WATCH LIVE 7pm MT
https://vimeo.com/event/5368136
October 3, 2025
A Bold New Book, Brand, and Movement Toward Healing, Personal Accountability, and Resilience.
On the two-year anniversary of a public breakdown that changed his life, Northern builder, father, and mental health advocate Trevor Kasteel will launch his first book and his new brand, Kick-Ass Love, at the Northern Arts & Cultural Centre (NACC) in Yellowknife on Friday, October 3, 2025.
The live/on-line event will mark the official debut of his first ever book, a new speaker series, and the Kick-Ass Love podcast (YouTube).
Trevor’s journey is one of unflinching honesty and deep transformation. For decades, he has fought an invisible complex trauma disease: between the ages of 13 and 19, Trevor was repeatedly sexually abused and psychologically tortured by a family friend and a trusted senior figure in both the church and healthcare system.
“He ate me, he raped my identity. He downloaded a twisted sense of love. He was just another form of cancer simply eating away at my soul, rather than my flesh.”
“I unconsciously never thought I was tortured so why consciously would I think I was tortured. I just had sexual abuse. Big F’ing deal.”
Like many men, Trevor was conditioned to ‘MAN-up’ and struggle silently—but in the summer of 2023 after another trigger-filled mental health crisis, this forced a choice. A choice to bankrupt his multi-million-dollar construction company or continue with restructuring it:
“I had to choose my business or my life—I chose me.”
During the NWT 2023 wildfire evacuations and during a month-long stay in an Alberta psychiatric facility, Trevor began yet again to discover more and deeper sexual molested root cause pieces of his infected self. Therefore, both company and Trevor could not restructure at same time.
Trevor’s story dismantles any myth that vulnerability is weakness, instead showing uncomfortable investigation, truth-seeking and truth-telling is an act of self-leadership and strength. His personal formula—Suffering + Courage = Resilience—is at the heart of his new book, which he describes as a detailed blueprint toward facing pain, telling the truth, searching for and reclaiming one’s inner sense of self… one’s soul.
The Kick-Ass Love launch event will feature Trevor hosting a public reading with Q&A, an introduction to his speaker series, and the formal debut of the YouTube Kick-Ass Love podcast—a raw, unapologetic space described as “a book building site, a blueprint, a firepit where we tell the truth and we don’t look away.”
“It would have been so much simpler if he physically kidnapped and sexually used me for those seven years. So much simpler, so much more accepted, so much more understood.”
“I fight him every single day.”
“You are not your suffering; you are your resilience,” says Kasteel. “This book, this brand, this podcast—it’s not just my story. It’s proof that true courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the willing action to walk into it, to heal.”
Event Details:
● What: Launch of Kick-Ass Love brand, book, speaker series, and podcast
● When: Friday, October 3, 2025, 7pm
● Where: Northern Arts & Cultural Centre (NACC), 4701-52 Avenue,
Yellowknife, NT
Media Contact: Trevor Kasteel (867-445-2800), (trevor@kasteel.ca)