This is part of a series of reflections by Paul Sinclair, one of the managing directors of Mind Matters. Drawing on his experience in high-pressure environments and his training with Dr Gabor Maté, Paul writes with unflinching honesty about the patterns he sees in his work with clients and in his own life. In this piece, he explores what Compassionate Inquiry is, how it works in the room, and what it is not.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are seeking medical guidance, please consult a licensed healthcare professional. Never change or stop prescribed medication without consulting your prescribing clinician.
Table Of Contents:
There is a question sitting underneath much of modern therapy, wearing a lanyard and behaving as though it owns the building:
What is wrong with this person?
Once that question takes charge, the person becomes a collection of symptoms. The symptoms become defects. Before long, somebody who has spent their entire life believing there is something fundamentally wrong with them is paying a professional to confirm it in more sophisticated language.
Compassionate Inquiry begins somewhere else.
Not what is wrong with you.
What happened to you?
Compassionate Inquiry is the psychotherapeutic approach Dr Gabor Maté built around that second question.
What did you experience that you couldn’t safely feel, express or understand? What did you conclude about yourself because of it? What have you been doing ever since to avoid feeling that powerless again?
I spent two and a half years training in Compassionate Inquiry with Dr Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam Kaur. The first year involved one hundred clients, one hundred case studies, hundreds of hours of observed practice and a relentless examination of my own internal machinery.
That part matters.
Before I could recognise a client’s defences, I had to recognise my own. Otherwise, your bullshit follows you into the therapy room, puts on a thoughtful expression and starts calling itself clinical intuition.
I then completed another fifty case studies and submitted recorded client sessions for formal review. People are rarely certified on their first submission.
I was.
That doesn’t mean I possess the sacred answer to everybody else’s life. It means the work was embodied, not merely memorised. Plenty of people can explain trauma beautifully until somebody’s anger makes them defensive or grief leaves them helpless.
Then the theory quietly escapes through the fire exit.
Compassionate Inquiry cannot be learnt as information alone. It has to change the practitioner.
Its premise is straightforward. Much of what we call dysfunction is adaptation.
I don’t look at anxiety, addiction, perfectionism, people pleasing, emotional shutdown or compulsive overworking and see faulty behaviour. I see intelligence operating under old information.
A child who couldn’t safely express anger learnt to swallow it. A child whose needs overwhelmed the adults learnt not to need anything. Affection earned through achievement taught another child to perform for connection.
Then they grow up, because apparently the passage of time is considered a treatment plan, and we rename what they learnt. Hypervigilance becomes anxiety. Self abandonment becomes people pleasing. Trying to become impossible to criticise becomes perfectionism. Emotional disconnection becomes independence. Never stopping becomes ambition. Anaesthetising pain becomes addiction.
The names change.
The original intelligence remains.
An adaptation can keep a child psychologically intact and dismantle the adult they become. The fact that it once protected them doesn’t mean it should keep running their life like an unelected government nobody remembers appointing.
But we cannot understand it while condemning it.
Shame already has an answer. You’re weak, selfish, lazy, damaged or fundamentally fucked. Case closed.
Curiosity reopens it.
Compassionate curiosity asks what happened, what was needed, what couldn’t be expressed and what the person came to believe. It must exist inside compassion, because nobody tells the truth where they expect punishment. They may produce immaculate psychological language and call it vulnerability, but they won’t look directly at what is there.
Compassion isn’t an expensive cuddle. It creates the conditions in which self deception is no longer necessary.
Without compassion, inquiry becomes interrogation.
Without inquiry, compassion becomes upholstery.
Compassionate Inquiry requires both.
How Compassionate Inquiry works
It begins with presence.
That sounds simple until somebody sits in front of you in deep pain. We want to reassure, advise, explain or make it stop. Their distress activates something in us, and the session quietly becomes organised around making the practitioner feel less helpless.
That isn’t attunement.
It is self regulation at the client’s expense.
My awareness moves in two directions at once. I watch the client while noticing myself. Am I impatient, rescuing or leading? Has something from my own history just arrived and started offering clinical opinions?
