Kat - Advisory Committee Member

by Kate Willette

I had a whole huge plan of what my life was going to be like. I was going to go to school, I was going to be in a Corpsman school, then maybe go into Officer training. 

And I just--my whole life went crash.

When young Kat joined the Coast Guard in 1980, she was following a well-traveled path. Like millions of others, she had multiple motives for going into the service. First, she was looking forward to a long career, one that would involve leadership and responsibility. But also, she’d already developed a problem with alcohol, and she saw the military as an organization where she could learn discipline and clean up her life. She was prepared to step up, work hard, and make her way. What happened instead was brutal.

I was accosted almost immediately in boot camp. This dental assistant asked to kiss me, but then he put his body on me and then he kissed me while he was asking me. I didn't have a chance to respond and I didn't; I laughed it off.

And then another fellow cornered me in the hall, in the closet, closed the door, and tried to kiss me. And he said he wanted a date with me.

She laughed that off, too.  

And then I was sent into a small boat station in Michigan. It was me, one woman, and the rest all men. I had been working in male environments before, but I noticed there was a lot of discrimination right away. I was singled out, told that I wasn't pulling my weight, that I wasn't doing this, I wasn't doing that. They were keeping me from doing things that I was supposed to do. I was set up to be in the wrong. I was humiliated and I was set up for, I don't know how to say it.

Kat describes a textbook case of rampant sexual harassment, in which her gender drove abuse that fell short of physical assault but nevertheless defined her work life.

I don't really know how to say it. It was sexual, they were sexually accosting me. There's so many little things that happened, but nobody ever tried to molest me. I got cornered, locked in a small boat. They broke in and messed my room up. Semen was smeared. I was told I was gay because I didn't want to go out on a date, and then I was told that I was a slut because I went out on a date.

Her Commander knew what was going on, but he also knew that if Kat chose to make it an issue or press charges, that decision would only make things worse for her.

And I said, "No, just get me out of here." Because he said it would follow me the rest of my life. And he was right. It did anyway. It followed me anyway.

So I married this guy I hardly knew, a man who thought he was being my rescuer. I just said yes, not even knowing him, so I could get out of that mess. I married this abusive man--never physically, but emotionally abusive, and I stayed with him for 25 years.

I started really drinking hard, and he kept leaving on ships and I would drink. And it followed me into the next duty station. I was having basically a nervous breakdown, but I had to keep working.

About when I turned 39, I started to have panic attacks and I started to face what had happened to me in childhood. And because I did that, the whole healing aspect of my life took place. I quit drinking, and my life really changed. I took back my control.

When Kat arrived in Port Townsend, she had already been in recovery for more than a quarter of a century. She’d had the good fortune to work with skilled therapists, but there was still a problem.

I've never dealt with what had happened in the military.

For obvious reasons, Kat is alive to the presence of veterans as a special and underserved population in the world of recovery, deeply deserving of the best and most creative care but rarely able to find it, and often unwilling to access it when they do. She explains that for them, there are unique obstacles.

My heart goes to veterans, veterans that are not able to talk about what happened to them. A lot of them abuse alcohol and drugs, a lot of them are out on the streets and not able to communicate that. A lot of them are afraid of the VA, a lot of them can't afford different kinds of modalities or healing modalities. I met a lot of veterans in the 12-step world, and they're very private. You know, they don't talk about it.

Recovery is different for veterans, because they've got this whole mindset that's a little bit different than other people. And with male or female military sexual trauma, when you've been through that in a military structure, it's much different than on the outside civilian world. Because many times you were accosted by your own commanding officer.

One of the issues that troubles Kat--who sees herself as lucky to have had access to good therapy and various approaches to healing--is that these things are expensive and not available to everyone. When she read a Port Townsend newspaper article about the Recovery Café, she saw a possibility that the Café’s open, community-supported model could be an opportunity for her to work with other veterans. It didn’t take long for that hope to become a reality.

As it happens, Kat’s dream of working with veterans within the Recovery Café model overlaps nicely with that of another organization: The Women’s Veteran Network (WoVeN).  

Formed by a pair of Boston University researchers back in 2017, WoVeN aims to organize a national network of local groups of women veterans. In January 2020, Kat joined 200 other women in San Diego to begin training as a WoVeN leader.

She foresees a time when there will be a weekly Recovery Circle at the Café that is also a local WoVeN group--a regular gathering of women who share both military background and a desire to connect and support one another in meaningful, honest conversation.

When I got here and I was looking at these recovery circles I thought to myself, I want to have a recovery circle just for veterans. I started out by having somebody from Washington State and the VA come out to do a class on peer support for veterans, and twenty people showed up just by my organizing it. 


I'm like, I'm onto something. There were no women veterans there; it was all men--there's a huge amount of shame, especially for women.

That meeting was a revelation about the real and pressing need for what Kat had in mind, but it was also important personally, because it was in that sessions that she understood she still had work of her own to do. This is the ordinary secret of recovery circles: there’s always more healing available. Every one of us has work to do.

I was triggered by things that were said in there, because I didn't realize how much those events from 40 years ago in the military have affected my entire life.

Kat has big plans for what comes next.

I want to connect with other Recovery Cafes around the United States. I've already got the connections and an idea, a plan of what I want to do, and what I'm doing is inviting different speakers to come at different events that are directly related to military sexual trauma, PTSD, peer support, recovery.

I want to have speakers come in, have films being shown. I want to see books being read. I want to do things that are interesting, fascinating, fun, helping people get back on their feet. 

Asked for some language to describe her vision of the Café in the future, here is what she says:

Warmth, compassion, welcoming, laughter, tears, accepting people as they are, not the way they think they should be. Community.