From Pain to Purpose: How DR. GAbor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry Is Helping People Heal

Throughout his years working as a medical doctor in Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, Dr. Gabor Mate treated a wide range of populations experiencing a variety of complex social and medical challenges such as extreme poverty, homelessness, addiction, mental illness and complex trauma. It was during his time working one on one with his clients that Dr. Mate organically began to create a framework for working with individuals, one that is inherently compassionate, curious, and based heavily in trauma-informed and body-based principles. 

Eventually called Compassionate Inquiry, Dr. Mate’s approach to psychotherapy is deeply rooted in attachment theory, nervous system awareness, safety, connection and is founded on an understanding that within each and every one of us there is a wise ‘inner healer’ that knows what needs to be tended to and held with love, respect and compassion.  

Throughout many years of working with numerous individuals on their addiction and mental health paths, Dr. Mate made the connection between early developmental experiences and the current patterns that he was witnessing in his clients’ lives. In order to understand these patterns better, he began asking them questions in a compassionate, non-judgemental way, highlighting how the patterns were often, if not always, rooted in early survival mechanisms. ‘Like wearing a snowsuit in the tropics’ – a common comparison that Dr. Mate uses in his trainings to describe adaptive strategies, once created from a place of survival, but no longer being needed and/or even causing greater difficulty in his clients’ present lives. 

The foundation of Compassionate Inquiry is grounded primarily in the relationship between the client and practitioner - one that removes the therapist from a place of ‘expert’ over the client’s experience and places the client in the driver’s seat, allowing their inner healer to guide the process while being held in compassionate, curious non-judgement.  

Together, client and practitioner work towards supporting the client to re-connect to the felt sense of the body, where memories, experiences and belief systems are often held. 

Dr. Mate’s approach differs from other mental health modalities in that it seeks not so much to change or eliminate symptoms, as much as it aims to understand, come into relationship and transform them from a place of compassion. ‘Symptoms’ are viewed as brilliant adaptations of the mind, body and nervous system.

A teacher in the past once described to me the difference between horizontal vs vertical approaches to mental health treatment. We can look at the thoughts that we’re having and view them as being distorted and needing to be changed (horizontal approach), or, we can explore more deeply, connect to our body’s felt sense and begin to understand why our systems adaptively created the belief systems that we’re holding in the first place. 

Compassionate Inquiry helps us to understand that we are not problems to be fixed, but brilliant, resilient, adaptive beings, infinitely capable of remembering our own essence, self-love and wholeness. 

To learn more about Gabor Mate, Compassionate Inquiry and its origin, visit www.compassionateinquiry.com.

Reilly Scott, Practicum Student Counsellor