in his book Cooking: A natural history of transformation, Michael Pollan talks about how he learned what he calls “cooking with water”: stews, braises, stews, etc.; These are those cooking in which the heat is transmitted to the food through some liquid (unlike what happens when the food is roasted). In all cases, they are cooking that takes time, and a lot of time. Prep time, cooking time: You can’t make a stew in half an hour.
I was reading Pollan who says that the person who taught him the fundamentals of this way of cooking was Samin, a woman of Iranian descent, who emphasized the need not to rush the process: «At one point he told me: “Good cooking consists of the three ‘p’s’: patience, presenceand practice“»
The 3 ‘p’s seem like a good way to summarize the requirements for so many things, but I found it particularly relevant to psychotherapy. Like cooking, both the learning and the actual practice of psychotherapy require patience, presence, and practice. I’m speaking from ACT, of course, but I suspect it’s broadly applicable to other models.
Psychotherapy requires patience. It is not a process that can be rushed without harm, but rather a process that requires patience for the slowness it entails. Patience in following the pace of the person we work with (which is usually slower than we would like), patience in developing a metaphor, an exercise, in exploring a sensitive topic. That’s why something that you will find over and over again in supervisions, books and training is this: decelerate. Slow down when avoidance or fusion begins to appear, slow down when values are touched, slow down when pain appears. The fastest results require slowness and patience. Of course, slowness does not mean delay or delay, but rather doing things at the pace they require.
Psychotherapy also requires presence. On the one hand, this covers basic issues such as not reading the newspaper in session. But on the other hand, it is the presence in what is happening, the attention to the gestures, movements, words that are occurring in the session. And presence, being what we are, is not so much about staying or concentrating, but rather about return deliberately every time we disconnect from what is happening. Therapy is learning, and you cannot learn something while your attention is somewhere else. That is why sometimes it can be useful to start a session breathing, to pause, a break that allows us – therapist and patient – to be present in the session.
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And it also requires practice. All learning requires practice, and this means that initially things may not go as we would like. All the processes we try to promote take practice: making room for an emotion, disentangling from a thought, returning to the present, changing perspective, contacting values, being guided by values, are skills with nuances, and nuances require repetition to acquire. Practice, coupled with enough flexibility to try different angles for the process, over and over again. This also applies to both therapists and patients.
Patience, presence, and practice are necessary qualities for cooking, for psychotherapy, and for almost any skill that can be perfected. Learning to play an instrument, to compose, to dance, to write, to paint require patience, presence, and practice.
The three qualities are related, by the way, because they are different aspects of the same thing. Patience requires being present with the rhythm of processes and practicing subjecting yourself to those rhythms. Presence requires patience with our own tendency to distract, and also improves with practice. And for practice to be profitable, it is necessary to have enough presence to notice mistakes and what can be improved, and enough patience to try again.
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Article published in Grupo ACT Argentina and provided for republication in .