A qualification doesn’t remove our fears and defences. It may merely give us better language for disguising them. I may steer away from anger, avoid a risky question or fill silence with therapeutic noise.
This is why the practitioner’s own inner work sits at the centre of Compassionate Inquiry.
When I work online, I use a large screen because I am listening to the words and watching what happens around them.
The breath stops. The jaw tightens. The voice changes. A small laugh appears beside the pain, apparently employed to reassure everybody that none of this is getting too serious.
I am not treating every blink like evidence from a crime scene.
I am noticing change.
The client may say they feel nothing while their physiology submits a detailed written objection. I might ask what happened inside them or what the laugh was doing for them.
I don’t tell them what it means.
I could announce that somebody is angry with their mother, and I might even be right. I would also have replaced their experience with my conclusion. The work would now be occupied with my brilliance, which is rarely where healing lives.
The skill isn’t possessing the answer.
It is asking cleanly enough that the client can hear their own.
I never give people advice. Ever.
I don’t teach them how to live or what decision to make. Advice places me above the client as the person who knows. Compassionate Inquiry asks me to remain present without reaching for authority.
Most people have spent their lives being told to leave, forgive, establish boundaries, think positively and love themselves, which is especially useful when they have no fucking idea what love feels like without earning it.
The advice may be completely correct and psychologically useless.
The real question is why the sensible thing feels dangerous. Saying no may threaten attachment. Stopping an addiction may uncover the pain it regulated.
I don’t explain that to the client.
I ask carefully enough that they can discover it.
My own counterwill is Olympic standard. Anybody can make a reasonable suggestion that might improve my health, save me money and bring peace to several developing nations. The moment they say I should, must or need to do something, my immediate internal response is, “Fuck off.”
I don’t say it aloud. Usually.
But internally, autonomy has barricaded the doors.
Clients do the same thing, generally with better manners. Tell them to leave and their partner improves immediately. Tell them to stop drinking and alcohol develops medicinal properties. Mention boundaries and they continue saying yes until their body files a formal complaint.
Even compliance can deceive. A client may follow instructions because people pleasing is the adaptation that brought them into therapy.
The practitioner calls it progress.
The client has simply learnt to abandon themselves more therapeutically.
My role isn’t to lend them my will. It is to create enough safety and curiosity for them to encounter their own.
The past isn’t stored only as a story. It remains active in the body and relationship.
A client may describe an unavailable father, but the adaptation appears when they apologise for needing my attention. They may understand their mother was volatile, yet still monitor my face instead of their own body.
The past arrives as expectation.
I will be rejected. I am too much. My needs are dangerous. If I stop performing, nobody will stay.
These beliefs are formed before a child can understand the adults around them. It is psychologically safer to believe the fault lies within them.
If I am the problem, perhaps I can become quieter, cleverer, easier, more useful.
It is an ingenious conclusion.
It is also complete bollocks.
Compassionate Inquiry brings that conclusion into the present. The client notices the chest contract, the throat tighten, the heat, numbness or urge to disappear.
This isn’t about overwhelming somebody in the name of depth. Emotional flooding isn’t proof of therapeutic courage. It is perfectly possible to recreate helplessness while congratulating ourselves on healing it.
Grief can be felt without the client being abandoned inside it. Anger can exist without anybody being harmed. The no that once threatened attachment can finally be spoken.
I don’t manufacture the release.
I create the conditions in which they no longer have to hold everything in the same way.
What Compassionate Inquiry is not
It isn’t advice, endless analysis, sympathy, interrogation or emotional theatre.
Insight has become a middle class recreational drug. We consume books, podcasts, workshops and therapy, producing refined explanations while remaining largely untouched.
We know our attachment style and trauma response. We can explain precisely why we abandon ourselves and then continue doing it before lunch.
Compassionate Inquiry isn’t impressed merely because an explanation is accurate. It asks what is happening inside the person as they say it, and what emotion the explanation may be helping them avoid.
Knowledge can open the inquiry.
It cannot replace experience.
Compassion doesn’t mean reassuring clients that everybody else is terrible. That may feel supportive, but it leaves them powerless.
Responsibility isn’t blame.
