Cooking as Therapy
How to Improve Mental Health Through Cooking
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Follow twenty recipes to find calm, improve self-esteem, and form daily habits—in your very own kitchen!—through mindfulness-based cooking therapy.
In Cooking as Therapy, licensed clinical social worker and sous therapist Debra Borden provides you with all the tools and techniques to have therapy sessions in the comfort of your own kitchen.
Cooking therapy is an experiential therapy that allows you to conduct a therapy session while you cook a meal. Using cooking processes like chopping, kneading, stirring, and more, you’ll develop the skills to recognize limiting patterns and behaviors, improve self-esteem, and form healthy daily habits, and you might even have fun incorporating techniques centered around
mindfulness—which develops calm,metaphor—which creates clarity, and mastery—which sparks self-esteem.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a great cook to try cooking therapy—or even like cooking. You only need an interest in self-exploration. Borden will teach you the processes involved in preparing a recipe or meal that trigger awareness and even “aha” moments. Unlike talk therapy, cooking therapy sessions incorporate tangible acts. It is less about what you prepare and more of a guided journey to self-reflection through how you prepare a dish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cooking is a valuable therapeutic exercise through which patients can "gain self-awareness and insight as well as discover habits and behaviors that may be holding back from optimum mental health," according to this well-intentioned if repetitive guide. Therapist Borden (Lucky Me) contends that cooking, like other forms of "experiential" therapy, can build a sense of accomplishment and forge a unique rapport between therapist and client. It also teaches mindfulness (by being intentional with one's physical actions); provides concrete material from which to extract insights about one's life (a patient of the author's reflected that a recipe that failed no matter how much effort she put into it was like her "marriage; no matter what I do, I can't save it"); and offers a sense of mastery that can carry over into other areas of life. The bulk of the book consists of eight "sessions" in which Borden addresses such topics as radical self-acceptance and effective communication, with sample recipes for working through each. While Borden makes a solid case for the therapeutic framework, her reliance on cutesy metaphors (in one recipe, readers are advised to spread jam on bread as they "add sweetness to mood") grows tiresome, as do the endless examples of situations where cooking therapy promoted a sense of mastery. The result is an overlong introduction to a fresh therapeutic method.
