Steve Hauptman

I'm a clinical social worker and Gestalt therapist who began my professional life as an alcoholism counselor, which taught me to see addiction as an attempt to get control over feelings. Later I came to realize that all human beings are pretty much hardwired to be control addicts, and that this addiction to control causes most of the problems they bring into therapy -- anxiety, depression, communication problems, parenting problems and lousy relationships. So for almost twenty years I've been studying control, helping clients and readers to better understand it, and teaching them healthy alte atives. That's the focus of my blog Monkeytraps, and the subject of the book I'm writing, tentatively titled The Illusion of Control.