Healing of a Psychotherapist by Charles C McCormack

Healing of a Psychotherapist: A Journey of Rebellion, Reflection, and Redemption is a gripping story of one man’s coming to understand and eventually overcome the paralyzing effect that a traumatic childhood and unacknowledged grief had on his capacity to experience fulfillment despite his worldly successes. In this memoir, Charles McCormack, a multi-award-winning psychotherapist, doesn’t offer himself up as a dry, clinical case but tells the emotionally raw story of his life and the people in it. Along the way, he conveys the layers of uncertainty, shame, low self-esteem, egotism, mistakes made and then made again, the lessons learned and then forgotten, the failures and successes, the joys and heartbreaks, and the wisdom and folly that constricted him like the successive shells of a Russian Nesting Doll.
On her death bed, his mother sensing the dark ampule of his abandonment planted all those years ago, refused to leave him again. On two separate occasions, she rose from her death bed, teetered over to him, placed her palms on the table for support, leaned forward, fiercely looked him in the eye, and emphatically demanded in her French-accented English, “Charlie, have a good life! Charlie, have a good life!” She wasn’t asking; she was telling. She then waited, unmoving, until, looking directly back into her eyes and choking back tears, he responded, “I will, Mom. I will.” Like a radioactive pellet inserted in the middle of a cancerous tumor, the directive to “Have a good life” became McCormack’s goal. Healing of a Psychotherapist is the story of his journey.

Among McCormack’s accomplishments: Clinical Social Worker of the Year, Maryland Society of Clinical Social Workers; author Treating Borderline States in Marriage; Guest Faculty, Washington School of Psychiatry; Graduate The New Directions Writing from a Psychoanalytic Perspective program of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Essence, the previous edition of Healing of a Psychotherapist, is the winner of the Montaigne Medal awarded to the most thought-provoking book of 2022 by the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2023 McCormack was honored to receive the Emeritus Award from the University of Maryland for his innovative contributions to social work practice.