Compassionate Inquiry and the Foundations of My Work
For a long time, healing has focused primarily on identifying a problem to solve.
If something wasn’t working, we looked for the broken part, the missing nutrient, or the right treatment. This approach brought huge advances in emergency care and short-term illness. But when it came to ongoing symptoms such as chronic pain, fatigue, gut problems, anxiety, and conditions that didn’t fully settle, something fundamental was missing.
Over time, a quieter shift began to take place.
Not toward fixing and control, but toward understanding.
A crucial voice in bringing this understanding together was Gabor Maté. What made his work so influential was not only what he contributed himself, but how he connected ideas that already existed, across medicine, psychology, neuroscience, and lived experience, into one coherent way of making sense of human health.
In books such as When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal, Maté articulated a central insight: illness is often not a defect, but an adaptation; a meaningful response to stress, emotional suppression, and the conditions of modern life. This opened the door to a far more compassionate understanding of the body.
Gabor Mate - Trauma Expert, Founder of Compassionate Inquiry & NYT bestselling author
One of the key strands Maté helped bring into the mainstream was the understanding that the body remembers experience. The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, first discussed this idea: experiences that overwhelm us don’t simply disappear, they are held in the nervous system and the body. From this perspective, symptoms stopped looking like random faults and began to look like signs of what the body had learned in order to survive.
Another strand came from Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, which offered a deeply humane reframe: symptoms are not enemies, they are protective responses. Pain, tension, fatigue, and digestive symptoms were no longer seen as failures, but as adaptations. Instead of asking “What’s wrong?”, the question became “What is this body trying to protect?” This shift brings a different and powerful starting point to how healing is approached.
Peter Levine - Founder of Somatic Experiencing®
Nervous system research then provided the physiological explanation for why these ideas mattered so much. Through the work of Stephen Porges (Polyvagal Theory) and Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), it became clear that the body cannot repair itself while it feels under threat. Digestion, immunity, hormones, and repair all depend on the nervous system sensing safety. This helped explain why symptoms worsen under pressure, why aggressive approaches often backfire, and why rest and pacing are essential.
At the same time, relational psychology added another important layer. Thinkers such as Donald Winnicott and Carl Rogers showed that healing often happens not through fixing or correcting, but through being met. Bodies change when they feel listened to, supported, and not rushed, a principle that applies just as much to physical health as it does to emotional wellbeing.
What Gabor Maté ultimately did was bring all of these strands together into a single, compassionate framework now known as Compassionate Inquiry (CI). CI is not a technique, but a way of understanding. It views symptoms as intelligent adaptations, and centres curiosity, safety, and context.
Taken together, this body of work has fundamentally changed how we understand healing. It is no longer about fixing something broken, finding the perfect plan, or forcing change. Instead, healing becomes about restoring safety, reducing load, listening to adaptation, and working with the body rather than against it. It becomes less about doing more, and more about creating the right conditions for repair.
Complementing this understanding, gut–brain research allowed these ideas to be applied to the world of digestion. The work of Michael Gershon and Emeran Mayer showed that the gut is not separate from the nervous system, it is one of its most sensitive expressions. This allows digestive symptoms to be viewed not just in terms of food, but also stress, safety, immunity, and emotion. Food still matters, but it sits within a much bigger picture.
From this place, we stop trying to override symptoms and start listening to them. We move away from quick fixes and toward support that is paced, personalised, and rooted in safety.
Food, digestion, the nervous system, and emotional life are no longer treated as separate problems, but as parts of the same conversation.
This is the ground my work now stands on, and the place from which I support people in finding a steadier, more trusting relationship with their bodies, and a path toward health that feels both human and empowering.