9

Dinner as a Laboratory for Change

I’m a huge fan of eating better, having more fun, feeling less burdened by cooking, and getting the conversational juices flowing at the table. But these aren’t the only changes that can happen at dinner. As a therapist, I’ve witnessed other types of transformation occur when families engage in the process of cooking and eating.

A family dinner is like an improvisatory theater performance or a laboratory experiment. The family shows up night after night, and as a group they can try out new ways of interacting with one another. Like actors in a troupe, they can try new behaviors, habits, and roles. A director (or a therapist) can provide a new setup or opening line to an improv, but then the troupe takes it and runs with it. Like scientists in a laboratory, a family can figure out which experiments work better than others. One change in the laboratory can lead to others—some planned and others serendipitous.

Changes in family relationships can happen in two ways. The first is by experimenting with new cooking roles. A couple can work on becoming better collaborators by starting to cook together. Or a teenager who has been critical of everything his parents do might start to make dinner. As he feels more involved and valued as a contributing family member, his contrariness might diminish.

The second way is by trying out new behaviors at the dinner table. For example, one family I worked with complained that there was too much bad-mouthing and name-calling in their exchanges with one another. While we could explore this for an hour in therapy, it was much more powerful to use dinnertime itself as an annex to the family therapy office, an annex they had access to every night of the week. With this in mind, the family decided to try an experiment of listening to one another at dinner without saying a critical word. If someone “slipped,” family members interrupted to say, “Rephrase that, please!”

In this chapter, you’ll read about other families who have used the dinner hour to make relationship changes: reworking power inequities in a couple’s relationship; reconnecting an estranged child and parent; getting a do-over as an adult after an abusive childhood; and coming to terms with a new stage of life. These changes all began in therapy but took root at home, where they could be tested night after night, since the dinner table keeps presenting itself as a place to try out new things.

USING COOKING TO MOVE FROM COMPETITION TO COLLABORATION

Rosa and Juan,¹ a middle-aged couple with two teenage daughters, are medical researchers at a teaching hospital. They came to see me for couples therapy when their relationship had morphed from being supportive collaborators at home and at work to becoming resentful competitors and estranged spouses. After months of therapy, a breakthrough occurred when we delved into their cooking practices. To be more precise—a breakthrough occurred during our second foray into their cooking practices. The first attempt was pretty much a kitchen disaster, like serving a raw chicken at a dinner party.

First the back story about the couple: For the first twenty years of marriage, Rosa and Juan had been very supportive of one another’s work, even coauthoring many scholarly papers. But that changed when Rosa suffered a depression that sapped her powers of concentration and attention. Instead of helping each other navigate the quirks of academic life, Rosa believed that Juan was just out for himself, and Juan, for his part, was angry with Rosa. He didn’t really understand what her depression had to do with her loss of intellectual focus.

Juan, an intense man who was more comfortable arguing a point than asking questions to understand Rosa’s perspective, explained their troubles this way: “We fight a lot, but that’s not the problem. We were equals, but with Rosa’s depression, we’re not. I don’t know how to be with her any more.”

Rosa was no shrinking violet. She had a great capacity to express emotion and to engage Juan in debate on everything from avant-garde French cinema to feminist interpretations of moral development.

After several weeks of therapy they had a shared understanding about Rosa’s depression as a real medical condition. But despite this insight, and despite the fact that Rosa’s depression was now being treated with medication and individual therapy, they had yet to restore their vibrant relationship as intellectual peers and engaged partners. Instead, Juan withdrew from Rosa and had become more self-reliant. And Rosa, frustrated in her attempt to engage Juan, resorted to provoking him in order to get any response at all.

Although Juan stuck to himself most of the time, he loved to cook for the family, as his father did, and he spent at least an hour each night in the kitchen. He insisted, however, on cooking alone and without a cookbook. He preferred to create recipes out of his imagination or from his memory of childhood meals.

One day, Juan began a therapy session with a cooking question that he wanted to discuss. I felt excited and leaned forward in my chair—this must be how a psychoanalyst feels when a patient offers a dream.

