What is Compassionate Inquiry?

In my practice, I work exclusively with Compassionate Inquiry.

CI is a therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Gabor Maté. He is a physician and author with broad experience in general practice, palliative care, and addiction treatment. Trauma played an important role in his own life, and he became convinced that our response to trauma, rather than trauma itself, causes problems. Over time he developed his own approach to help people bothered by dysfunctional responses. It has become an effective search for how and why certain events in childhood still affects adult life.

The key to the CI approach is the ability to help individuals identify the core of a specific problem by questioning and probing into bodily sensations and emotions. This process helps the person to acknowledge feelings associated with childhood events that were incomprehensible and overwhelming to the child and have led to the development of survival mechanisms. These include negative beliefs about oneself which were developed as a child to explain what happened to him/her. However, if this persists, it can cause problems in later life.

To transform negative beliefs, we look with compassion at the response of the child the individual once was. This can be a starting point for understanding and changing one’s dysfunctional responses.