Books

My writing explores the psychology of control: how human beings become trapped not only by trauma, anxiety, addiction, and family systems, but by our attempts to manage discomfort through control itself.

These books approach that theme from different angles — theoretical, practical, personal, relational, and symbolic — but all are rooted in the same central question:

What happens when the attempt to feel safe begins to imprison us?

*

Monkeytraps explores the hidden psychology of control: the attempt to make people, emotions, situations, uncertainty, and even ourselves behave the way we believe they must in order for us to feel okay.

Drawing from psychotherapy, addiction, family systems, and everyday experience, the book examines how control can gradually become compulsive — narrowing life even as it promises safety and relief.

At the center of the book is the metaphor of the monkeytrap: a simple device that captures monkeys not through force, but through their inability to let go.

You can buy Monkeytraps here:

*

Monkeytraps in Everyday Life

Forthcoming

This collection explores the many forms control can take in ordinary life: relationships, worry, perfectionism, resentment, approval-seeking, conflict avoidance, overthinking, caregiving, self-criticism, addiction, certainty-seeking, and more.

Each chapter examines a different “monkeytrap” — the emotional logic behind it, the relief it promises, the suffering it creates, and the possibility of letting go.

*

Monkeytraps for Adult Children

Forthcoming

This book explores the long afterlife of growing up in emotionally constricting, unpredictable, neglectful, controlling, or dysfunctional family systems.

Adult children often carry forward deeply ingrained strategies for managing anxiety, conflict, shame, uncertainty, and attachment — strategies that once protected them, but later become limiting and painful.

Monkeytraps for Adult Children examines how control operates within these inherited emotional patterns, and how healing may require not perfection or emotional self-control, but greater awareness, flexibility, responsibility, and intimacy.

*

Bert’s Therapy

Forthcoming

Bert’s Therapy is an ongoing exploration of the controlling parts of ourselves through the evolving figure of Bert — an anxious, stubborn, frightened, funny, manipulative, vulnerable, deeply human “inner monkey.”

Through conversations, reflections, images, and symbolic encounters, Bert gradually becomes more than a metaphor. He becomes a way of exploring the emotional world beneath control: fear, longing, shame, loneliness, hope, defensiveness, and the desperate wish to feel safe.

Some of these pieces are humorous. Some painful. Some absurd. Much of Bert’s world lives somewhere in between.

*

These books are interconnected parts of an ongoing exploration of control, suffering, freedom, and emotional life. Together they form an evolving attempt to understand how human beings become trapped — and how we sometimes begin to let go.