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More About the Talk
What's It About?
A survivor of complex trauma, I was on the verge of suicide for years. I’d been in therapy since I was 16 and gone to 12-step meetings almost daily since I was 20. Regardless of these efforts, my anxiety, flashbacks, and despair just got worse.
One day, sitting through yet another AA meeting, twelve year sobriety chip in hand, it dawned on me that the program itself was damaging to me as a trauma survivor. I walked out and never went back.
I decided to forge a new path. For two years, I struggled on my own. Then I met Dr. Cohen, a brilliant and controversial therapist, when he sauntered into the Argentine tango class I taught. Just when I was making significant progress in our therapy sessions, he died unexpectedly. Cohen’s death left me terrified I would regress, Flowers-for-Algernon style, to how I’d been before our work together.
While battling that fear - and with little outside support - I had to learn to trust my own mind again. I needed to make major changes to the life I’d accepted under the influence of the 12-step program: abusive partner, intellectual famine, emotional isolation and all. And I had to do it quickly, before the misery of my daily existence overwhelmed my newly found desire to live.
I succeeded.
Twenty years after leaving the program, I’ve built a life richer than I could have imagined. I am ready to tell my story, and to challenge AA’s reputation as an unequivocal force for good.
Through my lived experience and through research, I show how AA and its associated programs (EA, NA, Al-Anon, and on and on) are potentially damaging to trauma survivors. I demonstrate why the program is likely to make the mental and emotional state of survivors worse over time because of its foundational principles and core messaging: You are powerless. You are crazy. You cannot help yourself. And I dispute specifically AA’s claim that if their way doesn’t work for someone, it’s the individual who is at fault, not the program.
Who Is It For?
A combination Michael Moore exposé and Hannah Gadsby’s “Ten Steps to Nanette,” but with more tango, 12 Mis-Steps is for trauma survivors, in or out of 12-Step programs, who have not found relief via traditional therapies. It's for marginalized people who’ve been funneled into the Program and know the last thing we need is to be told we are more powerless than we already feel. And it’s for therapists, family, and friends looking for new ways to help loved ones when the old ways have failed.
About K'ai
K’ai Roberts Fu is a keynote speaker and author. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, with a BA in sociology and an unofficial minor in consciousness-raising; and a member of Mensa.
K’ai’s post-college adventures have included a year of automotive tech school, 20 years as a professional Argentine Tango instructor, and 12 years (ending in 2002) sitting in church basements talking about powerlessness while drinking truly reprehensible coffee.
In addition to writing and public speaking, she currently works as a video editor and production manager.
K’ai lives in the Pacific Northwest - renowned for its amazing coffee and freedom of expression. In her leisure time she can be found working out, writing, gardening, traveling with her spouse, and reading anything that might give her an advantage playing “Jeopardy!”