From the article: "Ms. Borden begins each session by asking her patients what they’re bringing to the table, literally and figuratively. 'They might say, "Oh, well, you told me to get salad,"' she joked. 'No, "How are you feeling right now?"'After getting a sense of the client’s mental mise en place, the work begins. One of Ms. Borden’s signature dishes to cook with clients is a zucchini noodle salad with feta and olives. The olives, with their soft fruit and hard pit, are particularly ripe with therapeutic metaphor, Ms. Borden said. She likes to ask clients: 'What is the pit in your stomach?'"
Ugh! Don't get me started on "pit in your stomach." I covered this topic back in 2021. It's a corruption of "pit of your stomach," which means the bottom of your stomach. The pit is the location of the bad feeling, not a tangible item that's causing discomfort. Also "What is the pit in your stomach?" assumes there is a bad feeling in the stomach. The presence of the olive created an opportunity for clever repartee that took precedence over listening to the client's expression. Does the client rise to the prompt and enumerate ways she's like that damned olive?
Do you want your therapist in your house and cooking with you, using food metaphors to pry into your emotional innards?
Prompt for Grok: "Tell me about the psychiatrist Brian Wilson kept in his house."
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9 comments:
It's the pits.
"It's the pits" is discussed in the 2021 post: "Do people still say "It's the pits"? If they do, are they picturing a pile of peach or cherry pits? Erma Bombeck wrote a book in the 1970s called "If Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?" I think, as I gaze back through the mists of time, that the title was funny because "the pits" did NOT refer to fruit pits."
Anyway, I think "It's the pits" is using "pits" to me low places, like the pit of hell or the pit of despair. It doesn't mean the inedible parts of fruit.
Therapist in the kitchen? My kitchen?! I don't even like my wife in the kitchen unless she is drinking wine and being hand fed treats I'm making just for her. But involved in my culinary artistic endeavours while Im trying to get laid? Get the fuck out.
"it's the pits" can also refer to armpits.
For years I told people that baking was my therapy. I did a lot of it years ago. I'd bake, then give it away. I don't do it much anymore these days. Maybe I'm feeling less stress as a retired guy. Maybe I don't like tempting myself with pastries all over the house these days. Maybe I've gotten too lazy.
But cooking can be therapeutic. You put your mind into focusing on that creation, the act of cutting, mixing, kneading, folding, rolling, what have you. You forget about those other things that raise the blood pressure.
The kitchen hardly seems the right place to work through your Oedipal issues. No couch.
Freud always said that the way to a man's heart was through his .... um ... stomach? Maybe that was Mrs. Freud or the family cook.
The Body Keeps The Score. You should be promoting this book through your "Amazon portal," many would benefit from reading it.
Cooking and eating offer therapeutic release.
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