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EMBODIED RELEASE
Compassionate Inquiry
Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach that supports the integration of childhood experiences. It also made me look at the world through trauma glasses.
I started my 1-year practitioner training at Compassionate Inquiry in February 2022. I remember working at the time primarily as a bodyworker and breathwork practitioner, and often encountering people getting in touch with emotional pain or stuck energies that were connected to memories and experiences from the past. It was intuitive to follow people in revisiting these experiences; at the same time, I was increasingly aware that I was missing tools and models to support them in that process. That led me to a training founded on Gabor Maté’s teachings on trauma and healing, which his collaborator, Sat Dharam, structured into a course.
I wish to share some reflections about this training, how it influenced my way of seeing reality, and how much — or how little — it comes across when I lead groups in Circling & Surrendered Leadership
People heal when they are met with compassion
If you go to the Compassionate Inquiry (CI) website, this is the statement you find on the front page: People heal when they are met with compassion. I find lots of resonance with that message. Images of memories show up for me — people releasing, opening, letting go, fundamentally because they were met with genuine compassion, openness and a non-judgemental attitude, embodied by another person or discovered within themselves.
Compassion, here meaning understanding, acceptance and kindness towards a wound, an addiction, a harmful behaviour. An attitude that allows for a certain softening. The inner world becomes less polarised; dialogue with inner parts becomes possible; integrating some of our pushed-down or suppressed aspects becomes more accessible. We can take a few more steps on the path towards wholeness.
But how to develop that compassion towards oneself and others? Within the CI model, the fundamental pointer is to recognise that whatever we are struggling with originates in our childhood, was never our fault, and can be approached with the same resources of tenderness with which we approach a child needing care.
Gabor’s method and life
Gabor is very public and generous in sharing his personal story of being a Jewish infant and child in Nazi-occupied Budapest during the Second World War. Stories that he came to know only from his mother’s recollections and her diaries: that she had to leave him as an infant in the care of a stranger for many weeks at a time, fearing that otherwise he would be found and killed. Losing most of his family members in concentration camps.
His mother writing in her notebooks about the parental approaches that were standard back then — letting him cry until he stopped, to train his character. Or feeding him, when he was a few months old, only at set times rather than when he was hungry, to establish better sleep routines. Gabor shares openly how he found himself, as an adult, in the grip of addictions, a sense of depression and alienation, and outbursts of anger towards his family. At the same time he was working as a GP in Canada and gaining a lot of insight into his patients, and into how their symptoms were actually reflections of wounds from the past. Over time, as he connected more and more dots and deepened his own healing journey, the core of his approach to working with trauma emerged.
What I find interesting in this story is that Gabor seems to have a really strong imprint of a traumatic upbringing from the very early stages — which, according to multiple studies and approaches, e.g. NARM, is the most difficult kind to really heal. In that light, it really makes sense to me that a big part of Gabor’s life work seems to be about trauma and its manifestations (books on addiction, ADHD, parenting, The Myth of Normal…).
I have often heard Gabor say, explicitly or implicitly — and frankly, Compassionate Inquiry is modelled this way — that EVERY wound can be connected to developmental trauma, even one that is associated with a specific event, namely a shock trauma. Developmental trauma means an imprint we received as developing children that created some degree of disconnection from our true nature, a suppression of our genuine responses, emotions, or impulses. That suppression and disconnection is what we carry, and to cope with the pain we develop various strategies and adaptations that later become parts of our personality and identity.
The core of CI
What for me is at the core of CI is linking any disturbance we experience back to its origins in the past. It is done by first evoking the somatic-emotional-mental atmosphere related to a challenging experience and staying present to it, coming closer to the felt sense and recognising the layers of sensation (somatic), emotion, and belief/perception (mental). Once we arrive in that triangular awareness, the guiding question for a client is:
‘When was the first time you felt this way?’
Or
‘How old is the part of you that’s having that experience?’
Why would we ask those questions?
This is where the compassion part comes in. As we come to the realisation that the places in our psyche that are in some form of suffering are actually young, hurt children — children who were met with a lack of attunement, abused, neglected, or lonely in their pain — something often softens. Why? Well, I think partly because we externalise that pain, see it as a child, and get some distance from it, which allows us to start relating to it instead of being captured by it. And partly it is because many of us intuitively see children as innocent, harmless, and deserving of care and nurturing; and once we see that we did not get it, and that this later developed into a certain wound with coping strategies on top, we can often connect to more compassion and acceptance.
This is the Compassionate Inquiry method in a nutshell, and as I see it, it trains practitioners to effectively guide clients into their unintegrated childhood material, and to develop a compassionate, accepting relationship with their young parts, while staying embodied and connected to the present moment (the somatic and emotional layers).
This approach gave me a lot in my work with clients, and it felt as if I had gained a framework, something to navigate with, when exploring these wounds with others. The processes were beginning to feel more rounded, more complete in their form, and I think easier to integrate after sessions.
The trauma glasses
I remember Gabor sharing that one of his therapist friends told him: ‘Gabor, do you know that you don’t have to carry your trauma everywhere?’ This quote stayed with me personally, and it does point to a certain… quality of working within the CI model.
As time passed and I stayed within the CI world — doing a mentorship, certification, and internship — I began to feel less and less stimulated by this therapeutic container. On the one hand, it appears to be true that each wound can be linked to some non-optimal or abusive experience from the past. On the other hand, approaching everything through that lens seems to flatten reality for me.
In a way, I was in a discovery process with clients about the origins of their wounds; and yet that discovery did have a certain agenda. With time, I started to crave letting things be more open-ended. Where does the inquiry actually want to take us? Where does the client actually want to go?
Maybe we stay more in touch with the present-time realities of the subject someone is bringing. Maybe spiritual experiences emerge. Or maybe the process becomes primarily energetic and subtle. Or maybe what becomes more alive is the nature of the relationship between me and a client, and how attachment or relating patterns reveal themselves in our shared presence. Or maybe reality surprises us and brings us into unknown territories!
Compassionate Inquiry and relating practices
I think it is really helpful to have a chance to address our wounds through the lens of what happened in the past, and to grow a compassionate relationship with our young parts and with how they take the lead in our lives at times. At the same time — and I actually remember this being expressed by Gabor at some point — he discourages people from doing this work with their relatives or friends.
I think going into developmental trauma work requires a certain therapeutic agreement, or at least an awareness of the specificity of being held in such an exploration. It becomes less about me relating to You, and more about me creating a container for you to integrate something delicate, tender, and suppressed. It can be beautiful; I believe it is needed, and I am grateful to those who could be with me there. And most of the time I want to be related to as an adult, seen in my wholeness, in peer-to-peer connection. CI-type explorations require a specific container, and life, with all its complexity and emergence, does not necessarily match it.
In a way, going through the CI education changed the way I look at myself and at others experiencing various forms of suffering. It became automatic and deeply ingrained to make a connection with the past and with upbringing. At the same time, most of the time in my life it is not my role to invite people into revisiting those experiences. Nor do I want such a role in most of my relationships. So although the origins of a certain behaviour can lie in the past, the question remains:
How do I actually feel right now about someone being who they are?
How do I relate to it and engage with it?
These relational explorations offer their own complexity and discovery, which for me ends up being more stimulating than the developmental trauma lens, while I am certainly grateful for what CI added to my work, life, and awareness.
More resources
Compassionate Inquiry online trainings:
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1-year training program https://compassionateinquiry.com/online-training/
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Self-study short course foundations https://compassionateinquiry.com/short-course/