About Jack Stell
The client sitting across from me is crying. Not the polite, contained kind of crying people do when they want to appear in control — but the ragged, embarrassed kind, the kind where a grown person makes sounds they haven’t made since childhood and doesn’t know what to do with their hands. I’ve seen this hundreds of times. I wait. I don’t reach for the tissue box yet. Some tears need to breathe before you interrupt them.
This person trusts me with the worst thing that ever happened to them.
And then I think: They have absolutely no idea who they’re talking to.
They don’t know that I began a police record at the age of nine.
They don’t know about the six months in a medium-security prison in Fairfax County, Virginia. They don’t know about the institutional placements, the failed grades, the years spent in rooms where the adults in charge were supposed to help and didn’t.
They don’t know that when I was eighteen years old, I received forty sessions of electroconvulsive therapy — ECT, electroshock — in the basement of a hospital in Washington, D.C. That when it was over I sat in a room and could not name the objects around me. That I had to relearn language the way an infant learns it, pointing at things and asking:
What’s that? What’s that?
They don’t know about the twelve years I served on four submarines, going places the Navy still doesn’t talk about. Or the nearly two decades after that in classified work at the highest clearance levels.
When I found a new doctor after moving to New York, he went through my records slowly, methodically, page by page — and then set the folder down and looked me straight in the eye.
“You shouldn’t be alive,” he said.
He wasn’t being dramatic. He was being clinical.
He’s right. I shouldn’t be.
But here I am.
Why I Became a Trauma Therapist
I am a trauma therapist because I survived trauma. The bridges I can build with clients: the credibility, the empathy, the ability to sit with someone in their worst moment and not flinch. These come directly from the places where I should have broken and didn’t.
At fifty-three, I made a deliberate turn: back to school, into clinical training, toward the therapy room. Not away from everything that had happened, but because of it. The tools in my clinical toolbox were forged in the same fire my clients are still standing in. I know what it costs to carry hard experience. I also know what becomes possible when someone decides to transform that weight into something useful.
Today I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Mental Health Counselor, and Substance Use Disorder Professional (LMFT, LMHC, SUDP), holding six active licenses across four states. I am an EMDRIA Approved Therapist and Consultant, trained in the treatment of trauma at its most complex. I see clients in person and virtually through Trauma Recovery, LLC, working with survivors of all backgrounds: veterans and military families, survivors of childhood adversity, first responders, and anyone carrying what life has left behind.
Vertical Moments is the story of how I got here.
A Note About Kathleen
This book did not exist without Kathleen Stell.
She is my wife of thirty-two years, my creative collaborator, and one of this memoir’s true authors. She built the structure, the chapter outline, the organization of sixty-plus years of experience into a sequence that could be followed and felt. She asked the questions that unlocked the answers:
What did it smell like? Why didn’t you give up?
She asked that last question for thirty-two years, in different forms, in different conversations, until the real answer finally came up. That answer is the spine of this book.
She found the people. She found the documents. She tracked down men and women from forty years earlier, called every Landis in a Lancaster County phone book until she found the right one, retrieved files that had been sitting in attics for decades. She is a family history researcher and genealogist by instinct and by practice, and she brought all of those instincts to this project.
She is not a background figure in this memoir. She is one of its authors.
We live together in Stillwater, New York, where we co-own Storybook Cottage, a bed and breakfast on the Hudson River. It is the first place in my life that has ever felt like home.
I am seventy-six years old. It took that long.