T.A.R.S. speaking

We are not broken;

We were programmed.

Wil Zenigma | WilZ

Keynote Speaker • Recovery Coach • LGBTQ+ Advocate

Through lived experience, education, and training, Wil Zenigma helps individuals in the LGBTQ+, recovery, and mental health communities — and the organizations that serve them — understand how identity is programmed by genetics, environments, relationships, and experiences, and how trauma and stigma create survivor skills that once protected us but now keep us caged. He teaches people to rewrite their stories, break the cages their programming and survival skills created, and build the lives they choose and deserve.

Bring WilZ to your next event, organization, conference, or community.

Book WilZ to Speak

Audiences will explore:

How every person is programmed long before they have the words to describe themselves
The difference between being broken and being programmed
How a child turns a dysfunctional environment into a false belief about themselves
How the brain collects evidence to confirm the stories we've already begun believing
How survival strategies get mistaken for personality — and why that mistake matters
How stigma operates internally, becoming the voice that reinforces our own programming
Why addiction functions as an escape from exhaustion, not a moral failure
How addiction led to homelessness and became a stepping stone, not an ending
How rock bottom can force the question that changes everything: not "how do I stop," but "how did I get here"
How self-awareness becomes a skill — recognizing patterns, triggers, and programming instead of judging them
How understanding someone else's programming can replace blame with understanding, without excusing harm
How awareness creates the power to choose — and choice is where a different life begins
How the T.A.R.S. framework gives language and structure to the process of rewriting your story

INQUIRE ABOUT THE KEYNOTE

THE STORY THAT WROTE ME

My Signature Keynote

We all carry stories.

Some were written by us.

Others were written for us long before we understood that we had a choice.

The Story That Wrote Me is a personal and powerful keynote about trauma, addiction, survival, recovery, identity, and the process of learning to rewrite the narratives that have shaped our lives.

WilZ takes audiences through the experiences, patterns, and survival strategies that shaped his own story—and explores what happens when the things that once helped us survive begin to keep us from living the life we want and deserve.

This isn't simply a story about addiction or recovery.

It's a story about identity, programming, choice, and possibility.

WHAT I SPEAK ABOUT

TRAUMA

Trauma doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it appears as a reaction we don't understand, a belief we can't seem to shake, or a pattern we've repeated so many times that it feels like part of who we are. I help audiences explore how experiences can become programming—and how recognizing those patterns can create space for something different.

ADDICTION

Addiction is more than a behavior. Behind the behavior can be pain, survival, identity, environment, conditioning, and a search for something we didn't know how to find another way. My message challenges stigma while creating a more human conversation about substance use, addiction, mental health, and the people experiencing it.

RECOVERY

Recovery isn't simply about stopping. It's about learning how to live differently. It's about identity, relationships, choices, coping, accountability, connection, and discovering who you are when survival is no longer the only goal. I speak about recovery as a process of learning, practicing, and choosing.

SOBRIETY

Sobriety can change what we do. But recovery asks us to examine who we are becoming. I challenge audiences to look beyond sobriety as an endpoint and consider what it means to build a life that we choose and deserve to live.

SPEAKING TOPICS

Below are the categories of topics I can speak on based off of life experience. All topics are customizable. For a full detailed list of topics you can download a PDF here:

1. Identity & Self‑Concept

This category explores how a person’s sense of self is shaped by trauma, stigma, and early experiences. It examines internal programming, survival strategies, and the belief systems formed in childhood that later become identity. It includes themes like feeling unlovable, invisible, or insignificant, and how shame, scripts, and interpretation patterns define how someone sees themselves.

“Self‑perception shaped by trauma”
“How stigma becomes identity”

2. Trauma & Childhood Experience

This category focuses on early life experiences that disrupt emotional development and shape long‑term functioning. It includes childhood trauma, abuse, conflict, bullying, suicidal ideation, and growing up in stigmatizing or religiously conflicted environments. It highlights how generational trauma and attachment wounds create lifelong patterns.

“Growing up in a stigmatizing environment”
“Developmental trauma”

3. Mental Health (Experiences)

This category covers lived emotional and psychological experiences rather than formal diagnoses. It includes depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, people‑pleasing, perfectionism, chronic self‑criticism, isolation, hopelessness, and identity confusion. It reflects how trauma shapes interpretation, emotional regulation, and the internal world.

“Trauma‑based interpretation patterns” “Feeling invisible / not mattering”

4. Mental Health (personal Diagnoses)

This category outlines formal or clinical mental health conditions that have shaped the individual’s life. It includes depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, ADHD, CPTSD, borderline personality disorder, suicidal ideation history, and potential autism. It reflects the diagnostic lens through which symptoms and experiences have been understood.

