Caroline Gebhardt, LPC, RYT, RSME/T, is a licensed professional counselor, certified Chi for Two® embodiment coach, registered yoga teacher, and Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist with ISMETA. She offers psychotherapy to Georgia-based clients and embodiment coaching and Somatic Movement Education/Therapy to clients worldwide.

Caroline helps clients to feel deeply nourished by exploring struggles with food, eating, drinking/substance, exercise and body-image journeys using a trauma-informed, depth-oriented, expressive arts approach. She also offers family therapy and parent/child therapy with experiential, relational, developmental, and nervous system-informed techniques.

Caroline draws upon a blend of body-based and cognitive therapies from an attachment-based, trauma-sensitive and polyvagal-informed framework as well as the trauma healing method Chi for Two, which she co-developed. As a movement educator for 20+ years and a mother of three, Caroline created M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine®, a Chi for Two early relational, body-based focus for deep nourishment.

Education/Training:

Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist — ISMETA, International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association

Chi for Two Embodiment Coach, Trainer & Co-Developer

M.S. Clinical Mental Health Counseling - Georgia State University - Atlanta, Georgia, USA

B.A., Major: Journalism, Cognate: Women's Studies and Theatre Speech - University of South Carolina - Columbia, SC

Specialized Trainings:

Body-Mind Centering®’s Embodying the Autonomic Nervous System

Postpartum Support International’s Advanced Perinatal Mental Health certificate

300+ hours of Yoga Alliance teacher trainings

Continuing education and self-studies: 

Kestenberg Movement Profile 

Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor

Peter Levine’s trauma studies

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory

Trauma-Sensitive Yoga

Basic Neurocellular Patterns - Bainbridge Cohen

The Birthing of M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine

Before becoming a professional counselor, Caroline created FLOW Training LLC, a service offering trauma-informed movement at treatment centers and for private clients struggling with disordered eating, avoidant or compulsive exercise, and addictions. During these years, Caroline experienced, studied and witnessed the importance of healthy attachment and relational embodiment practices as a path to help heal trauma. With appreciation of “mother” as a verb as well as the scientific understanding of the neuropeptide oxytocin (“the bonding hormone"), Caroline’s trauma-informed, experiential movement approach eventually birthed into M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine.

Caroline’s graduate studies while obtaining her Master’s in mental health counseling provided an emphasis on diversity, multiculturalism and social justice. With an understanding of multigenerational trauma and the implicit narratives stored in the body, she offered a trauma-informed somatic approach when she served as the therapeutic yoga leader at Walden Behavioral Care. Working in various levels of clinical care for eating disorders treatment — from partial hospitalization, to intensive outpatient, to outpatient care — deepened her understanding of the need for more trauma-informed approaches as a pathway for sustainable bodily functioning and relational nourishment.

M-Bodied offers relational, trauma-informed body-mind practices and invitational approaches including developmentally significant movement and shapes that look like yoga as paths to help re-pattern nervous system functioning and embody a fuller sense of self. The M-Bodied approach, as informed by the trauma healing method Chi for Two, helps clients to discharge stuck energy, unsustainable coping mechanisms, and maladaptive patterns—often inhibited developmental rhythms, movements and gestures—using one early relational movement expression at a time in an effort to expand one’s capacity for Social Engagement System functioning.

M-Bodied as an early relational Chi for Two focus

Several years ago, while Caroline experienced and studied the healing intersection of trauma and relational movement, she consulted and teamed up with Dee Wagner, LPC, BC-DMT, RSME and other body-based helping professionals to create Chi for Two® - The Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship.

Chi for Two is a multi-generational trauma healing method that is polyvagal-informed, trauma-sensitive and attachment-based and offers relational practices to explore better ways to manage traumatic events. These practices are for relationships with both power equality (romantic partners, siblings, colleagues) and built-in power differentials (child/parent, student/teacher, employee/employer). To learn more about the synthesis of Chi for Two and how it compares to other trauma healing methods, please explore more here.

M-Bodied offers specific Chi for Two relational practices designed to help re-pattern nervous system functioning, the deep nourishment involved in the early interactions—the important first tastes of connection and separation: match and mismatch—with our primary caregivers. These patterns are often passed down from generation to generation, so these M-Bodied practices and symbolic redos help to shift nervous system functioning, and therein physiological and developmental functioning, like creating a more rhythmic digestive pace, to help reclaim deeper literal and figurative hungers and healthy embodiment from the inside-out.