Compassionate Inquiry – CI is a somatic psychotherapeutic approach developed over the years by dr. Gabor Mate. It is a modality developed to help people with mental health issues, issues of self-esteem, traumatic experience, addiction, physical illnesses, any kind of major life challenges, and also as a way of just helping people get to know themselves.
The underlying assumption of CI is, that underneath all our difficulties in life, there are some unresolved issues. Many of these issues stem from unmetabolized childhood experiences, from trauma of one kind or another. When it is happening, we develop coping mechanisms to deal with, but the same coping mechanisms then get in our way to the Authentic Self in adult life.
In CI the client is approached with compassion and acceptance. The therapist starts with the Inquiry Part, asking non-judgmental questions designed to uncover that, which in ourselves we are not aware of. The first core assumption here is, that all these coping mechanisms and difficulties have some reasons, but they are not our fault. Nobody is to be blamed. They are to be understood compassionately, accepted for what they are, and looked at with genuine curiosity.
CI is a somatic psychotherapeutic approach that allows the suppressed emotions to be expressed. It allows the client to recognize the limiting beliefs or the delusional beliefs that they have been caring and internalized since childhood and transform those beliefs through awareness and through the connection to the practitioner, themselves and the present moment. Then they can discover or move into a new possibility, new ways of being.
The purpose of Compassionate Inquiry is to drill down to the core stories people tell themselves – to get them to see the stories they are telling themselves unconsciously; what those beliefs are, where they came from; and guide them to the possibility of letting go of those stories, or letting go of the hold those stories have on them …That’s what Compassionate Inquiry is. Dr. Gabor Maté