Juan told Rosa that he had been thinking about a dessert that his mother used to make—a frothy meringue swimming in sauce, called a floating island. He asked Rosa if she would make it for him, and she was visibly pleased by his request; Juan hadn’t asked her to share the kitchen with him in years, so this invitation had extra heft. Rosa confided that baking and making sauces were the only things she learned to do in the kitchen when she was a child. Most of all, Rosa felt invited into Juan’s emotional world after feeling iced out for years. Here in one fell swoop was a chance to enter both his kitchen and the closely guarded chamber of his inner world. However, she overstepped when she asked him why he was thinking about his mother. This was more than Juan bargained for. He rebuked her. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’d just like you to make the dessert.” Rosa settled for that and agreed to try it that night.

The next week, I contained my curiosity for a few minutes before I blurted out, “How did the dessert turn out?” I could tell by their glum faces that it didn’t go well. Rosa’s version of a floating island involved beating egg whites and then baking them to form toasted peaks over soft pillows of cream. Juan’s childhood confection, however, involved raw eggs and bore no resemblance to Rosa’s creation. Rosa, still undaunted, saw these two different takes on meringues as a chance to discuss their different families. But Juan was not interested in sharing these feelings with Rosa. “I just wanted you to make the dessert the way I wanted,” he said.

“Juan, you are so controlling,” Rosa retorted. “I wanted to play with you and talk with you about your family.”

As their therapist, I saw this incident as containing their central conflict: Juan wanted to keep emotion away, and Rosa wanted to bring it in. Juan had been burned by Rosa’s emotionality, as he blamed her depression on the breakdown of their marriage. They managed this conflict by trying to vie for control. “Let’s do things my way” is what they seem to be saying to each other, to no good effect.

Their different styles had grown rigid and polarized over the years. Juan was wary about letting Rosa in and tried to protect himself by being controlling. Rosa felt frozen out, and when given any opportunity to penetrate Juan’s fortress, she overwhelmed him with her emotions. But, if this conflict was bubbling up in the kitchen, perhaps it could be worked on there. I suggested a way to cooperate as fellow chefs that would begin to restore their sense of play and collaboration and wouldn’t put either one in charge. Privately, I worried that I might be on shaky ground, given how badly the last cooking episode went. But I pressed on, remembering that the kitchen is the place that Juan feels most generous and expressive.

So, nervously, I wondered out loud if there was a way they could work together in the kitchen so that neither of them was giving or receiving orders. Maria, their eighteen-year-old high school senior, was about to leave home, and Ana, their seventeen-year-old high school junior, would leave in another year, so I suggested that maybe they’d like to teach them some cooking skills. I asked what was most important to teach them.

Juan answered first. “I want them to try new things and take risks.”

Rosa added, “To quote the Dalai Lama, I want them to cook and love with reckless abandon.”

Their responses made me feel that I could persevere. I suggested that they find a recipe that neither of them had ever made before, cook it, and then teach their daughters how to make it. In that way they would incorporate the value of trying new things. They decided to find a recipe from a Latin culture that is neither Argentinian like Rosa nor Guatemalan like Juan. Instead, they decided to re-create a chicken with a rich mole sauce from their favorite Mexican restaurant.

The next week, before I had a chance to ask, they told me that the dish was delicious, although their children gave it mixed reviews. They described the fun they had together figuring out how to make a mole sauce, tinkering with the spices, and creating a recipe all their own. And, as they were leaving my office that morning, Juan tossed off a comment: “Did we mention that we are collaborating on a paper together for the first time in years?”

I don’t think the timing of this academic collaboration was a coincidence. Instead, I think that much as children might work out a conflict through playing with stuffed animals, Juan and Rosa began to work out a prickly marital conflict through cooking. The success of collaborating on a new recipe opened the door for collaborating on an intellectual project. This was not a miracle cure. The mole sauce did not lead to marital bliss. It did, however, give them one experience of creative collaboration that I could remind them of when they despaired of ever being able to work together as equals.

USING COOKING TO RECONNECT A FATHER AND HIS ADOLESCENT SON

In my clinical practice, a family came to see me for help with their seventeen-year-old son, Ben, who was described as oppositional and who had stopped talking to his father, except to ask for a ride to school. The father, Roy, complained to me: “Ben is everything I am not. I am a Republican, so he is an anarchist. I have worked hard to achieve material success, and he has nothing but contempt for my achievements. I am socially conservative, and he has hair down to his shoulders. The last indignity is that he is a vegetarian, and he won’t eat our food.”

