About

I’m a therapist and writer with a longstanding interest in the ways human beings become trapped — not just by trauma, anxiety, addiction, and family dynamics, but by our own attempts to escape discomfort through control.

Over time I began to see a recurring pattern beneath many forms of suffering: the attempt to make people, emotions, relationships, outcomes, uncertainty, or even ourselves behave the way we believe they must in order for us to feel okay. What begins as protection can gradually become compulsion. The harder we try to control our experience, the narrower and more painful our life can become.

I came to think of these patterns as monkeytraps.

A monkeytrap is a simple device used in some parts of the world to catch monkeys. A piece of fruit is placed inside a narrow-necked bottle or container. The monkey reaches in and grabs the fruit, but cannot remove its clenched fist. Freedom requires letting go — but the monkey will often remain trapped rather than release what it cannot keep.

The metaphor stayed with me because it seemed to describe something profoundly human.

Much of my work explores this paradox: how our efforts to gain control can unintentionally deepen suffering, rigidity, isolation, and fear — and how healing may require not greater control, but greater awareness, responsibility, surrender, flexibility, and intimacy.

These ideas eventually evolved into an ongoing body of writing that includes Monkeytraps: Why Everybody Tries to Control Everything and How We Can Stop (2015), and the forthcoming Monkeytraps in Everyday Life, Monkeytraps for Adult Children, and Bert’s Therapy.

Bert began as a humorous inner figure — a kind of anxious, controlling “inner monkey” — but gradually became something much more complex: vulnerable, defensive, frightened, determined, lonely, stubborn, and deeply human. Through Bert, I explore the psychology of control with a mixture of humor, compassion, and psychological reflection.

Alongside my writing, I continue to explore psychotherapy, addiction, creativity, spirituality, dreamwork, and family systems — all of them, in different ways, touching the ongoing tension between control and freedom.