About Marina Gearhart, LMHC, R-DMT
Marina received her bachelor’s degree at Connecticut College in dance and psychology. Though battling with a hip injury, she was given the opportunity to co-lead a program called Dance with Parkinson’s, which brought her to my love of using movement as a healing art.
After graduating from Conn, Marina worked in Sports Medicine Research for three years studying injury prevention, body satisfaction, quality of life, performance perception, and movement mechanics in dancers at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). During graduate school at Lesley University, she worked as a group therapy intern at an intensive outpatient eating disorder clinic as well as worked as an intern at McLean Hospital in the OCD Institute. While in grad school, she worked as the Program & Research Coordinator for Boston Children’s Hospital outpatient eating disorder clinic. For about three years, she has worked as the lead therapist for local residential eating disorder facility. Today, she is part of the outpatient practice, Flourish Therapy Center.
Through school, internships, research, and work, she has always observed movement and looked for mind-body connections.
As a result of this witnessing, she developed a workshop called Body Language. This workshop was designed using research-based psychoeducation to help trainers, instructors of movement and movers learn about identifying mental health needs and how to use motivating language in workout classes that have an awareness of the implications of diet culture on body image without shame. It is her goal to bring awareness to the whole self in our everyday spaces.
In each role she has held, she has worked to combine her interests in movement and mental health. Her work seeks to understand the multiple etiologies of negative body image, the various manifestations of trauma in the body and exploring eating disorders through a clinical and research lens.