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June 24, 2026
You have heard of art therapy and talk therapy. Charlotte Hastings does therapy in the kitchen, and it opens people up in a way the usual chair never quite does.
Charlotte Hastings is a psychodynamic therapist, founder of Kitchen Therapy, and author of Kitchen Therapy: How to Become a Conscious Cook. Trained first as an anthropologist, she taught drama to neurodivergent teenagers before building an entire therapeutic approach around the kitchen.
Charlotte recognized her own ADHD in her forties, after years of self-medicating and a chaotic childhood with an undiagnosed, alcoholic father. School had convinced her she was not smart. Anthropology, Jung, and eventually a wooden spoon proved otherwise. Now she uses cooking the way other therapists use art or drama: a side-by-side, low-pressure space where the real stuff surfaces.
In this episode, Tracy and Charlotte talk about why cooking can work like art or drama therapy, why food and love are so entwined, how recipes can both support and shut down ADHD brains, and why the way you hold a wooden spoon might reveal the way you hold life. If cooking has ever felt loaded, boring, chaotic, or impossible, this conversation offers a gentler reframe: the meal is not just the result. The journey is the meal.
“The world keeps telling us there is one model we are supposed to fit into. What a relief to realize that is never going to happen, no matter how old I get.”
- Charlotte Hastings
“Anything that engaged my imagination had my full attention. Stories, people, relationships, patterns. That is where my brain came alive.”
- Charlotte Hastings
“Food became a language I could understand. The way people fed me told me something about love, belonging, and connection.”
-- Charlotte Hastings
"Cooking became a therapeutic space for me because it was a place where I could feel at home with myself."
-- Charlotte Hastings
"How you are in the kitchen tells a story about how you move through life."
- Charlotte Hastings
"A meal has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The ingredients are the beginning, the cooking is where the plot happens, and the finished meal gives us resolution."
- Charlotte Hastings
"Cooking for yourself is one way of saying, ‘I care about feeding you."
- Charlotte Hastings
- Charlotte recognized her ADHD through Gabor Maté's work on addiction as an attachment disorder, never pursuing a formal diagnosis and naming alcohol and amphetamines as self-medication
- She grew up in a chaotic household with an alcoholic father in Switzerland, feeling like a fish out of water with school performance that swung between top of the class and zoning out
- Anthropology at Goldsmiths in the 1980s unlocked hyperfocus and introduced her to Carl Jung, helping her reconcile a disastrous high school with thriving once interest was engaged
[19:18 – 36:20] How Kitchen Therapy Began and Why It Heals
- The idea was born when she named an anxious student's grip on a wooden spoon as how she was holding life, opening a conversation that connected her anthropology, childhood, and grandmother's cooking
- She explains why cooking works therapeutically: it makes us human through fire and transformation, gives a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end, and reaches the gut as the first brain
- Kitchen therapy runs as groups, couples, and individuals, rooted in attachment, including an ARFID teen who meets foods as video game characters with superpowers
[36:20 – 01:12:50] Process Over Product, Intuitive Cooking, and Food as Love
- Charlotte cooks without measurements and values the psychological and spiritual nutrition of the process, drawing on ancestral knowledge and several sources rather than freestyling alone
- Responding to Tracy's lost cooking confidence in perimenopause, she reframes learning to love cooking as the first base for healing, removing perfectionism and retelling the stories people carry into the kitchen
- She ties food to love through the maternal gaze that wires a baby's brain, critiques the disconnection of Deliveroo and ordering in, and points listeners to therapykitchen.co.uk
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- Website: therapykitchen.co.uk
- Instagram: @therapy.kitchen
