Why You Give Your Power Away, and How to Take It Back

Somebody is standing in a doorway. The room is full, the conversation is moving along, and then one person shifts their weight in that frame and the whole room tightens. You may not notice the moment you start leaning toward them. Your attention leaves your own body, lands on their face, their mood, the question of what they're thinking about you, and stays there. That is the image that opens a long conversation on The Adult Chair Podcast, where host Michelle Chalfant sits down with teacher Sue Morter to talk about bioenergetics, emotional triggers, nervous system patterns and what it means to bring attention back to yourself. Morter, who spent twenty years in clinical practice before becoming a teacher, argues that the most reliable way to stay stuck is to keep searching for what is wrong, and that triggers hit so hard because we have handed our center to the people and circumstances around us.

What happens when someone in the doorway takes your power?

The most useful thing about the episode is how it reframes a trigger. Most of us experience a trigger as something that happens to us: a partner's tone, a boss's email, a sibling's comment at the holiday table. Morter's framing moves the event from the other person to the one who is reacting. Early in the conversation she puts it plainly: "You don't even know you're doing it, but you're giving them your power." The person in the doorway has not taken anything. Your attention has gone out to meet them, and in that transfer, your sense of safety is now located somewhere outside you.

Her remedy is equally direct. Keep looking at the person in the doorway and you will keep feeling the pull. But "call that right back home," she says, and "you're going to feel very differently." The advice sounds simple. The episode's larger argument is that it is hard to do because our habits of attention were built long before we had words for them.

Who is the teacher behind this framework?

Morter's own story is part of why the conversation carries weight. She describes herself, without much polish, as a child who was terrified of the world. "I would cry if an adult would talk to me," she tells Chalfant. She hid in her room, slept on the floor of her closet, and struggled with life in general. Decades later she is speaking to audiences in what she describes as 140 countries, and she presents that arc as evidence of what a change in inner orientation can do.

The turning point, as she tells it, came through her clinical work. She was practicing in a results-based clinic that taught people to work with healing on every level, and she was getting migraines herself. She had read research suggesting meditation helped migraines, and she noticed she was missing a day or two a week. So she began to meditate. In her telling, the result was immediate: "I instantly started having transcendental multi-dimensional experiences just like that, and it changed my life forever." (The episode opens with her account at 2:04 and her migraine story at 3:11.) Whatever one makes of the language of "transcendental" experience, the through-line is practical. Her interest in energy was born from a body that wasn't working and a practice that changed it.

What does bioenergetics actually mean?

Morter's definition begins with a claim about matter. "Modern science is showing us that everything is energy," she says in the episode. "Even the physical matter in our lives is just compressed energy." The chair you're sitting in is energy in solid form. Your body is energy compressed into physiology. Thoughts are energy too, only less compressed. From that starting point, bioenergetics is simply "the energy as it relates to the body": bio for body, energetics for the energy that flows through it.

She describes a pattern of energy flow that is healing and rejuvenating, the flow that builds, sustains, detoxifies and cleanses. When that flow is blocked, distorted or suppressed, the consequences show up in the body and mind together. "We stop digesting properly. We stop thinking properly," she says. Anxiety, depression and exhaustion, in her framework, are not separate problems but downstream effects of energy that isn't moving the way it was designed to move. This is where the episode connects bioenergetics to the mind-body relationship and to consciousness, treating the body not as a machine to fix but as an expression of how attention and energy are organized.

Why does looking for what's wrong keep you stuck?

This is the central paradox of the conversation, and it is the one most likely to change how a listener approaches their own bad days. Morter's claim is blunt: "The number one way to block the energy is to go looking for the blockages." Our instinct when something feels off is to diagnose it, to scan for the problem, to ask what is wrong with us. The episode argues that this scanning is itself the interruption.

"When we look for what's wrong, we're starting to route the energy differently than it's designed. Because if we're to look for what's right and we enhance that, we will heal whatever the blockage was in the first place." (Sue Morter, The Adult Chair Podcast, around 7:54)

It is a reversal of a deeply familiar self-improvement logic. The usual model says you find the flaw, then you fix it. Morter's model says the attention you spend hunting for the flaw is the very thing routing energy away from where healing happens. Enhance what is working, return to what is right, and the blockage tends to resolve on its own terms. This is not an argument for ignoring symptoms. It is an argument about where your attention is when you try to help yourself.

Why do pessimism and worst-case thinking feel like protection?

The episode description lists a set of patterns that the conversation takes seriously: pessimism, sarcasm and worst-case-scenario thinking, which Morter's framework treats as forms of protection rather than character flaws. Its opening moments model a different response to these inner voices. Rather than fighting the pessimist, the speaker turns toward it with something close to tenderness: "Love the part of you that's being pessimistic right now. My god, I see you trying to protect me."

That gesture matters because it changes the question. If pessimism is a guard posted by a part of you that learned, somewhere, that expecting the worst kept you safe, then arguing with it only escalates the vigilance. Acknowledging the protective intent gives the part a job that has already been done. The episode frames this as a way of coming home to yourself rather than stepping out of your body to manage your reactions from a distance. In a trigger, the pessimistic voice is often the first sign that your attention has already left for the doorway.

Is bringing attention back to yourself selfish?

Many people hear "focus on yourself" and worry they are being asked to stop caring about others. The episode anticipates that objection. In the exchange that opens the conversation, the response is clear: "It isn't selfish. It's being personally responsible." The distinction is important. Selfishness, in this framing, would be taking energy from others. Personal responsibility means refusing to hand your own energy to someone who has not asked for it and does not need to be managed in your head.

There is a practical consequence. A person who keeps asking "Do they like me?" and "What are they thinking about me?" is reading the other person as the source of their emotional state. A person who returns attention home is still paying attention to the other person, but from a stable center rather than a leaking one. Relationships, on this view, tend to go better when both people are located in themselves.

Why isn't positive thinking enough on its own?

The episode also takes up the question of why positive thinking alone isn't always the answer, and this is where Morter's logic is most distinctive. If the problem is where attention is located, then a stream of cheerful affirmations can still be aimed outward, still seeking reassurance from the room, still checking the doorway to see whether the affirmation is working. Positivity pointed at the other person's approval is still a transfer of power. The alternative the conversation points toward is less about replacing one thought with a better one and more about relocating the attention that is producing the thoughts in the first place.

What does coming home actually feel like?

Morter is specific about the experience of returning. In the segment around 37:24, she describes the moment of arriving back in oneself through sensation: you feel held, you feel seen, and the room that felt threatening starts to feel like a room again. Earlier in the conversation she describes gathering attention back toward the body and letting it settle there. It is not a dramatic transformation. It is a shift in where your awareness rests, repeated until it becomes a default.

For listeners who want to test this, the simplest practice is the one the episode returns to: when you notice you are fixed on someone, notice the fixation, then deliberately bring your attention back to your own body and to what is working. The host also points listeners to a free trigger toolkit linked in the episode description, which includes journaling prompts and steps for returning to center in difficult moments. The toolkit is the host's own resource rather than part of Morter's teaching, but it is built on the same premise: you cannot stop reacting from a place you have left.

Where to go from here

The episode runs about seventy minutes, and the transcript covers far more ground than a single article can hold, including childhood programming, unconscious beliefs and the nervous system patterns that make a trigger feel like an emergency. If the ideas here are useful, the full conversation is worth watching in order, because Morter's framework builds: the doorway image leads to the question of blockage, the question of blockage leads to protection, and protection leads back to personal responsibility. Start with one moment this week. The next time someone in the doorway pulls your attention, notice where you went, and then ask what it would feel like to call that attention home.