The other evening, I went for a walk through Barcelona. I passed the crowded tourist areas, crossed the football fields, and was heading back home when I came by the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. On impulse, I went in. A mass was taking place. The priest was distributing the body of Christ. For a moment, I considered joining the line, but I felt like I would be intruding — like entering something intimate that was not mine. Instead, I sat down. As I settled, I began to notice the atmosphere in the room. There were perhaps 30 people — mostly elderly, along with a few young families and some teenagers. What struck me was not devotion, but density: a quiet, shared weight of lived suffering. Not dramatic or loud — just present. Many faces seemed marked by difficulty. I had entered seeking calm. Instead, I encountered vulnerability.
Then I looked up at the crucifix — Christ suffering on the cross — not as doctrine, but as an image. As presence. A figure that did not turn away from pain. I closed my eyes and unexpectedly felt warmth, light, and compassion. It felt regulating in a precise way: suffering could be held, not denied; accompanied, not solved; carried without being erased. There was room enough for all of it — wounds from what should never have happened, and wounds from what never happened but should have. The feeling was simple and powerful: suffering does not cancel love — it invites it. This experience reminded me of an essential aspect of psychotherapy. One of the therapist’s most fundamental skills is the capacity to create safety — not merely as the absence of threat, but as the presence of a relational space where vulnerability, shame, and trauma can be expressed without fear of judgment or rejection. Without safety, therapy may proceed in form — questions asked, interpretations offered — but the deeper layers of lived experience remain guarded behind narrative, distance, or intellectual explanation.
From a Compassionate Inquiry perspective, as developed by Gabor Maté, compassion is not an optional quality in therapy — it is the condition that allows truth to emerge. Only when a person feels met without judgment does the nervous system relax enough to reveal what is actually there.
Read the rest in Psychology Today
FINN JANNING 