Vertical Moments
How a Traumatized Child Became a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of the Hands That Reached Out to Me
A life can turn on a single moment — a therapist who asks the right question, a doctor who chooses life over the easier path, a minister who opens a door that was never supposed to open. Sometimes the reaching is mutual. Sometimes you are simply pulled toward the light by someone who decided, without being asked, that you were worth saving. This is the story of those moments, and the man they made.
The Book
Every trauma survivor carries a ledger of rooms where no one asked the right question — the basement, the institution, the placement that processed instead of seeing. Jack Stell carries those rooms too. But he also carries something rarer: a precise memory of the people who changed his direction, one degree at a time, until the degrees added up to a different life entirely.
Vertical Moments moves between two timelines that turn out to be the same story. A childhood marked by abuse and instability. Twelve years aboard Navy submarines. Nearly two decades in intelligence work at the highest clearance levels. And then, at fifty-three, a deliberate turn toward becoming the kind of person who shows up in someone else’s vertical moment — a licensed trauma therapist and EMDR specialist, doing for others what was once done for him.
This is not a redemption story told from a safe distance. It’s an accounting — honest about anger, honest about the cost of survival, honest about the rooms where help never came — that arrives, finally, at gratitude. Not for what happened, but for who reached out anyway. And for what surviving it made possible: the hard-won tools, the hard-earned instincts, and the particular capacity to sit with another person’s pain that can only come from having lived inside your own.
Advance Praise
“For clinicians, this memoir offers a powerful reminder of why our work matters and how deeply it can change a life… For survivors, it offers validation, hope, and the reassurance that healing is not linear, not perfect, and not out of reach.”
Tracy Ryan Kidd, LCSW, from the Foreword
“For veterans navigating PTSD, and families trying to understand what their loved ones carry, this book is a mandatory read.”
Colonel Darel Maxfield, U.S. Army (Retired)
“A true hero’s journey — full of courage, heart and hope. It will be a gift to survivors, clinicians, and anyone who deeply respects the power of healing.”
Nancy Newport, LPC, LMFT, Jack’s clinical supervisor during his internship
About the Author
Jack Stell knows what it is to be a child in rooms where no one asks the right question — to move through institutions that process rather than see, and to carry the weight of that invisibility long into adulthood. He also knows what it is to be reached for, at exactly the right moment, by exactly the right person. Vertical Moments is his account of both.
His path from traumatized child to trauma therapist ran through twelve years aboard Navy submarines, nearly two decades in intelligence work at the highest clearance levels, and a deliberate reinvention at fifty-three that brought him into the therapy room — this time as the clinician. Today Jack is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Mental Health Counselor, and Substance Use Disorder Professional (LMFT, LMHC, SUDP) and an EMDRIA Approved Therapist and Consultant. He holds six active licenses across four states and runs Trauma Recovery, LLC, seeing clients in person and virtually. He works with trauma survivors of all backgrounds — veterans, first responders, survivors of childhood adversity, and anyone carrying what life has left behind.
Working With Jack
If you’re looking for a trauma therapist, not just a memoir, Jack sees clients through his practice, Trauma Recovery, LLC.