When I asked them about other recent changes in the family, they told me that Mary, Ben’s mother, had recently quit her job. As a result, she was doing all the cooking, taking over from Roy, who used to make dinner for the family. Ben piped up, “I wish my mother was still working, since I don’t like her cooking.”

I ventured to articulate the implied compliment to his father: “So I guess your father’s a pretty good cook.” Ben nodded and smiled. Encouraged, I continued. “What was dinner like when your father cooked it?”

“I’d keep my dad company while he prepared dinner,” Ben answered. “I might make a suggestion—try some chili powder, or go easy on the onions. And he’d usually do it.”

“Of course, I would,” Roy quickly added. “I was so happy to have your company. Mary and Ben have an easy time talking about movies and books. But this was the one time of the day we would talk.”

I ventured a comment to Ben: “Maybe it’s not that you object to your mother’s cooking, but that you’re protesting losing the time with your father.”

The father nodded, but added, “I don’t think he’d like my cooking now any better than he likes his mother’s, since he’s become a vegetarian.”

A child changing the way he eats during adolescence is a familiar story. An omnivore child becomes a die-hard adolescent vegan. A sweet tooth is traded in for a love of pickled foods. A passion for ice cream becomes so intense that new flavors are invented each week and the ice cream maker is in constant use. Food choices, like decisions about hair color, music, and clothing, are time-honored opportunities for teenagers to differentiate themselves from their parents and to assert that they no longer have the childish tastes of yesteryear. So Ben’s recent decision to become a vegetarian didn’t sound like a full-scale rejection of his parents. Instead, I noted that Roy and Mary could benefit from eating more vegetables, grains, fruits, and nuts, even if they continued to eat meat. Ben might very well be helping them to live longer.

Even though I thought I might be pressing my luck, I went on to suggest that Roy buy a book on vegetarian cooking and then ask Ben to pick out some particularly good recipes that his father could make a couple of nights a week. In this way, father and son could renew their partnership in the kitchen but with an adjustment to accommodate Ben’s shift to vegetarianism. While Roy felt rejected by all the ways that Ben was asserting his autonomy, in the kitchen they could find a way to make room for these changes and for their mutual longing for connection.

Parents engage in many pushes and pulls around adolescents’ growing demands for more autonomy and self-definition. When a parent agrees to change the family’s foods to make room for a teenager’s new tastes, it can go a long way to easing some of these tensions. When Roy agreed to join Ben in his new vegetarian world, it was a way of saying to him, “I’m interested in the person you are becoming.” When Ben was willing to pick a recipe for Roy to make, it was a way of saying, “I’m not rejecting you. I just want you to know me differently than you did when I was a child.”

YOU DON’T HAVE TO REPEAT THOSE AWFUL CHILDHOOD DINNERS

Making family dinners as an adult can be daunting, especially if dinners as a child were painful and unpleasant. But current family dinners can also provide an opportunity for a second chance.

This was the situation with Nora, who came to individual therapy with a set of childhood wounds that were only barely scarred over but never fully healed. Talking about her dinners growing up identified the wounds; talking about her current family dinners was a place to start the repair.

Nora, a single mother of three young children, came to me for parenting advice. As a way of learning more about her childhood, I asked her to tell me about the family dinners she had while growing up. She winced visibly and then told me straight out that she wasn’t ready to talk about them. Since most patients are willing to talk about childhood dinners, Nora’s response concerned me, but I knew that I’d have to wait until she was ready to tell me more.

Months later, we circled back when I noticed that she had been losing weight. She told me that eating was really hard for her, especially when she was having a difficult time managing other parts of her life. She had just been laid off from her job and felt scared that she wouldn’t find employment soon enough to stave off a financial crisis. With a reluctant sigh, she said, “Well, I guess it’s time to tell you about what food was like in my childhood home.”

Nora was one of four children with a mother who came to dinner after drinking wine all day long. To this day, Nora has no idea why she was singled out for the punishment of having to watch her siblings enjoy their dinners while she was served nothing.

This particular abuse haunts her as a mother. She tells me that while she loves cooking dinner for her three children and talking with them while they eat, she cannot eat in front of them. They have begun to notice. As an excuse, she tells them that she tasted so much of the food while she was cooking that she isn’t hungry anymore. This may work for now, while her kids are small, but she acknowledges that they will soon start to ask more questions. And so, with some encouragement, she experimented with eating a few bites in front of them. It was difficult but doable. Now she’s getting a second chance at the family she didn’t have as a child—one bite at a time.

