Charles McCormack began his career in mental health, volunteering at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, a psychiatric teaching hospital near Baltimore, Maryland, in 1974 at age 25. Subsequently, while working in drug abuse treatment, day and evening hospitals, and family violence and sexual abuse treatment programs, he earned Master's Degrees in both Psychology and Clinical Social Work. In 1988, at age 39, he was named the Senior Social Worker of Adult Long-term Inpatient Services, supervising the social work treatment of 140 inpatients with diagnoses ranging from eating disorders to personality disorders to schizophrenia. He also became the first social worker in the hospital's history invited to join the Teaching and Supervisory Faculty. He was a University of Maryland and Smith College Schools of Social Work field instructor. With the demise of long-term inpatient treatment under the eroding pressure of managed care, McCormack left the hospital in 1992 at age 43, entering private practice.
Grieving the loss of his professional home, McCormack wrote an article published in the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy (1989), translating the lessons learned in inpatient work to outpatient practice. In turn, this writing came to the attention of the Washington School of Psychiatry, which invited him to speak at their annual conference and subsequently to join their faculty.
In 1994 McCormack was honored as the Clinician of the Year by the Maryland Society of Clinical Social Work. In 2000 he published his seminal book "Treating Borderline States in Marriage: Dealing with Oppositionalism, Ruthless Aggression, and Severe Resistance," in which he introduced the concept of separate alternating dyadic interactions to help manage emotional dysfunction in challenging couples. In 2006, he graduated from The New Directions Writing from a Psychoanalytic Perspective program of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.
In 2018 McCormack began writing his autobiography in response to two questions asked by his adult children: who are you, and what is life about? His automatic response to the latter question was, "The pursuit of happiness." His children seemed unconvinced by this facile answer, and McCormack began writing his autobiography "Hatching Charlie" to make his case. As McCormack revisited his history, he became acutely aware of how his difficult childhood had affected his capacity for happiness in adulthood despite whatever successes he had achieved. Subsequently, he modified his goal to include the effort to illustrate how such a dampening on the capacity for happiness can occur and his measures to overcome it. After multiple revisions, the book "Essence: The Unseen Waters of Our Lives," emerged to win the Montaigne Medal for being the most thought-provoking book of 2022 by the prestigious Eric Hoffer Book Awards while also earning an Honorary Mention in the category of Memoir. "Healing of a Psychotherapist: A Journey of Rebellion, Reflection and Redemption," the second and improved edition of "Essence," was published in 2023, and McCormack unpublished "Essence."
On March 10th, 2023, McCormack received the Emeritus Award from the University of Maryland for his passionate and innovative contributions to social work practice.
Now partially retired, he maintains a small private telehealth practice in Aberdeen, Md. He resides on the border of the Bush River just off the Chesapeake Bay, enjoying boating with his wife Janet, long walks, audiobooks, photography, strumming a guitar, travel, and listening to the waves lapping the shore as Blue Heron and Bald Eagles grace the sky. Every several weeks he gets together with one or more of his nine grandchildren, which he finds both exhilarating and exhausting. Still, he eventually recovers and does it again, enjoying their uniqueness as they evolve into the mystery of their respective personhoods.
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