Charles C. McCormack's Blog

Yesterday, I received this email. concerning my book "Essence."
"Congratulations! Your title has won the Montaigne Medal for the
current Eric Hoffer Award season. The Montaigne Medal is given in
honor of the great French philosopher and awarded to the most
thought-provoking titles each year. This is a special distinction
beneath the Eric Hoffer Award umbrella. (Your book is still being
considered for category, press, and grand prizes.)

All prizewinners will be listed on-line at
< http://www.HofferAward.com > www.HofferAward.com and, later in May,
covered in the US Review of Books (www.theUSreview.com).

This year the Eric Hoffer Awards had over 2500 registrants, out of which forty+ were considered for the medal by a second panel of judges. I'm pleased as can be to announce that my book Essence was this year's winner.

I received this announcement in the mail today:
Congratulations!
We are proud to present you with our Literary Titan Book Award.
Your book deserves extraordinary praise and we are proud to acknowledge your dedication,
writing skill and imagination.

The Silver Award is bestowed on books that expertly deliver complex characters, intricate worlds,
and thought provoking themes. The ease with which the story is told is a reflection of the author’s
talent in exercising fluent, powerful, and appropriate language.

Thomas Anderson Editor In Chief Literary Titan

6/7/2017: Received this email that makes all the time and effort put into writing Hatching Charlie well worth the effort.

"Hello.  Not sure how to proceed.  I live in vermont but grew up in baltimore and visit from time to time bc family here in this area.  Found "hatching charlie" through having landed on some national social workers' conference website some months back.  (There was a sw conference here in balto this spring and i thought i wished i was a sw or therapist or something so i would have had reason to attend but am not,  just need the therapy to "get on with life" but it is late ...am 60 this year.) Okay so found hatching charlie and bought on Amazon..... this is fantastic story...it brought me to the edge of the storm....my love and congtatulations to you and your perseverance and tenacity and work ...  what a puzzle, what a grapple so weighted in reality....so the weight is real both when its felt and when it starts to lift.....so now am pouring through your borderline states and i would change "marriage" to "any and all relationship"  Can not find therapists in vt...maybe you know one 
..in meantime...do you see new people..could i even see you once ?  
Best wishes"

I received the following gift in my email this morning. I had truly given up all hope of hearing from them given the weeks and months that had passed and then there it was:

Dear Charles McCormack:

I'm very pleased to announce that the May 2017 issue of our online book review magazine "Small Press Bookwatch" features a review of "Hatching Charlie".

Here is the review:

James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, WI 53575

http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/...

The Biography Shelf

Hatching Charlie

Critique: Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Hatching Charlie: A Memoir" is an inherently fascinating, thoughtful, and thought-provoking read from beginning to end. While unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary American Biography collections, "Hatching Charlie: A Memoir" will also prove to be of immense interest to the supplemental studies reading lists of psychology students as well.

Interesting call from a friend this morning. He reported being in the midst of listening to the audible version of Hatching Charlie: A Psychotherapist’s Tale and finding my voice more muted in the telling of the first fifteen chapters, so much so that he kept wondering “Where is Charlie’s voice?” Then, at chapter sixteen, when I begin working in a psychiatric setting where I report “getting myself back from this place” my voice changes to the one he is used to hearing. It is as if I came more alive, which is exactly what happened in the story of my life. Our thought together was something along the lines of “Isn’t it amazing how powerful the unconscious is. How it makes itself known in the most unexpected of ways.” He now finds the audible version more engaging. In all fairness, listening to a book is a very subjective experience, and I have had others tell me they much prefer the audible version from the beginning. I know I do in that it allows me to convey in tone, pitch, pace and so on what I cannot in the written form.

BLOG

Today, one of my patients spoke of attending a high school reunion. There someone recalled a meeting that had occurred during high school, a meeting my patient remembered very well. One girl, whose father was dying, talked about how apparent it was listing her father’s fatigue, loss of weight and pallor. It was at this moment, my patient realized that her father was also dying. Indeed, he had been dying for years from a degenerative disease and my patient had come to assume that he would simply continue to die forever. Now, to her shock, she realized her father's death was imminent. She broke down being unable to imagine life without him. Subsequently, she never wanted to talk about it and no one referred her to therapy. She kept her father’s dying a secret from all but her closest friends. My patient asked me, “Would I be less screwed up today if I had had therapy at that time.” Mind you my patient is a very successful CEO and president of a company. She was speaking of her inner life. I shared my thoughts with her. I felt if introduced to psychotherapy earlier that she might have been more open to herself sooner, developing greater self-understanding, self-acceptance, and self-compassion during the years that had ensued, indeed perhaps arriving at the very place of self-care she found herself in now. She went on relating her thought that maybe she and the friends she gravitated to at that time shared a brokenness. I revealed my own thought, in no way original, that in some way we are all broken, that none of us escapes our early years unscathed. However, some people protected by denial and compartmentalization don't know they’re broken until much later in life when the doors of their compartmentalization are kicked down by the adversity that confronts most of us sooner or later in our lives. The great sadness is in the fact that what ails us goes unacknowledged, unrecognized and unaddressed (reconciled) by those around us, leaving the individual alone and isolated deep within themselves. The good news is that once aware of this state of affairs, each of us has a choice as to whether we want to remain that way. I think it may be true that it’s never too late to be happy, but each of us has to find some way to give it to ourselves.
Charles C. McCormack, MA, MSW, LCSW-C
Author: Hatching Charlie: A Psychotherapist’s Tale
And
Treating Borderline States in Marriage: Dealing with Oppositionalism, Ruthless Aggression, and Severe Resistance.

Repression is not a local anesthetic but a wide-ranging one. It numbs not only the capacity to feel painful feelings, such as shame, sadness, or anxiety, but the capacity to feel in general, including positive feelings, such as the joy and happiness one might feel from the nuances entailed in a beautiful sunset or the varying textures of a tender kiss.
In this world of the repressed, cut off from the light of consciousness and the spring-fed tributaries of openness to the world, the growing darkness can only feed upon itself.
www.createspace.com/6716585

If there are two counter-intuitive things I’ve discovered in my wending journey as a man and as a psychotherapist, it’s that it takes great courage to be happy and that most of us are as happy as we can stand.

Hatching Charlie: A Psychotherapist's Talehttps://www.createspace.com/6716585