Like Nora, many parents have no sunny memories of family dinners to build on. But that isn’t a prerequisite for creating warm and positive family dinners today. The capacity to nurture differently than one was nurtured as a child doesn’t give you back a terrific childhood, but it can deflate its power to define you.

USING DINNERS TO HELP MAKE A TRANSITION TO A NEW LIFE STAGE

In general, families and couples are most challenged during the transition from one stage of life to another—the first year of marriage, the adjustment to becoming parents, and much later, becoming “empty nesters.” These threshold times stir us up. It’s hard work to shed one role and make room for another. Such molting can be a time when our rituals no longer fit us, like a pair of jeans we’re beginning to outgrow. If we pay attention to the discomfort, however, rituals such as dinner can be altered to accommodate our new developmental stage. Let’s take a look at a few transition points that were difficult and where changing the dinner ritual helped ease the transition.

The-transition-to-marriage dinner debacle

When two people marry, or when they make a long-term commitment to each other, they have dozens of decisions to make. Most broadly, couples at this stage are trying to figure out what they each want to carry forward (and leave behind) from their respective childhoods, and how they will gel their two family experiences: Where will we live? How will we argue? What religion, if any, will we observe? Who will our friends be? Will we go out or stay home on Saturday nights? What will dinnertime be like?

When I ask newly married couples about dinner, the question is a pipeline into their childhoods. Typically, they each describe a complex and compact picture of home life. They can put their two snapshots of childhood family dinners side by side, and they can view the cover to their new family album. Looking at the two pictures side by side, the couple can have this conversation: Now that I see your picture, perhaps I can adjust mine, and vice versa.

Liza and Thomas, a couple who had been married just six months, had a recurring fight about dinner—a fight that made sense only when they examined the dinners of their childhoods. Liza complained that she knocked herself out night after night making four-course gourmet meals for her new husband, and he never even said thank you. She was hurt and angry that Thomas ignored her efforts to please and delight him. Thomas, for his part, said that he hadn’t asked for these meals, and if she wanted to make them, he figured that she must enjoy doing so.

When asked to describe their childhood meals, Thomas told of growing up in a family with a single mother who had a degenerative neurological disease but somehow managed to drag herself out of bed each day to make dinner. Every night was the same meal: Spam meatloaf. When his mother would offer him seconds, Thomas remembered biting his tongue so as not to blurt out how repulsive the meal had been, and how he had barely been able to eat firsts, never mind seconds. Instead, so as not to hurt her feelings he would merely say, “I don’t need any more tonight.”

Liza, the eldest of three, had a mother who died of ovarian cancer when Liza was thirteen. After her mother’s death, Liza took over the cooking in the family, making elaborate dinners in order to keep alive the memory of her mother and to create a feeling of home for herself, her younger siblings, and her father.

When she cooked for Thomas, she thought he would understand all the meaning that was packed into the newlywed dinners—the mix of generosity and sacrifice, the connection that ran through her families, from her mother to herself and now to Thomas. But instead of understanding, he was channeling his own sad family dinners. The couple had to unpack these experiences before they were free to create a new dinnertime ritual. While Thomas and Liza had particularly painful family dinners to make sense of, any couple will have two different sets of experiences to integrate into a new interpretation of dinner.

The empty empty-nest dinner table

George and Amy came to see me for couples therapy after their third and last child had left for college. They were finding it difficult to find things to talk about with each other, and they were growing more and more distant. The only time they did talk was to fight about Amy feeling ignored by George, or George feeling unappreciated by Amy.

I asked about dinnertime, which I imagined would be a poignant reminder of their new station in life as empty nesters. George quickly responded in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “If you like three- to four-day-old food served in Tupperware containers, then you’ll love dinner at our house. Now, don’t get me wrong—every few days, Amy will prepare a hot meal.”

Amy listened quietly and then through clenched teeth said, “The table is set before dinner. I feed my husband well, but nothing is ever good enough. George must be living on another planet if he thinks we have leftovers every night.”

