actually wounded children (in adult bodies) interacting with each other while wearing grown-up clothing and carrying iPhones. Same child like nervous system. Better accessories. Think of the statement: lipstick on a pig, you cannot dress up dysfunction and make it disappear.

The Adolescent Chair reflects the defensive coping strategies people develop to protect the wounded child. This includes control, perfectionism, blame, avoidance, rebellion, people-pleasing, passive aggression, and emotional shutdown. The adolescent self seeks power and protection but often creates disconnection and conflict. Chalfant argues that many high-achieving adults unknowingly operate from this chair, appearing successful externally while internally driven by fear, insecurity, or the need for approval.

The Adult Chair is the goal….

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #112: Mona Delahooke, PhD – Beyond Behaviors


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Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we welcome one of the most important voices in modern child development and behavioral science, Mona Delahooke.

Dr. Delahooke is a licensed clinical psychologist, internationally recognized speaker, and the author of groundbreaking books including Beyond Behaviors and Brain-Body Parenting. Her work challenges one of the deepest assumptions in modern parenting and education: that difficult behaviors are simply choices to be corrected. Instead, she invites us to ask a radically different question, what is the nervous system trying to communicate?

This conversation sits right at the crossroads of neuroscience, attachment theory, polyvagal theory, developmental psychology, and the lived experience of parenting. In many ways, Mona’s work gives language to something clinicians and parents often feel intuitively but struggle to articulate: behavior is not merely compliance or defiance, behavior is biology expressed through the body.

We explore how stress physiology, early attachment, sensory processing, trauma, neurodivergence, and autonomic nervous system states shape the way children interact with the world around them. We discuss why punishment-based models often fail vulnerable children, how “bad behavior” may actually represent adaptive survival responses, and why safety and connection are foundational to learning, resilience, and emotional regulation.

For me personally, this conversation resonates deeply with the broader themes we often discuss on this podcast, the interaction between environment, physiology, immune health, metabolism, and neurodevelopment. Mona helps bridge the gap between cellular stress and relational stress, between body and mind, between physiology and behavior.

If you’ve ever cared for a child with anxiety, ADHD, autism, sensory challenges, explosive behavior, school struggles, or chronic dysregulation, this episode offers both compassion and a fundamentally different framework. One that moves away from blame and toward curiosity. Away from control and toward connection.

This is a conversation about seeing children more clearly. And perhaps, seeing ourselves more clearly too.

Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Mona Delahooke.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #111: Duey Freeman, MA – Attachment


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Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First. Today’s conversation moves into one of the deepest layers of human development: attachment, relationship, and the way early experiences shape the architecture of our emotional lives.

My guest today is Duey Freeman, a licensed therapist, teacher, mentor, and internationally respected voice in attachment theory, human development, and relational psychology. Duey has spent decades teaching therapists, graduate students, and helping professionals around the world, developing a practical framework for understanding how connection, or the absence of it, shapes the nervous system, identity, and the capacity for intimacy.

He has logged nearly 80,000 direct clinical hours and co-founded both the Gestalt Equine Institute and the Gestalt Institute of the Rockies.

What makes Duey’s work unique, and it is unique, is that he does not approach attachment as a sterile academic theory. He approaches it as lived human experience. His work centers on a simple but profound truth: what is injured in relationship is often only healed in relationship.

In this episode, we explore how attachment patterns emerge in childhood, how they quietly shape adult relationships, parenting, stress physiology, and even our sense of safety in the world. We discuss the roots of attachment theory through the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and we move into modern concepts involving trauma, nervous system regulation, emotional attunement, and relational repair.

We also touch on an uncomfortable reality in modern culture: many people are surrounded by communication yet starving for authentic connection. Children especially do not simply need instruction or behavioral management. They need co-regulation, attunement, eye contact, emotional presence, and secure relational anchors.

This conversation is not just for therapists. It is for parents, physicians, educators, coaches, and anyone trying to understand why humans behave the way they do under stress, conflict, intimacy, or loss.

Duey brings an unusual combination of wisdom, groundedness, tenderness, and clinical depth to this discussion. I have heard him frequently called Yoda, and if you knew him, you would immediately understand and agree with that moniker. You can feel that he has spent a lifetime studying not just psychology, but people.

So sit back and enjoy this remarkable conversation with Duey Freeman on attachment, psychology, and the relational foundations of being human.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #110: F3 Nation and Fatherhood


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Welcome to Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast. Today’s conversation is a little different.

Six men. One table. No scripts.

Just a shared commitment to something that doesn’t come with a manual—fatherhood.

We’re talking about what it means to show up as a dad when you’re tired, when you’re stretched thin, and when the stakes feel higher than anything else you do.

And we’re grounding that conversation in the ethos of F3 Nation—fitness, fellowship, and faith—where men gather early, push each other physically, and, more importantly, build something deeper: accountability, purpose, and community.
Because strong fathers don’t happen by accident. They’re forged—day by day, rep by rep, conversation by conversation.

Let’s get into it.
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #108: Halie Hauser – Storytime

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On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Halie Hauser, a pediatric clinician, storyteller, and quiet architect of early childhood connection.

Halie is the creator of Storytime Explorers, a storytelling platform designed for toddlers and preschoolers that sits at the intersection of language, emotion, and human development. With a Doctor of Nursing Practice focused on pediatric primary care, she brings both clinical depth and creative intuition to the way she reaches children—and just as importantly, their parents.
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Her work lives in the small moments: friendship struggles, big feelings, daily routines, the courage to try again. The ordinary terrain of childhood—where, if we’re paying attention, the most important wiring is happening.

Halie understands something we often forget in modern pediatrics: before a child can regulate, they must feel safe; before they can learn, they must feel connected; and before they can speak, they must be spoken to in a language that meets them where they are.

Through storytelling, she’s building that bridge.

This is a conversation about early brain development, emotional scaffolding, the power of narrative in shaping behavior—and how something as simple as a story can become a tool for resilience, attachment, and lifelong learning.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 5 – Relationship Balance


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Finding Relational Balance


Relational balance falters when one person needs the other to feel safe or whole. A parent in a strained marriage or carrying childhood wounds may lean on a child for comfort. The child, loyal and loving, tries to meet that need. Over time, this can harden into dysfunction.

Years ago, I cared for a mother and son locked in a budding enmeshed relationship. She could not draw boundaries. She absorbed his pain, projected her own trauma onto him, and smothered him with anxious love and control. She tightly managed his world yet set no limits on how he treated her or others. By four, he was out of control. She was exhausted and indignant, insisting he was sweet while enabling every behavior. Her fear of becoming her own restrictive parents left him both fused to her and furious. Therapy was suggested. It was rejected….

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 4 – Relationships

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Literature Review:

A) “Establishment of the gut microbiome during early life is a complex process with lasting implications for an individual’s health. Several factors influence microbial assembly; however, breast-feeding is recognized as one of the most influential drivers of gut microbiome composition during infancy, with potential implications for function. Differences in gut microbial communities between breast-fed and formula-fed infants have been consistently observed and are hypothesized to partially mediate the relationships between breast-feeding and decreased risk for numerous communicable and noncommunicable diseases in early life. Despite decades of research on the gut microbiome of breast-fed infants, there are large scientific gaps in understanding how human milk has evolved to support microbial and immune development.” (Davis et. al. 2022)

Main Takeaways:

First 1000 days matter a lot for microbial and immune development: Infancy is a critical window when the gut microbiome is assembled and the immune system is learning to respond to microbes and external exposures. Patterns set early can ripple into infection risk, inflammatory diseases, and atopy later in life.

Enjoy,
Dr. M

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