The Program That Works for Everyone Else Might Not Work for You

By Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey

When K’ai Roberts Fu stopped trying to sleep eight hours in a row, her nights got dramatically better.

For years, Roberts Fu, a speaker and author (her book, 12 Mis-Steps, launches May 19), had been waking naturally after three or four hours of sleep, lying awake for an hour, and then drifting off for another stretch. She told herself she was bad at sleeping. She worried. Which, predictably, made sleeping harder.

Then she did some research. It turns out that before the Industrial Revolution, sleeping in two distinct phases was simply how people slept. The BBC covered the historical evidence in depth: biphasic sleep, with a wakeful period in the middle of the night, was standard practice for centuries. Modern schedules and artificial light consolidated it into one continuous block. The approach Roberts Fu had been failing at was less than two hundred years old.

When she stopped fighting her own biology, she started using the wakeful window to journal, solve writing problems, or edit. She began waking up rested. “I realized,” she told me, “I was not failing at sleep. I was doing it my way, which also happens to be how most of humanity did it until fairly recently.”

It is a small story. But it opens onto a much larger one.

When the Gold Standard Isn’t Gold for Everyone

Roberts Fu’s book is not about sleep. It is about what happens when a solution that works for many people, and is even held up as the definitive solution, is a poor fit for someone with a different history, a different body, or a different set of needs.

Her case study is Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step model. As a survivor of complex childhood trauma, Roberts Fu entered a twelve-step program in her early twenties desperate for the serenity the program promised. She stayed for twelve years. And over those twelve years, she got further from serenity, not closer.

The reason, she argues in her book, is a direct structural conflict: trauma recovery and twelve-step recovery operate on opposite premises. Trauma recovery centers on restoring agency: helping survivors understand that they were not at fault, that their symptoms are not evidence of insanity, that they can trust their own judgment and take care of themselves.

Twelve-step programs require members to admit powerlessness (Step 1), acknowledge that their thinking is impaired (Step 2), turn decisions over to an outside entity (Step 3), and take responsibility for their role in past harms (Steps 4, 8, 9, and 10). For someone without a trauma history, that sequence can be genuinely liberating. For someone rebuilding a sense of agency after abuse, Roberts Fu argues, it is the exact opposite of what healing calls for.

The research behind the programs is also less settled than the cultural narrative suggests. As physician Lance Dodes documented in a meta-analysis, the success rate of AA itself may be as low as five percent. A Stanford study put one-year abstinence rates closer to forty percent. Meanwhile, the program has had no significant structural updates since the steps were codified by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939 – before psychotropic medications, the diagnosis of conditions such as PTSD and manic-depression, and trauma-informed care existed as a field.

“They were created by middle-aged, middle-class, Protestant white men for people like themselves,” Roberts Fu told me. “And now people from every walk of life walk through the doors and receive the same message: your problem is that you think you have too much agency. Give it up.” For marginalized communities who already experience systemic powerlessness, she noted, that instruction can compound harm rather than relieve it.

What This Means for Leaders

Most leaders are not addiction counselors. But most leaders will, at some point, be in a position to offer support or advice to someone struggling. A direct report. A peer. A family member. And in those moments, the default often gets activated: Have you tried therapy? Have you looked into a program? Have you heard of AA?

Roberts Fu’s argument is not that these resources are not helpful. She is careful to say that the twelve-step community offered her genuine human warmth, that the individuals in the rooms cared, even when the framework was wrong for her. The community aspect of twelve-step programs has helped many people in ways that extend beyond the steps themselves.

Her argument is that defaulting to any solution without curiosity about individual fit is a form of negligence dressed up as generosity. The same logic applies well beyond addiction recovery. Leaders confidently prescribe solutions to their teams, their organizations, themselves, based on what worked elsewhere, for someone else, under different conditions.

High-performance routines that assume eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Networking strategies that reward extroverts. Productivity systems that quietly penalize anyone whose brain works differently. The wellness industry, Roberts Fu notes, is particularly prone to promising universal results from individualized practices.

“If something is near-universally beloved and claims to work for everyone,” she told me, “and yet research and anecdotal evidence show it doesn’t work for everyone, we need to stop treating it as the default.”

How To Know When Something Isn’t Your Size

Roberts Fu has a practical framework for this, developed the hard way. First: has it been tried long enough to assess fairly, given that some approaches do get worse before they get better? Second: are the people offering it genuinely accounting for individual circumstances, or are they applying a one-size answer? Third: is the program discouraging questions? “Anytime you’re in a world that tells you not to talk to outside people,” she said, “whether it’s a program, a religion, or an MLM, be wary.”

The corollary for leaders is equally clean: when something isn’t working for someone on your team, the first question worth asking is not whether they’re doing it wrong. It’s whether the thing is the right fit for who they are.

Roberts Fu walked out of the program one day after twelve years, sitting in a meeting and hearing people repeat the aphorism that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. “I realized I had been doing the same thing for twelve years,” she said, “and the results hadn’t changed. So I left.”

What she found on the other side was not a different universal prescription. It was a willingness to treat recovery – and eventually, her whole life – as a process of finding what actually fit.

Sleep schedules included.