When Carter was five years old, her mother had a serious mental breakdown, which took her three years to recover from. After recovery, Carter's mother decided to become a psychotherapist. Carter now pays her mother to read scripts and provide her opinion of the characters' psychological motivations. A few years after her mother's recovery, Carter's father became deaf in one ear while on holiday in Greece. He was diagnosed with acoustic neuroma, and underwent an operation to remove a benign tumor. However, the surgery went very wrong; after 9 hours in surgery, Raymond, at 50 years of age, had a stroke that left him half-paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. With Carter's two older brothers away at college, she alone was left to help her mother deal with issues.