These books explore how our attempts to control life can leave us trapped—and how we can begin to let go. Together, they form the Monkeytraps Project, with different starting points for general readers, adult children of dysfunctional families, and therapists.
Monkeytraps: Why We Try to Control Everything and How We Can Stop
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.
The new edition of Monkeytraps is due shortly. You can still buy the first edition here:
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Coming next in the Monkeytraps series
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.
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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.
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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.
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Monkeytraps for Therapists
What happens when a therapist’s need for control enters the consulting room?
Monkeytraps for Therapists explores the controlling patterns clients bring to therapy—and the ways therapists can become caught in those patterns themselves. Through clinical stories, reflection, and practical interventions, it examines how our wish to help can become pressure to produce change, relieve our own discomfort, or secure a client’s approval.
Written as an invitation to conversation, the book explores how we can recognize these traps and work with greater awareness, flexibility, and willingness to let clients find their own way.
Completed manuscript; awaiting publication.
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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.
