Outside the clinic
Vegetarian-curious, and dangerously invested in cabbage.
Ben is not, technically, a vegetarian. He is what he calls "vegetarian-curious" — a man edging toward the plants one meal at a time — and somewhere along that slow drift he developed a genuine, slightly unreasonable passion for making cabbage interesting. He now believes it has taught him something about therapy. His family believes he has simply run out of hobbies.
How it started
It began, as these things do, with a glut. A neighbour's garden produced more cabbages than one household could reasonably eat, and Ben — congenitally unable to let food go to waste — accepted three of them and then had to work out what to do with three cabbages.
He had, until that point, held the standard Australian view of cabbage: that it was a vegetable of last resort, boiled into submission and served alongside things you actually wanted to eat. It was, in his words, "the beige of the vegetable world." He did not expect to enjoy the assignment.
What he discovered, over a fortnight of increasingly ambitious experiments, was that cabbage is not boring — it is patient. It will hold whatever flavour you're prepared to give it. Charred with cumin and chilli, it becomes something else entirely. Fermented slowly into kimchi, it develops a depth that months of waiting can't be rushed. Shredded raw with lime and fish sauce, it's bright and alive. The cabbage was never the problem. The problem was what people had been doing to it.
Around the same time, and not unrelatedly, Ben found himself eating less meat. Not out of any grand conviction — he is suspicious of grand convictions, professionally and personally — but because the plant-forward meals he was cooking had quietly become the ones he looked forward to. He describes himself as "vegetarian-curious": not committed, not evangelical, just genuinely interested in where a plate goes when you stop assuming meat has to be the centre of it.
"I'm not going to stand here and tell you I've given up a good steak," he says. "I haven't. But I've noticed that when I cook the cabbage properly, I don't miss the thing I thought I needed. There's probably a lesson in that. There's usually a lesson in that. It's a bit of an occupational hazard."
His youngest daughter maintains that cabbage is "fine, but not a personality." Ben has chosen to take this as a challenge rather than feedback.
The repertoire
Six things he does to a cabbage.
A working list, refined over three years of Sunday cooking. Each one, Ben insists, is also — if you squint — a small parable about how change actually happens. He has stopped saying this out loud at dinner.
Charred with cumin
Wedges, high heat, left alone long enough to blacken at the edges before he's tempted to fuss. The lesson, apparently, is that some things only get good if you stop interfering with them. He mentions this to clients more than he should.
Slow kimchi
Salted, spiced, packed into a jar, and then — crucially — ignored for weeks. Fermentation cannot be hurried. Neither, he notes, can most of the useful work a person does on themselves. The jar does not care about your schedule.
Raw with lime & chilli
Shredded thin, dressed sharp, eaten bright. Proof that you don't always have to cook something down to make it palatable — sometimes you just have to see it clearly and add the right thing. He is aware this is barely disguised.
Braised low and long
An hour on a gentle heat with garlic and a little stock, until it turns silky and sweet. The vegetable people give up on becomes the best thing on the plate. He finds this genuinely moving and is a little embarrassed about that.
Toasted with mustard seed
A South Indian influence — mustard seed popped in hot oil, curry leaves, turmeric, the cabbage wilted through it. Small additions, transformative result. The theme, if you hadn't noticed, is that the cabbage was fine all along. It just needed the right conditions.
Whatever's in the fridge
The improvised version. No recipe, no plan, just a half-cabbage and whatever's to hand. Most weeks it works. Occasionally it does not. Ben considers the failures instructive, which is a thing he says about most of his failures.
What it's taught him
What a humble vegetable has to do with the work.
Ben did not take up cabbage to become a better psychologist. He took it up because a neighbour had too many cabbages. But he is a person who finds meaning in things, sometimes against his own better judgement, and the parallels became hard to ignore.
The men Ben works with often arrive believing they are the beige of the vegetable world — that whatever's underneath is boring, unpromising, not worth the effort of getting into. They've been boiled into submission by years of getting on with it, and they've concluded that flat and grey is simply what they are. Ben does not think that's true. He thinks, like the cabbage, most people have just never been given the right conditions.
The vegetarian-curious part matters too. Ben's slow drift away from meat wasn't a decision so much as a discovery — he stopped missing the thing he'd assumed was essential once he actually enjoyed what was in front of him. A surprising amount of therapy, he's found, works the same way. People don't need to be argued out of what they think they need. They need to have a good enough experience of something else that the old certainty quietly loosens its grip.
"You can't lecture someone into changing," he says. "And you can't force a cabbage to be interesting by wanting it to be. You create the conditions — heat, patience, the right spice, enough time — and then you get out of the way and let the thing become what it can be. That's most of the job, honestly. Cabbage included."
Book a session →The three conditions
On change and conditions
"You create the conditions and then you get out of the way. That's most of the job. Cabbage included."
— Ben Stevens
I've sat with men who were written off as boring, difficult, past it — usually by themselves. Turns out they'd just never been cooked properly. I don't say that in the room. But I think it every time.
Here for the therapy, not the cabbage.
The cabbage is not on the menu. The psychology practice very much is open for bookings.