Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner
This week I qualified as a Compassionate Inquiry (CI) Practitioner. I’m delighted. This psychotherapeutic approach developed by Dr Gabor Maté has changed my life. I started the training in February 2020, just before the first lockdown. Eighteen months later I’m living in a different country and my career has moved in a new direction. I feel like a different person. It was during one of our biweekly group meetings, whilst being a CI client in front of the group, that I uncovered a core belief that was at the root of my indecision about moving back to Ireland. The following week I resigned from work and began making plans to move home.
When I started the Compassionate Inquiry training, there was much about it that was familiar. The reading list, written case studies, small group work and the video recording of interactions with clients for assessment, were all elements I’d done before. I remember thinking ‘this seems fairly straight forward’. After all, I’d done a medical degree and a huge amount of postgraduate medical training. Learning is a lifelong process when you are a doctor so I felt confident.
I quickly realised however that this training was very different to anything I’d done before. What I was being asked to do, as well as become familiar with the qualities, skills and stepping stones of the approach, was to look at myself. Deeply. To dig down into my own behaviours, patterns, judgements, triggers and childhood experiences. To be with the sensations and emotions that arose within me. We were encouraged to develop our own daily spiritual practice, to seek out our own therapist and to become intimately acquainted with our inner worlds. What we were being trained to do was to be a clear mirror for our clients and to use our hearts, intuition and gut instincts as much as our cognition. We were encouraged to disclose some of our own story. This builds trust and safety and allows us to come alongside our clients, as fellow human beings on our own journey, rather than experts or fixers. I was learning to heal, rather than to fix or manage. I was learning to provide a container for the patients own healing process, rather than focusing on outcomes. I was learning that symptoms aren’t always problems to be fixed. They can also be viewed as signposts to something deeper, opportunities to heal old wounds and traumas. I was unlearning much of what I’d learnt in medical school.
Of course, fixing has a place. Tumours need removed; broken bones need repaired; and dangerously high blood sugars need controlled. But the majority of problems with which patients seek help from a GP are not life threatening, fixable problems. They are chronic conditions that develop over a lifetime with their roots in early childhood, in emotional dysregulation, stress and the mindbody. As a Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner, I now have the tools and training to deal with issues that, as a GP, used to leave me stuck and frustrated. As one of my clients explained to me last week ‘my GP just doesn’t know what to do with me’. He was talking about his multitude of medically unexplained symptoms. ‘That’s OK’ I said, smiling. ‘Let’s get started’.
