Animals & Us
Petrina Barson · 51 min
A doctor who lost her three-year-old daughter to sepsis turned catastrophic grief into a lifelong mission to build a more compassionate society — one person, one community, one act of courage at a time.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Petrina Barson is a GP who has spent her life learning what compassion really means. Not kindness, not empathy, but something harder and more specific: a sensitivity to suffering that moves you to act, staying loving even when you encounter pain. She grew up surrounded by love as the youngest of five girls, but also absorbed perfectionism and a lack of self-compassion that would shape her for decades. In 2006, her three-year-old daughter Maya died suddenly of sepsis. That catastrophic loss could have closed Petrina's heart. Instead, it deepened her understanding that suffering is part of life, and that accepting compassion from others is just as important as giving it.
Medical training nearly broke that compassion. The six years of her degree and early hospital practice felt soul-destroying: compassion was unspoken, sometimes treated as weakness, and patients were reduced to their worst moments with dehumanizing language. But Petrina held on. In 2013, she heard a radio interview about Compassion Cultivation Training at Stanford University and knew it was her calling. She trained as a teacher and brought the program to medical students at the University of Melbourne. She also discovered the Richards Trauma Process, which she understood as self-compassion in action, allowing people to re-parent their wounded younger selves.
Today, Petrina runs the Center for a Compassionate Society in Clifton Hill, a small church-based space where people's natural compassion is fostered and given room to grow. She has facilitated letter-writing campaigns for refugees, stood in a human-sized cage outside the Park Hotel in Melbourne to protest their incarceration, and connected climate action to responsibility toward her children and grandchildren. She teaches that compassion is not weak; it can require you to take a stand against cruelty. And she believes that as you attach your purpose to something that serves the world, your own sense of self grows stronger and more rooted.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses grief & loss, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au • GriefLine: 1300 845 745 · griefline.org.au
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