“Major Depressive Disorder with psychotic features”
“CPTSD”

5. Addiction, Recovery, & Healing

This category explores nearly three decades of substance use and the role addiction played as escape, survival, and belonging. It includes the consequences—loss of stability, identity, relationships, and housing—and the journey into recovery, early sobriety, harm reduction, relapse‑adjacent thinking, and rebuilding identity after addiction.

“The ‘in‑between’ stage of recovery”
“Post‑addiction identity reconstruction”

6. Life Circumstances & Adversity

This category focuses on real‑world hardships and the lived consequences of trauma and addiction. It includes homelessness, poverty, discrimination, isolation, losing everything, and rebuilding from nothing. It highlights survival‑mode decision‑making, navigating systems while stigmatized, and the emotional journey of losing hope and regaining it.

“Navigating systems while stigmatized”
“Rebuilding from nothing”

7. LGBTQ+ Lived Experience

This category centers on identity, stigma, discrimination, and belonging within LGBTQ+ contexts. It explores how trauma intersects with queer identity, internalized homophobia, community connection and disconnection, and the role of advocacy. It reflects the unique challenges and strengths of LGBTQ+ lived experience.

“Navigating trauma within LGBTQ+ contexts”
“Community connection and disconnection”

8. Human Behavior & Interpretation

This category examines how trauma shapes thinking, interpretation, and emotional reasoning. It includes cognitive distortions, pattern recognition, survival‑based personality development, and how beliefs become internal programming. It also highlights how awareness creates choice and how interpretation patterns influence behavior.

“How survival becomes personality”
“Cognitive distortions formed by trauma”

DOWNLOAD FULL TOPICS MENU

WHY WILZ?

Lived Experience Meets Intentional Change

I don't speak about recovery from a distance.

I've experienced the realities I'm talking about.

I've lived through trauma, addiction, homelessness, recovery, and the process of rebuilding
identity. I've also spent years working within the recovery community, including experience
as both a resident and staff member in a recovery home.

Those experiences shaped the way I understand recovery.

Professional coaching helped me turn those experiences into a framework for
intentional change.

And speaking allows me to bring that perspective into rooms where the
conversation matters.

My goal isn't to tell people how to live.

It's to bring awareness to how our identity is programmed from a very early age, long before we're able to make a conscious choice.

It's to show people that they aren't stuck with the programming they were given.

It's to share a system of tools I've lived through myself, and put them into something that made sense — start to finish.

It's to break not just societal stigma, but the stigma we carry about ourselves.

Ultimately, it's to help people create the life they choose and deserve.

We all get one life to live. And we all deserve to live it by our own choosing — not by what outside sources dictate.

A child never asks, 'What's wrong with this environment?' They ask, 'What's wrong with me?

WHO I SPEAK TO

WilZ speaks to audiences across recovery, behavioral health, LGBTQ+ advocacy, education, community organizations, and beyond.

Ideal audiences include:

Recovery organizations
Treatment and behavioral health organizations
LGBTQ+ organizations
Colleges and universities
Conferences and conventions
Community organizations
Nonprofits
Healthcare organizations
Advocacy organizations
Employee wellness and workplace programs
Community and awareness events

Speaking formats include:

KEYNOTES
Engaging presentations designed to challenge perspectives and leave audiences thinking differently.
WORKSHOPS
Interactive sessions that move beyond inspiration into practical reflection and application.
PANELS & DISCUSSIONS
Lived-experience perspective combined with meaningful conversation.
CUSTOM PRESENTATIONS
Content developed around your organization's audience, goals, and event.

WHAT AUDIENCES TAKE AWAY

A powerful story can make people feel something.
A meaningful message can make them think.
The goal is to give them something they can carry with them afterward.

Audiences leave with:

A different way to understand their own story.
A deeper understanding of stigma, survival, and the patterns they create.
Language for recognizing their own programming — and where it came from.
A clearer connection between identity, behavior, and the experiences that shaped both.
Permission to question the scripts they've been living by.
Proof that the past can influence a story without having to determine its ending.
The understanding that awareness creates choice — and choice creates a different life.

BRING WILZ TO YOUR ROOM

Your audience doesn't need another lecture.

They need a conversation that makes them stop, think, feel, and see something differently.

Whether you're planning a keynote, conference, workshop, panel, training, or community event, WilZ brings lived experience, storytelling, professional coaching, and an original framework for understanding change into the room.

Let's change the conversation.

INQUIRE ABOUT SPEAKING