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Chris Carlin: Overcoming the Odds

Sometimes a blow on the head can be a blessing, at least in the long term. That’s what happened to Chris Carlin when he was a student at Syracuse University. He rounded the corner of a building, banged hard into a door, and it changed his life. He looked up at the building, saw that it said School of Social work, and knew that it was the field he should be studying. At the time, Chris, now a therapist who lives in Chester, was floundering as a broadcast journalism major at the Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Chris, who grew up outside Syracuse, knew social work and social workers well from his own unhappy childhood. In fact, that is why he wants to tell his own story, to help people in difficult circumstances retain their optimism. What happened to him and the way he survived, notes his wife Anita Deeg-Carlin, “can bring hope to the many members of our community who struggle with abuse, neglect, mental illness, and other such difficulties.”

Despite a childhood of difficulty and deprivation, Chris graduated from Syracuse, went on to get a master’s degree in social work, and now has his own practice as a therapist, maintaining offices in Centerbrook, Clinton, and Higganum.

Chris and his three siblings, all of whom he says had different fathers, were abandoned by their mother when he was seven. She simply left them alone in the house. His sister, the oldest, was 12. Chris recalls the only food was some bread, a sack of sugar, and some milk. They lived on that for a week. Then Chris had an idea. He borrowed a Cub Scout uniform, took a wagon, and went around the neighborhood saying he was collecting for a food drive.

“You never really know what you’re are going to do when you’re thrust into a situation where your family is in trouble,” he says.

Chris recalls his impromptu food drive collected an assortment of canned goods.

“It was the first time I ever had Dinty Moore Beef Stew,” he says.

That worked for a few weeks, but then neighbors noticed there was no car at the home and called the Department of Social Services. The children were all placed in foster care, Chris with his younger brother.

They spent 5 ½ years in 10 different foster homes, with a brief interlude of only one day. His mother took him and his brother back when he was eight, but the next morning deposited them on a relative’s stoop with a note to call the Department of Social Services.

The foster homes are filled with unhappy memories for Chris. In the worst, where he and his brother were placed for three years, Chris recalls being punished by being hung upside down by his belt on a hook in a barn. He had seen the father of the family sexually abusing a 13-year-old foster daughter.

“He knew I knew. I thought I would die on that hook, but I had another fear. He said if I told, he would do the same thing to my little brother,” Chris says.

Finally Chris and his brother planned to run away from their last foster home, but on the night that they were going to leave, his brother wet his bed.

“He hadn’t done that in years, but he was wet and cold and didn’t want to go,” Chris remembers.

That turned out to be fortunate. The very next day, Chris found out he was going to be adopted.

“If we had run away, I would have been classified as an incorrigible youth and probably not suitable for adoption,” he adds.

Although children are harder to place in adoption as they grow up, Chris says he was lucky that his family was looking for an older child. In at least one respect, however, he and his new family were visibly dissimilar. Chris is six feet, two inches.

“I think the tallest one in my adopted family was five feet four,” he recalls.

Chris cannot explain why he did not suffer the same problems as his siblings, all of whom had serious emotional troubles. He adds that he is quite sure his mother also suffered from mental disease.

“I just kept saying that I was going to live, that they would not take my spirit and I would stay positive,” he says.

There was an ironic moment in his social work studies when Chris was doing at internship at the New York State Department of Social Services. His supervisor was the person who had placed him in foster care.

After college, Chris went out west and worked as a counselor and team leader in Arizona and Idaho at a series of what their founders called therapeutic boarding schools for youngsters with a range of psychological and behavioral issues. Some therapeutic schools have since closed, in part because of complaints about the severity of their methods and lack of properly credentialed staff.

Chris, as he looks back, sees some virtue in his experiences.

“I did emotional growth work along with the students; I looked at what had been done to me and how that held back my own life,” he says.

Now, in his work as a counselor, he shares his story with his own patients. He says it creates a bond which fosters communication.

“Classically, training is that you don’t tell anything about yourself, not even where you live, but if I put my guts on the table and tell my story, then people get it. They understand that I know these feelings,” he says.

One of the focus areas of his practice is teenagers, particularly teenage boys, who he says relate to a male therapist.

“Adolescents have so much going to with their bodies, their heads, their parents,” he says.

According to Chris, parents are good at telling children what to do, but less good at listening to them. And that, Chris adds, is the skill they need to develop.

Parents, he notes, cannot and should not try to insulate their children from failure.

“Parents all want success for their children, but we have to allow for both success and failure. We learn from out failures. Children need to know they can fail and get up and still find success,” he says.

Chris and Anita and their two children have lived in Chester for some six years.

“We love the community; we are down at the market every Sunday,” he says.

They are also involved with the Valley Stands Up, a group formed in 2016 to fight hate and bias after the defacement of a sign promoting human rights. Their daughter Mikaela, is 12 and son Kai is 10. (Explaining Kai’s name, Chris says, “after Mikaela, we couldn’t name him Bill.”)

As he looks at his own children, Chris contrasts their lives with his own growing up. When she was seven, he realized Mikaela’s behavior was unfamiliar to him. He wondered why and then realized he was the reason.

“When I was seven, I was struggling; I had so much to do when I was that age. She was a normal seven-year-old. I never had that opportunity,” he says.