There was the problem, writ clearly: Without their kids at home, dinner was a time when they keenly felt their disconnection from and disappointment in each other. George believed that Amy didn’t want to cook just for him, and Amy felt sure that her efforts to be a good wife were being denigrated. Dinner was a painful nightly reminder of how lost they were without their children.

There were many issues to work on, but their dinner ritual was a time when so much of their unhappiness crystallized. And, because it happened every night, they could try out new behaviors and get quick feedback.

I asked them to consider using dinner as a workshop, to do test runs on interactions that were making them unhappy at the table—and elsewhere. Could they, for example, make a few stabs at offering appreciation at dinner, perhaps about the food, or about some aspect of the other’s character, or parenting, or appearance? Could they privately try to notice any goodwill on the part of the other? Perhaps something new would happen if they tried asking for what they wanted at dinner, in terms of food and conversation, rather than trashing what was offered.

Because I believe that it’s easier to bear hardships when they are named rather than tucked into dark corners, I suggested that they talk at dinner about missing having the kids at home. But a kid moving out isn’t just about loss, so why not also discuss what foods they are freer to eat or what conversations they can have without their kids around. Dinner in bed? A trip they want to plan without the kids? Making spinach crepes that the kids had turned up their noses at?

I won’t pretend that these interventions alone made everything hum again for Amy and George. But they did provide a starting point for bridging the gulf between them. Each night, they had a reliable time to reach across the emotional divide that had deepened since their last child moved out. My hope was that by redesigning their dinner ritual, they would begin to find new ways to communicate with each other. One of the great properties of a ritual is that it’s set apart from the rest of the day, so it allows for experimentation within borders. Amy and George, like other couples who have lots of problems to solve, can use dinner as a time to try some new ways of being with each other.

FOCUSING ON DINNERTIME TO ADJUST TO OTHER MAJOR DISRUPTIONS IN FAMILY LIFE

Just about every family experiences one or more major disruptions during the children’s growing-up years. Common events, such as divorce, remarriage, a parent’s illness, a job loss, or a move to a new neighborhood, can generate a seismic shift in day-to-day life, leading to the feeling that the family is inalterably changed. When there has been a major shift in a family, dinner, along with many other routines, gets disrupted too. Making sure that a dinner ritual persists, especially during a time of tumult, is enormously helpful to children. It gives them a sense of stability. Protecting predictable routines and rituals is one of the best things that parents can do for kids, and for themselves, during times of upheaval. And paying attention to changing the dinner ritual to accommodate or honor a major shift can help with the adjustment to a new family configuration.

When parents divorce

In the first year or two following a divorce, most children and parents struggle to get their bearings. Children’s routines—eating, homework, bedtime, visiting with friends, going to athletic practices—get disrupted when they’re dividing their time between two homes. Dinner can be a particularly poignant time to notice these changes.

For starters, the empty chair of the missing parent is a nightly reminder of the divorce. And despite the best efforts of the single parent who has tried to prepare a nice dinner, mealtime can be a time of deep longing for the parent who isn’t there. Children who liked to talk and linger over dinner may want to finish as quickly as possible, to avoid feeling the pain of loss.

Several things might help. Naming a child’s sadness, and letting children talk about how different dinner feels now is a good start. If loud conflict, heavy drinking, or violence was the reason for the divorce, children might also note that dinnertime is more peaceful now. They may feel guilty about preferring the divorced family dinner to the highly contentious nuclear one, but they should be validated for these feelings. It’s also important that children feel that some parts of their lives are continuing as before, so changing the food they eat, or the time of day when they eat it, might not be the best idea. Kids are trying to make sense of belonging to two families, so they may want to compare the dinners at each parent’s house.

It’s not just the children who must adjust to post-divorce dinners. For the parent, now single, it’s an extra challenge to shop, cook, and clean up without the help of another adult. There may be more conflict introduced as a single parent turns to her children to help with some aspect of cooking or cleanup that the other parent did when they were still married.

With only one parent at the table, the conversation might feel less lively, or the small number of participants may make dinnertime feel too intense. One newly divorced mother of an eleven-year-old daughter felt that it was too much pressure to go from being a trio to a duo at dinner. She asked her daughter for ideas to make dinner more comfortable. Together they decided to bring something to read aloud—an article from the newspaper, an online blog, or a poem—that could bring in another voice to liven things up a little so that they weren’t just staring at each other. Another family with several children designated one night a week as a night to invite friends and neighbors over, to give a feeling of abundance at a time when they felt such loss.

