The Story of Chi for Two®
The development of Chi for Two® - The Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship has six inspiring chapters:
Chapter One: Trauma
Like most therapists, Dee Wagner—originator of Chi for Two—had a rich personal therapeutic journey. This journey led Dee to want to become a therapist. Sharing personal discoveries of strength and hope in the service of others’ healing creates awareness of the deep richness gained when we find the path to well-being.
When Dee was born, her father had his first psychotic episode. This meant that these “crazy” feelings were brewing in the family as Dee was forming in the womb.
In 1985, Dee had the first of two children—Stephen Wagner—a co-developer of the Chi for Two practices. This pregnancy came as Dee’s mother was dying of cancer.
The birth was a difficult cesarean section. However, Dee’s undergraduate degree was in theater with a focus on dance so Dee and Stephen maintained mindfulness of the trauma by dancing together, both around the house and in a dance concert called Thicker Than Water.
Dee and Stephen are on the left in this concert promo.
The expressive arts take people into deep healing places. When Stephen was 4, Dee and Stephen brought theatre games and body-awareness work to mothers and their children in shelters through a program called Arts for All.
Dee decided to get a master’s in counseling with training in dance/movement therapy, and to begin an eight year study in complex trauma. Trauma training helps therapists pay more attention to process than content.
Yoga teacher Caroline Gebhardt and massage therapist Mary Lou Davidson began to study trauma healing with Dee. Caroline, Mary Lou and Dee all began to recognize in very nuanced ways that there is a lot going on in the “dance” between a helping professional and client.
Meanwhile, Stephen was getting a BA in anthropology with a focus on alternative healing. His deep studies in the healing arts from many cultures helped us in our creation of Chi for Two. His sensitivity to these healing arts helped us to honor ancient practices, while anchoring the Chi for Two partner practices in the nervous system science that illuminates multigenerational trauma patterning.
Chapter Two: Relationship Dancing
Dee taught ballroom dance for many years. When Caroline got pregnant, Dee and Caroline began exploring how the dance between infant and parent is similar but different from romantic dances.
Photo ©2012 N Gebhardt
Touch is lovely in romantic dances, but essential with infant/parent.
The energetic dance of Call and Response is fun with lovers, but between parent and child it is an invitation to embodiment .
Feeling known by your lover is sweet, but as children, we are hungry to be witnessed—to call out, “Watch this!” or “Listen to this!”
Stephen and Dee drew upon their journey as offspring/parent to deepen the creation of the practices that help parents better dance with their offspring. Chi for Two creates a lens through which we can see that all body-based healing work offers a redo of the child development dances that pattern our nervous system functioning.
Caroline drew upon her mothering experiences with her three sons, creating M-Bodied: Mindful Movement as Mothering Medicine®. M-Bodied teaches the Chi for Two practices with a focus on Maternal Mental Health and healing for Disordered Eating.
M-Bodied invites mindfulness of the rich relational dances that foster Perinatal Health—health during our time in the womb and in the important transition from womb to swaddling. As we look through the Chi for Two lens, we see “Mother” as a verb describing a relational dance between infants and all caregivers back through the generations no matter their genitalia.
Chapter Three: The Practice of Push
In the late 90’s, Dee was working with a couple who argued frequently. Suddenly, Dee said, “You know, nothing you two are talking about seems important. I think you just need to wrestle.”
Dee invited the couple to face one another and press their palms together. They pushed and laughed. They did some alternate-handed push moves and laughed more. They stopped and rested, looking at Dee as if to say, “We have stumbled on a useful truth.” They learned to catch themselves verbally wrestling at home, and to switch to this palm-to-palm wrestling and see what happened. It helped.
Couples therapists have known for a long time that romantic dances trigger unfinished child/parent interactions. From the time of the Wrestling Couple on, Dee would always invite couples into some sort of palm-to-palm experience. This was the birth of the Chi for Two practice Push.
Photo©2021 J Cargile
Eventually, Dee started inviting individual clients to Push, saying, “When you push into what’s not you, you find you.” And, “Can you feel your arms…your core even? If you Push hard enough, you may feel your feet pushing into the floor.”
Chapter Four: Polyvagal Theory
Dee discovered scientist Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory of nervous system functioning. Polyvagal Theory helps us identify an active state that is not fueled by Fight/Flight. Porges calls this state Play/Dance.
As a massage therapist, Mary Lou began picturing how to bring this important information to bodyworkers. She began to recognize how polyvagal theory could help bridge the work of psychotherapists and bodyworkers, brainstorming with Dee about possibilities.
Photo © 2021 Bob Mahoney
From a dance/movement therapy perspective, Dee began to sense that clients lying on tables seeking a therapeutic experience—change—might stir distant body memories of infant/parent interactions that occurred during diapering and dressing on changing tables.
Mary Lou began to envision helping bodyworkers become mindful of these powerful possibilities within the client/therapist relationship. She felt a wish to offer bodyworkers a deeper understanding of what psychotherapists refer to as transference and countertransference—ways the client/therapist relationship mirrors the infant/parent relationship.
Out of these explorations, Mary Lou and Dee created training for bodyworkers and all helping professionals working with clients’ psychosomatic pain. The training is called Who’s on the Table? Using nervous system science and attachment theory to recognize trauma and mindfully manage transference and countertransference.
Chapter Five: Online Dating Dances
Dee met John Cargile—now Dee’s husband. John is a long-time yoga enthusiast and Dee and John did a lot of yoga classes side by side.
Because they met online, they teamed up with Kathy Jernigan to write a workbook that helps online daters use the experience of romantic dating dances to shift the way they live in their bodies: Naked Online: A DoZen Ways to Grow from Internet Dating.
Photo ©2021 Dee Wagner
John is an artist and designer—creator of all the Chi for Two® drawings. Dee originated the concept for the drawing that we call the Chi for Two® “Map” of nervous system functioning.
John and Dee opened an expressive arts studio in Atlanta, Georgia USA called Harbor of Dreams Art. Much of the coaching and counseling work is done virtually, making Chi for Two training available for people around the world.
Chapter Six: Chi for Two Embodiment Coach Training Program
Back when Stephen was 5, Dee wrote a children’s book called Mabry. Recently Stephen and Dee recognized how this children’s book foreshadowed the first Chi for Two practice—Star.
Mindful movement became Stephen’s profession. He has taught yoga, meditation and martial arts off and on over many years. It was when he became a tai chi teacher, that Dee approached him and invited him to develop Chi for Two® with her.
Photo©2021 J Cargile
Before COVID, Stephen was invited to create Chi for Two classes in a school for kids on the sensitivity spectrum. In doing this, he helped to clarify the final version of many of the partner practices.
During the shelter-in-place of COVID, Dee and Stephen—with the help of Caroline, Mary Lou and John—developed the two-year Chi for Two Embodiment Coach training program.
We invite you to join us.
illustration by J Cargile
This is the story of the creation and development of Chi for Two® - The Energetic Dance of Healthy Relationship. As you read this story, you are joining us.
We hope you will explore some of the partner practices by doing a coaching session or a professional training.
Perhaps you’d like to become a certified Chi for Two® embodiment coach. As we say in our Chi for Two® training programs, “Let’s push into each other and develop our Social Engagement systems.”
Learn a little more about how Chi for Two helps us embody polyvagal theory at Polyvagal 101.