Blame condemns the person for developing the pattern. Responsibility asks whether they still want it making their decisions.
A dramatic release proves nothing has integrated. Tears aren’t a receipt. Somebody can experience enormous catharsis and return with the same belief driving the same behaviour.
The question isn’t how impressive the session looked.
It is whether the person now has more choice.
Compassionate Inquiry isn’t a script either. You can ask where somebody feels an emotion in their body with all the warmth of airport security. The method isn’t contained in the words. It is in who is asking, why they are asking and whether they can remain present for the answer.
Where I stand in it
My training didn’t give me the correct interpretation of everybody else’s life.
It taught me to stop assuming I should have one.
I arrived with plenty of lived experience. Trauma, addiction and recovery were not academic subjects to me. I believed I knew my adaptations.
I knew the presentable ones.
The ones I could discuss without my body becoming involved.
Compassionate Inquiry showed me that we can be honest about our lives while remaining strangers to what they did inside us. We can recount trauma without touching fear and speak eloquently about our defences while using eloquence to defend ourselves.
A practitioner who hasn’t examined themselves can mistake judgement for discernment, anxiety for concern, control for guidance and personal opinion for clinical truth.
All of it can look therapeutic from the outside.
Relational work is learnt in relationship.
I experienced the difference between being analysed and being met, being directed and being trusted, and between needing an outcome and allowing truth to take its own shape.
That now sits underneath the way I work.
I don’t know the client’s truth. They may not consciously know it either, but it belongs to them.
My role is to listen, watch and ask skilfully enough that they can recognise it.
Then I stay while they look.
Not producing the perfect question. Not delivering a brilliant interpretation.
Staying.
Remaining emotionally available without invading, rescuing or teaching, or quietly asking them to hurry up because their pain is becoming inconvenient.
Compassionate Inquiry doesn’t give people a more flattering story.
It helps them see the story they have been unconsciously obeying.
What happened? What did you come to believe? What did that belief require you to become? What has it cost you? Now that you can see it with compassion rather than shame, do you still want it making your decisions?
I don’t answer that for the client.
Ever.
FAQ
What is Compassionate Inquiry?
Compassionate Inquiry is a psychotherapeutic approach developed by Dr Gabor Maté. Its starting point is that most chronic patterns, from anxiety to addiction, are adaptations rather than defects: intelligent responses to conditions that once made them necessary. The work is a present-moment, body-centred inquiry into what the pattern protects, what it believes, and what it now costs.
What happens in a Compassionate Inquiry session?
Less performance than most therapy and more presence. Rather than analysing your history, the practitioner tracks what happens in your body and your feeling as you tell it: the held breath, the tightened jaw, the belief underneath the story. The questions are small and precise. What are you feeling now. Where. What does it believe? The story is respected. The body is where the work happens.
Is Compassionate Inquiry a type of therapy?
It is a psychotherapeutic approach, practised by therapists, physicians and other trained practitioners, but it is not tied to one clinical tradition. Think of it less as a technique and more as a discipline of attention with a moral position built in: the person was never the problem, the adaptation made sense, and change begins with feeling what the adaptation was built to avoid.
How do you find a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner?
Certification runs through Dr Maté’s official Compassionate Inquiry organisation, which maintains a directory of practitioners who have completed the full multi-year training and supervision. Only a small group of practitioners has been personally certified worldwide, so check certification specifically: many people have taken a short course and borrowed the vocabulary. The training is the difference between speaking the language and having lived there.
Paul Sinclair
Paul Sinclair is Managing Director of Mind Matters and co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator. He is a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, one of a small group personally trained and certified by Dr Gabor Maté over two and a half years. He holds a 12-month psychedelic-assisted therapy certification through Vital and is a certified breathwork practitioner. His path to this work ran through Chelsea Academy as a footballer, a career-ending knee injury, service as a Royal Navy nuclear propulsion engineer on submarines during the Falklands War, Cold War reconnaissance work, international football for the Navy, a career as a lighting director (Glastonbury, UB40, Suzanne Vega), and several businesses of his own, underneath which ran thirty years of addiction, and the PTSD that is the lived ground of his work today.