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Nine years ago, I came home from work to find my answering machine filled up with messages. Some were from people I hadn’t heard from in a long time saying things like, “Tara. Call me. It’s about Katrina.”
Since Katrina and I are both in recovery from addiction, my first thought was, “please… someone just tell me that she relapsed.” In my gut I knew that the truth was far worse and it was soon confirmed. She had suffered an aneurism and was now laying brain dead in a Staten Island hospital.
Her name was Katrina Devita. She was 42 years old when she died suddenly. More than a friend, she was a mentor.
I met her when I was 25 years old, deeply caught in the hopelessness and pain of active addiction. She had about 5 years clean and I was unsuccessfully struggling to put 24 hours in a row without using drugs together. She had had her own struggles, having once been homeless on the streets of Chico CA, at the time that we met she was studying to be a nurse while raising two kids all by herself.
I didn’t like her at first. She was nosy, bossy and had a lot of strong opinions. Come to think of it, we had a lot in common.
My 25-year-old self was filled with sadness, anger and self-destruction. I didn’t want to be in pain, but I didn’t know how not to be in pain. My attitude at the time was, “Life sucks. Convince me that I want to live.” I was a lot of work.
Perhaps because she saw herself in me, Katrina stepped up and became my Guardian angel. Never in my life had someone understood me so deeply. I remember talking to her on the phone for the first time and wondering if she was psychic. I didn’t understand how she could know me so well. Now I know that she understood my pain. I was not so unique as I thought. She had been where I was and knew that path. She was further down the path and had been fortunate enough to take road of recovery when she came to the fork in the road. Now she was holding a lamp and trying to guide me in that direction.
I didn’t go too willingly but she never gave up. For two years I struggled but Katrina never abandoned me. She spoke to me endlessly on the phone, she sewed my ripped clothes, she fed me and let me crash on her couch when no one else would have me. I became her shadow and all the while she spoke to me about the way life could be if I stopped hurting myself.
What ensued was an EXTREMELY long growth process and the direction wasn’t always “up!”
As we got to know each other more, our conversations naturally got deeper and more personal. I allowed myself to trust her – something I had stopped doing out of necessity and survival.
It is often said that religion is for people who are afraid of Hell and spirituality is for those who have already been there. This was the case with Katrina. I remember telling her that I didn’t think I would ever get clean because I didn’t believe in God.
“Native Americans believe that when we throw a rock across a river, we change the course of the river.”
She replied.
With the release of Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s book, Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know
Now labeled under the DSM-IV as Antisocial Personality Disorder, lay people often assume that the term “Sociopath” refers only to people who kill.
True, many killers are sociopaths but not all sociopaths are killers.
I have some experience with this too because in my psyche 101 analysis, I believe that my mother was (and is) a sociopath. She possesses a complete lack of empathy or concern for others and only engages with people as far as it goes to get something from them. For one example, when I was in a serious car accident in 2006 in which I broke my neck in 2 places, my mother didn’t even pick up the phone to inquire about my well-being. It didn’t even cross her mind. That’s just her – and it is only one small example. I have many more examples that can (and hopefully will) fill a book one day (a funny one… don’t worry… tragedy=comedy). I understand this kind of behavior in the present but it sure did a number on me while I was growing up, as it is apt to do when people get involved with sociopaths.
Let’s get real. Most people know or encounter sociopaths in their daily lives. We can’t help it. They live among us. Our interactions with them often leave us baffled, hurt and wondering what happened. According to Dr. Martha Stout, a Harvard psychologist and author of “The Sociopath Next Door,” about 4 percent of the population (1 in 25) is someone who lives in this world without a conscience. They can’t help it either. They were born that way.
What this means to us is that he or she has no ability to feel “gut-checking” emotions that guide and censor behavior such as shame, guilt and remorse.
A sociopath cannot empathize, cannot feel anyone else’s feelings, including his or her own. This differentiates a sociopath from someone with narcissistic personality disorder as a narcissist can feel his or her own feelings deeply, but has an absolute inability to feel or have empathy for anyone else.
In the aftermath of encounters with such people, we are left only with the painful memories and the psychiatrist’s bills as we try and pull our lives back together.
