this exciting book breaks new ground in identifying the major cause of relationship failure as the need to control - in marriages and families, with friends and within organizations. Compelled to Control reflects Miller's sweeping knowledge as a thinker, a speakers and a writer. Going far beyond "how to control a controller," Miller speaks from the perspective of experience and personal change. "When a controller has the sense of life being out of control," he says, "he or she reacts with an even stronger need to 'get things under control'...usually with the negative result of alienating the people who matter the most." Miller tackles this deeply denied, seemingly universal phenomenon with compassion and offers a way out of the dilemma. He tells who to approach broken relationships in new ways, leaving behind destructive patterns of perfectionism and self-justification. Keith miller is one of those rare writers who can combine intellectual acuity with deeply felt insight born of his own struggle for authenticity.Compelled to Control is an impressive contribution to the literature of recovery and personal change.

IntroductionSomething is wrong in America. A great, unseen vibration is shaking the country, causing ripples—then waves—of anxiety, stress, anger and shame. These waves sweep across boundaries of race, gender, class and education into the lives of almost everyone. Even those apparently protected by wealth, power and religion are not immune. The vibration that threatens to shake us apart is fear. We are a nation of people who fear we are not "enough." Deep in the recess of our hearts, in places we rarely reveal even to ourselves, we feel shameful and inadequate—and we're terrified someone will find out. We live in constant fear that our shortcomings will be exposed to family, to friends, to the world. We wake up at night reliving a mistake and feel overwhelmed with shame. We worry. Our personal relationships don't satisfy, nor do other aspects of our lives. We are lonely and frustrated, our marriages often end in separation or divorce, our children are estranged. In an effort to "fix it" we may turn to compulsive or addictive behaviors, only to find that our unconscious attempts to cover the pain are unsuccessful, too, and bring only more loneliness and fear. We look everywhere for someone or something outside of ourselves to blame or complain about, for something to kill the pain and bring us peace. But when we increase our efforts to find happiness, we come face to face with the uncomfortable feeling that we are "not doing it right." Our desperate strivings leave our fundamental issues untouched. Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, viewed this phenomenon another way: "We are complaining about the ants at the picnic when the bears are eating our children." Life in the last decade of the century has changed our experience of time. Our grandparents seemed to live a life of relative serenity, moving at a steady pace down the quiet river called Time, on a strong but invisible current. As they paddled downstream, they heard the sounds and felt the pulse of life in the river and on the surrounding banks. The slower pace of life allowed them to live more in harmony with the flow of the water, the chirping of birds on shore, the scudding of clouds overhead. But in today's world, we race downstream as if on a giant speedboat, ignoring the natural current of the river that flows, we think, too slowly for us to do all we must do. We grapple with time, try to expand it in our accelerating race to get more and more accomplished in a day, a week, a year, than anyone in the past ever dreamed of doing. In our race against the clock, we have created a fast-paced reality in which a person who elects to work "only" an eight-hour day has little chance to get ahead or climb the corporate ladder. As we zip through our days and nights, all we see and hear of the river bank is an unrecognizable blur. By some miracle our minds can move faster and faster—but our feelings cannot. They still conform to the steady flow of the river. When our minds and f

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Excerpted from Compelled to Control: Recovering Intimacy in Broken Relationships by J. Keith Miller
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