When a parent remarries

When a stepparent enters the scene, the bonds and loyalties among family members are reshuffled. The dinner table is a prime place to experience the sea change. As Dr. Patricia Papernow, a nationally renowned expert on stepfamilies explains: “Dinner is a time when children are reminded of how dramatically their family has changed. The new couple relationship is a long-awaited, wonderful gift to the adults. For kids, however, it often means a loss of parental attention and yet another in a series of difficult changes.”² Kids now have to share a parent whose attention was exclusively theirs. If they start enjoying this new adult, they may feel disloyal to the parent who is no longer there. Meanwhile, the new couple may yearn for some time alone.

Papernow describes the disequilibrium further. The strongest and oldest bonds will be between the parent and children, as they share years of history and an implicit understanding of “how we do things in our family.” This parent sits squarely on the inside of the family, closest to everyone—the stepparent, the kids, and even the ex-spouse. By sharp contrast, the stepparent, Papernow explains, is “late to the party” and can feel like an unwanted outsider. This contrast between insider and outsider can create a lot of tension. They may not understand inside jokes, get the references to treasured family stories, or like the food that’s served. The children might not want to explain themselves so that the stepparent can join in. The children’s parent will have the difficult task of trying to bridge these two constituencies.

Papernow offers advice that might seem antithetical to maintaining family dinners, but can eventually make them more possible. She recommends that in stepfamilies, family members “spend lots of time in one-to-one relationships” because “building relationships one dyad at a time is easier than expecting a stepparent to blend right into a preexisting family.”³ When it comes to dinners, different subsets of pairs can take turns making an appetizer or a dessert (adult stepcouple, two stepsiblings, stepparent and stepchild, parent and child). The adult couple could set a night to go out alone once a week. Becoming a stepfamily takes time (usually years), resourcefulness, and patience before the family reaches a new equilibrium.

When a parent is ill

When a parent is ill, particularly if that parent is the one who usually cooks, dinner will change dramatically. But maintaining a dinner ritual, even if it has to be radically altered, can provide stability and normalcy to both children and adults. There are many ways that families can handle the cooking when the main chef is sidelined by illness. Children can pick up the slack, but they may already be feeling burdened and depleted by having a sick parent. If the parents ask them to pitch in by first asking what they feel ready to do, it will work better. Perhaps a teenager would be willing to make one dinner a week for the family or, with a sibling, help make some soups and stews on the weekend.

Well-meaning friends and neighbors often offer to bring dinners after surgery, during chemotherapy, or when a parent is confined to bed. Dr. Paula Rauch, director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Parenting at a Challenging Time Program, recommends designating a “captain of kindness,” to help organize the well-wishers. This person lets friends know about the family’s food preferences—”please no more lasagnas” or “only vegetable soups and salads.” The designated captain of kindness sends out instructions about the best time and place to deliver the food, so that the family knows when to expect dinner and doesn’t have to entertain the person making the delivery.⁴

Figuring out some ways to keep having family dinners when a parent is sick is important because it gives a sense that the family is still able to nourish everyone. Keeping the routine going is key, even if it means having takeout food every night. Some families may want to agree that the dinner table is the one place that illness is excluded and decide not speak about it while they are having dinner together. Other families might prefer to let family members ask questions and raise worries at dinner—the one time of day when everyone is present.

CHANGING CONVERSATION, CHANGING THE FAMILY

Bruce and Martina were ready to divorce when they came for couples therapy as a last-ditch effort. Bruce was a stay-at-home father of their two teenagers, and Martina worked long hours as a software programmer. This arrangement suited Bruce much better than Martina. He had been laid off a decade earlier and found that he preferred taking care of the home front to working. Martina was able to support the family, but she often felt envious of her husband’s greater intimacy with the children, and she worried that time was running out on getting to know them before they were out the door to college.

Dinner was a time when their parenting roles were particularly apparent. Bruce cooked and served dinner, and then liked to engage the kids in political debate about topics of the day. Martina, who had emigrated from Germany and spoke English as her third language, often felt left out.

“He can lecture them about events all over the world, and I just sit there,” she explained. “I leave the table as soon as I finish eating.”

