What is Compassionate Inquiry?
Compassionate Inquiry® is a therapeutic method developed by Dr. Gabor Maté over several decades of working with trauma, addiction, and chronic illness. At its heart, it is a way of turning toward yourself — gently, honestly, and without judgment — to understand why you feel what you feel, and why you do what you do.
It is one of the primary methods I use in my online grief and trauma sessions. And it is, without question, the most transformative work I have ever encountered — both as a client and as a practitioner.
How does Compassionate Inquiry work?
Most of us move through life managing our emotions rather than feeling them. We develop patterns — people-pleasing, shutting down, staying busy, numbing out — that once kept us safe but now keep us stuck.
Compassionate Inquiry gently explores what lies beneath those patterns. Not by analysing them from a distance, but by dropping into the body, into sensation, into the moment where the feeling actually lives.
In a session, we might explore:
- A belief you formed about yourself in childhood — I am too much. I am not enough. I am not safe.
- A pattern that keeps repeating in your relationships or your life
- A grief that has never had space to be felt
- A part of you that shut down long ago and is still waiting to be heard
We don’t try to fix these parts. We listen to them. And something shifts when that happens — not because I did something to you, but because you finally met yourself.
Compassionate Inquiry for grief and loss
Grief is one of the places where Compassionate Inquiry goes deepest.
Not just the grief of losing someone — but the grief of a childhood that wasn’t safe, a self that went into hiding, a life that passed while you were surviving. The losses that have no name, no funeral, no one checking in after two weeks.
These are the griefs that live in the body long after the mind has tried to move on. The tightness in the chest. The heaviness that won’t lift. The tears that come out of nowhere — or the ones that never come at all.
Compassionate Inquiry creates a space where all of it is welcome. Where grief doesn’t have to be performed or justified or managed. Where it can simply be felt, at last, by someone who is not afraid of it.
Compassionate Inquiry for trauma and CPTSD
Trauma is not what happened to you. It is what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you.
Compassionate Inquiry works directly with the nervous system — with the body states, the implicit memories, the survival responses that were formed long before you had words for any of it. It doesn’t ask you to retell your story over and over. It asks: what are you feeling right now, in your body, as we speak?
This is particularly powerful for complex trauma and CPTSD — where the wounds are not from a single event but from years of living in an environment that wasn’t safe, wasn’t attuned, or simply didn’t see you.
In this work, you don’t have to hold it together. You don’t have to explain yourself. You just have to show up.
Online Compassionate Inquiry sessions
I offer Compassionate Inquiry online via Zoom, working with clients globally. Online sessions are just as deep and just as held as in-person work — many clients find the privacy and comfort of their own space actually allows them to go further.
Sessions are available on a sliding scale for those who need it. There is no prescribed frequency or pace — we go at the rhythm that is right for you.
I work with people navigating:
- Grief and bereavement
- Complex trauma and CPTSD
- Anxiety and emotional overwhelm
- Relationship patterns and attachment wounds
- Life transitions and identity shifts
- The quiet sense that something in you has never been fully lived
Why I work with Compassionate Inquiry
I didn’t come to this method through a textbook. I came to it through my own healing.
I have sat where you are sitting. I know what it is to carry grief that has no name, to live in patterns you can’t seem to shift, to feel things so deeply that the world tells you it’s a problem.
Compassionate Inquiry was the work that changed everything for me. Which is why it is at the centre of everything I offer.
I won’t rush you. I won’t pathologize you. I won’t tell you what you should be feeling or when you should be done.
I’ll just be there — until you can be there for yourself.
Compassionate Inquiry and Gabor Maté
Heal limiting core beliefs with Compassionate Inquiry
To heal, we must not only look at the past but learn to reconnect with ourselves in the present. Through Compassionate Inquiry, you can identify and heal the limiting core beliefs and coping mechanisms created in childhood. You’ll learn to recognise and reconnect with your authentic self — and understand the parts that became your personality but were never truly you.
This cultivates a new awareness — understanding your triggers, healing trauma, and breaking the stories that keep you looping in the same patterns. Compassion, self-love and embracing your authentic self ignite the way for true transformation and healing.
This work gets to the root of what’s blocking you from living the life you actually want.
I invite you to begin with a free 30-minute discovery call before we start working together.
