“We don’t ask you to fit in, we ask you to belong.” “The opposite of addiction is connection.” “Addiction is a family disease.”
These Beit T’Shuvah clichè phrases are thrown around so willy-nilly that you can feel the room shake with the residents’ eye rolls. But, for some, they hold significant weight. For someone who has spent their entire life battling not only their addiction but the addictions of everyone they love, watched loved ones die alone in the street from this disease, and has felt more isolation than anyone would wish on their worst enemy AND STILL come out as compassionate and caring as Katie “Katie Kathrine” Loftus…now that is a person worth spotlighting.
Redondo Beach. A bottle of booze in her mother’s hand. A bag of heroin in her sister’s. Sitting next to it all, soaking it in like an innocent sponge: a young Katie. As anyone could imagine, growing up with a physically and verbally abusive alcoholic for a mom wasn’t easy—now add a sister who drinks as much as she does dope, a father who is nowhere in sight, a brother who died of cancer at the age of four, and you have Katie’s home life. Through it all, she remembers feeling like she had to take care of her family. The burden of this, and the feeling like she was the only one who didn’t have a “normal family” made Katie feel like an outcast in her school, in her town, and in her own skin.
Katie was always a good student—loved school in fact. A self-proclaimed “dork.” But, when Katie was 13, she saw a few kids smoking weed and drinking behind the school and decided to join them. The magic pill. This new form of escape unlocked so much within her. It was a turning of a valve that finally relieved some of the pressure that she was under. She also found it to be a great way to finally fit in and make friends. That little girl who was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders could now do it all, and relax while she did it…and on top of it all, she didn’t have to feel so lonely.
By high school, Katie went from hanging out with the bad kids to hanging out with the worst kids. These new friends introduced her to crack—at 14. “I started failing out of school, but I really liked school. So, I was really struggling with that. I would stop using the drugs, do well in school, and then start using them again. It was a back and forth.” Eventually, she straightened up, stopped using, joined ROTC, and got into the college of her choice. Initially, she did well at Cal State Long Beach…until she started to drink again…heavily. While in college, she met the man who would be her first husband. Together they had a daughter. It became clearly, fairly quickly, that this marriage was a disaster. So, she moved back in with her mom. By this time, her mom had gotten sober but was still emotionally abusive.
Two years later, Katie got married for the second time. Initially, the marriage was full of drinking, but once Katie got pregnant with her son she put down the bottle. For the next ten years, she was a dry drunk. She was in and out of mental hospitals, cutting herself, and obsessively exercising. That feeling of obsession never lifted. On one tragic day, she found out that her sister, who was homeless at the time, was murdered by blunt force trauma to the head. The pain of this was far too much and as a result, Katie was prescribed Xanax. Could this be the magic pill? She was working for the local school district, popping Xanax like Tic Tacs, and everything seemed good and dandy. Until (and I am sure you knew an “until” was coming), she had to get surgery and they prescribed her Percocets. “This is my new love.” Okay, this has to be the magic pill!
Katie’s life was falling apart. So, she checked herself into a detox. Here is where she met a gangbanging meth dealer. She left her husband and moved in with him. “This is where my life really went downhill. I was homeless for seven years. I got arrested. Charged with a felony—intent to sell.” For these seven deadly years, there was no drug that was off the menu for Katie. She even started doing straight fentanyl. After bouncing between drug dealer boyfriends, she found herself living on the streets of Palm Desert. One day, out of the blue, she got a call from her son who, by this point, had gotten sober. He invited her to watch him speak at an AA meeting. So, she went. This was the catalyst for the rest of her life in recovery. She went to a detox in San Pedro and then eventually came here, to Beit T’Shuvah.
“I remember walking through those front doors thinking, ‘Are you kidding me? This place is really going to help me? I get to stay here?’” Unfortunately, it was not always an easy road full of gratitude for Katie.
“I did not trust people. I was basically raised by wolves so, I had no idea or understanding of what community meant. I had no concept of what it was like to have functional relationships with people.” Katie’s lack of trust in her earlier days at Beit T’Shuvah was evident. She was hesitant to lean fully into the love of the program, maybe not by choice but by conditioning. Thankfully, that fear subsided.
After being a Program Facilitator intern, Katie was hired to be the driver—taking clients to meetings, appointments, and stores. She loved it, but knew she wanted to give back in a deeper way. That is when she was promoted to addiction counselor—the job she holds today. Shortly after becoming a counselor, Katie relapsed. “I had surgery and was prescribed pain pills and then I crossed that invisible line. I abused them and then called an old meth dealer boyfriend. For two weeks she was getting high—hiding. For the next year, Katie held on to that secret. The poisonous pain of that lie of omission was eating her up inside. She knew she couldn’t cross that line from sobriety to recovery if she didn’t tell Beit T’Shuvah the truth. So, that’s exactly what she did. “I had this fear that if I told them they would say, ‘Sorry, you can’t work here anymore. Sorry, we don’t love you anymore.’ In my mind, Beit T’Shuvah’s love was conditional because that’s all I knew. But when I got honest, they embraced me. To me, that’s unconditional love.”
Yesterday was Katie’s three-year sober birthday. The Katie who walked through these doors is nothing like the Katie we see before us today. Not only has she saved her life, but every single day she saves the lives of countless others. “I love being a counselor. I love being able to come to work and help people. It is a highlight of my life.” Every other week, you can hear her nickname “Katie Kathrine” being thanked on stage. That is because her clients love her—that is because her community loves her. Her once chaotic family is now all sober, her son with seven years and her daughter with one and a half. Katie is even a grandma! That pressure, that build-up, that feeling like she would never fit in—that disease that plagued her family. All of it is gone today. Katie uses everything she has been through to be a shepherd for residents in need. “I love watching the light go on in their eyes.” All the suffering, all the trauma, everything Katie has been through has turned her into so much more than just an addict recovery or an addiction counselor. Katie is an electrician, turning that light on for people. Saving souls, warming hearts, and connecting us all. Because in reality, there is no magic pill, only magic people.