I realized that Martina felt that she didn’t have a place at the table; she was more of a guest than a parent. I asked her how she’d like dinner to be different. She took in a deep breath. “I want to know what the kids did during the day,” she began. “I know Bruce has already heard all of that because he’s been home with them for hours. I want to ask them how they feel about things that happened to them. Bruce is only interested in intellectual topics.”

It was clear that she was just warming up. “I also want the kids to speak German at the table occasionally, and I want Bruce to cook German foods some of the time. They know so much more about his side of the family. And one more thing: When there’s a disagreement with the kids, I want Bruce to take my side rather than ganging up on me.”

Bruce had ideas as well. “I don’t want Martina to introduce major rules at the table. You bark orders at them about their homework and how they have to get after-school jobs. It’s just not relaxing for us.”

“But dinner is the only time I have to try to influence what the kids do,” Martina interjected.

Bruce gently suggested that she might catch more bees with honey. “If you enjoyed the kids, they’d be more likely to listen to you when you told them to do something.”

Martina bristled at this. “I don’t need to be told how to be a mother,” she said.

Keeping in mind that dinner is a stage upon which many of their dynamics unfold, I thought that improvising a few new interactions could be helpful. Mindful that there were many problematic exchanges, I didn’t want to overwhelm them with too much homework. I suggested two experiments, one for each to try. Turning to Martina, I said, “What if you try to jump into a conversation that Bruce had begun?” And to Bruce I said, “What if you start the meal by asking Martina about her day, and include some questions about her feelings? Then Martina might feel there was room for her to ask similar questions of the children.”

The following week, the couple reported that dinners had lasted longer. Bruce observed that the kids were more relaxed and that the rest of the night went more smoothly. Martina added that they actually had fun.

This was just a start, but it was a success they could build on.

FOOD METAPHORS IN SEX THERAPY

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you work on your sexual relationship at the family dinner table. Nor am I advocating for the aphrodisiacal powers of oysters, chocolate, or avocados. I’m going in a different direction as I close out this chapter, because I’m a big fan of using food metaphors in therapy. Since food is a language that everyone speaks—and because it easily taps into topics such as desire, appetite, asking for what you want, and trying new things—it’s ripe for riffing on in therapy.

Food metaphors are particularly apt when talking about sex, which is, after all, a type of appetite. The most common sexual problem that couples seek help for from a therapist is loss of sexual desire—a partner’s loss of appetite for the other. It turns out that the things that can reawaken a person’s taste for food are pretty similar to what you might do to regain a hearty sexual appetite.

For starters, there is a famous French saying l’appetit vient en mangeant, or in English it’s “the appetite is in the eating.” In other words, even if you’re not that hungry when you sit down to eat, if the food is good, you might discover that you’re hungrier than you thought. Similarly, if couples engage in sex only when they are feeling desirous, or hungry for sex, this will limit the occasions for sexual encounters. Instead, they can ask each other, “What makes for an inviting and appetizing sexual encounter?” Perhaps, it’s a candlelit bedroom, a chance to take a nap, or a backrub. “What can I do to get you to the bedroom so that you are willing to partake of what I can offer you?”

For many couples, particularly those who have been married a long time, desire will follow, not precede, the start of a sexual encounter. Sex researchers have discovered, for example, that many women who have been married ten years or more report experiencing desire only after foreplay and arousal have begun.⁵ This scientific discovery flies in the face of years of the presumed sequence of sexual activity, i.e., desire preceding arousal. It has led sex researchers to ask women, “Are you receptive to having sex?” rather than, “Do you desire sex?” This receptivity to sex seems similar to a person being willing to try a new food, even if they didn’t come to the table ravenous.

Food metaphors can also help frame conversations about what a person prefers and the notion that tastes can change without the meal being considered a failure. What feels satisfying? What do I want, and what do you want? Do you want to try something new, or go back to the same trusty dish? These are all questions that work in talking both about food and about sex. They’re questions that help ease couples into talking about sex, since, by comparison, we are so much more practiced in talking about food.

Talking about food, reconfiguring cooking roles, and experimenting with dinner table conversation are all ways that I think about family dinners as a therapist. I’ve come to see the kitchen as an annex to my therapy office, and often a much more important place for new behaviors to get started and take root. Family dinners can be recipes for therapeutic growth as well as the best part of the day.