The Journey

According to my doctors, I shouldn’t even be here. But Dr. G, a psychiatrist who worked with me over a key period of my life told me that with everything I’d been through, I should either be dead or living on the streets. He told me not everyone makes it—and he’s right.

But I did make it. And now, I’m speaking up.

On October 17, 2023, my company, Kasteel Construction in Yellowknife filed for bankruptcy. Twenty years of building something from nothing—gone. But the real collapse wasn’t financial. It was personal. Letting the company go was the only way to save himself. People thought I’d lost my mind, and in some ways, I had. But I can see now, from here, that the collapse of my psyche and my business, was the way I found my soul.

What you don’t know about me and likely wouldn’t have known, because I’m a man, I ran a multi-million dollar company, I was a city councillor and I prided myself in my ability to ‘keep it together’, is that I was psychologically, spiritually and sexually abused by a trusted family friend between the ages of 13 and 19. It took over twenty years for the scars of that harm to come to the surface.

Dr. G said to me:

“Trevor, to the best of my knowledge, those first thirteen years of your life saved you.”

And this is the story I want to share.

I had bedrock beneath my feet. The wisdom and love of my father (who passed when I was 13), the grit only life in The North can bring you, my community, and my insatiable quest for knowledge.

The Message

At the center of my work is a simple but powerful formula:

Suffering + Courage = Resilience

I call this the Kick-Ass Love formula because it’s what kept me alive. Sometimes I needed a loving kick in the ass to keep me moving forward.

For years, my life was defined by this painful childhood abuse. Still, daily, I have moments where my ‘suffering’ threatens to crush me – but it doesn’t have to. Where there is an possibility, there is courage.

Courage is something we all have access to, even when we don’t think we do.

I created 15 awareness tools to keep me going. I pulled in the best of Clint Eastwood (Kick-Ass), a little bit of Ghandi (peaceful warrior) and a whole lot of Curly (3 Stooges) for fun and I came up with the L.A.F. method: Love, Accountability and Fun to resource myself when I wanted to give up. And I dove head first into academic reading from the Canadian and American Psychological Association to find the definitions I needed to locate where I was in the madness of it all.

And I healed.

And I am still healing.

And I will always choose healling.

We don’t need to go searching for suffering—life brings it.

We don’t need to create resilience—it’s the a natural byproduct of surviving.

The only place we need to go to work in, is at the courage. And that’s what my work is about.

Your suffering does not disqualify you. Your courage will surprise you.

Your resilience is already inside of you – waiting for you to recognize it.