Carefully stored away in Jesse Holland’s condo in East Brunswick, New Jersey, are the totems of a culture that nearly killed him.

When I visited his place on a cold afternoon in December of 2023, it had been nearly four decades since Jesse first donned his dress blues as a first-year, or “plebe,” at the Valley Forge Military Academy, just north of Philadelphia. He showed me the uniform he was given at age 14, neatly folded, still hanging in his closet. Jesse’s old textbooks and academic records from the Forge were tucked away, too, as was a towel and laundry basket the school had issued him. Also, a brass badge depicting Gen. George Washington praying on the Pennsylvania Revolutionary War battleground for which the Forge is named.

As we settled on the couch, Jesse acknowledged that even most of his computer passwords play on the school’s name. “For so many years, I never left the Forge, even though I was physically removed from the property,” he explained. This insight, he added, stemmed from a passage he’d read in The Body Keeps the Score, a somewhat controversial 2014 bestseller that tries to explain how trauma can seemingly trap someone in time. Jesse and I were speaking now because he was on a journey to finally wriggle free. “The only way out,” he reasoned, “is through.”