Eddie Stephens’ legal career had just begun when a client confided he was addicted to crack cocaine.
Stephens was astonished. The client was successful in his work, so he must be doing well, he had thought.
He was to learn over the years ahead not to be surprised. The more people the West Palm Beach man represented as a family attorney, the more he saw lives derailed by problems that included psychiatric and substance-use disorders.
Stephens was also to be reminded, again and again, how lucky he had been. He also had experienced childhood events that could have skewed the course of his adult life.
“I am lucky to be leading a functional and productive life,” he says.
He hadn’t felt lucky then. Both his parents had substance-use disorders. He was in the 11th grade when his mother died and he went to live with a grandmother. He was left on his own to find the caring, support, guidance and encouragement his classmates got from their parents.
Bit by bit, he found what he needed from people around him. Friends, teachers and other adults saw gaps and moved to fill them. In the process they met his greatest need — to know that he was not alone.
“They were angels.” he said.
Stephens also found healing in discovering his talents. He loved to perform and to write.
He could use both skills — public speaking, and putting together a case — as an attorney and have the stable life he wanted.
As he entered adulthood, he found he also loved to help people — to do what others had done for him.
It was in his volunteer work he learned how lucky he was.
Traumatic events such as he had experienced are now so widely recognized for their lasting health and psychological damage that they have a name and even an acronym: adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
They can include substance-use problems in the home, witnessing domestic violence at home, the death of a family member by suicide, being the victim of violence and abuse and, among the most common and significant, divorce.
Specializing in high-conflict divorces, Stephens could see the toll the conflict and hostility of a disintegrating marriage could have on children.
He spoke at a Center for Child Counseling event in 2015. The nonprofit, founded in 1999, provides information and services to address the effects of adverse childhood experiences. It has served thousands of Palm Beach County children since, and provided training for thousands of professionals, students, caregivers and others.
Stephens joined its board the following year. Then in a law journal article, he pulled together what he had learned, arguing that family lawyers should be “trauma informed,” so that they could better serve clients.
Since then, he says, more than 8,000 people have been touched by the article.
Training to recognize and respond to trauma now qualifies as two hours of mental health credits for the Continuing Legal Education credits Florida attorneys must complete every three years.
The center uses money raised through the training to get more services to children.
As awareness of the impact of trauma has grown and spread, he says, “It’s a movement.”
Married happily with one son in graduate school and another in college, Stephens enjoys the life he built with the help of caring people.
He still gets to perform as a public speaker, and, in 2022, told his story at The Palm Beach Post’s inaugural Storytellers event.
He wants everyone to have the opportunities he had to heal and have a full life.
“We’re all kind of a product of our own experiences,” he says. “I try to take an experience and make it better and fairer.”
