As the children break up for the summer I invite you to all have some fun! Take a seat and use your DNA.
Let me explain – there are two main approaches that I refer to in most of my work with teenagers and adults. The Adult Chair Model, by Michelle Chalfant and the ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Training) coaching therapy model. I think that these two combined when working with families is especially useful, and particularly at this potentially stressful time of change – the school holidays!
School holidays bring all kinds of new stressors, especially around expectations. The children are expecting activities every day and freedom. Parents are now balancing paid work with child supervision and if they can take annual leave, not unsurprisingly their expectation may be rest and restore.
I would like illustrate how combining the two approaches may actually enable most of us to live in the present moment a little more frequently, and as such increase the happiness factor!
The Adult Chair Model is an easy way for us to check out our parenting reactions to how our children are behaving at any one moment. When we are triggered by something it is a good idea to pause and reflect on our own sensations/emotions/feelings and just to check if we feel grounded and ‘adult’ or if we may have slipped into another chair. It is important not to judge these ‘chairs’ as good or bad, but instead to just realise that our thinking and therefore our behaviour may or may not be…
