0%
NA members hold nearly 76,000 meetings weekly in 143 countries. We offer recovery from the effects of addiction through working a twelve-step program, including regular attendance at group meetings. The group atmosphere provides help from peers and offers an ongoing support network for addicts who wish to pursue and maintain a drug-free lifestyle.
Our name, Narcotics Anonymous, is not meant to imply a focus on any particular drug; NA’s approach makes no distinction between legal and illegal drugs including alcohol. Membership is free, and we have no affiliation with any organizations outside of NA including governments, religions, law enforcement groups, or medical and psychiatric associations. Through all of our service efforts and our cooperation with others seeking to help addicts, we strive to reach a day when every addict in the world has an opportunity to experience our message of recovery in their own language and culture. This website is the contribution by members living in Ventura County towards that worldwide effort.
We are not alone, you are not alone.
The Narcotics Anonymous message is “that an addict, any addict, can stop using drugs, lose the desire to use and find a new way to live.”
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
There were probably hundreds of times in our active addiction when we wished we could become someone else. We may have wished we could trade places with someone who owned a nice car or had a larger home, a better job, a more attractive mate--anything but what we had. So severe was our despair that we could hardly imagine anyone being in worse shape than ourselves.
In recovery, we may find we are experiencing a different sort of envy. We may continue to compare our insides with others' outsides and feel as though we still don't have enough of anything. We may think everyone, from the newest member to the oldest oldtimer, sounds better at meetings than we do. We may think that everyone else must be working a better program because they have a better car, a larger home, more money, and so on.
The recovery process experienced through our Twelve Steps will take us from an attitude of envy and low self-esteem to a place of spiritual fulfillment and deep appreciation for what we do have. We find that we would never willingly trade places with another, for what we have discovered within ourselves is priceless.
When we were using, everything was life-or-death serious--that lifestyle of getting, using, and finding ways and means to get more! Some of us felt like we hadn't laughed for years when we first got to NA. Others of us experienced plenty of laughter out there--directed right at us. "You're so thin-skinned," our mates would mock us. "Get a sense of humor."
While actual events of our using history stay the same, our relationship to them evolves as we grow in recovery. We see fellow NA members finding humor in their pasts, and we begin to lighten up about the darkness in ours. Our stepwork reveals a long list of defects that still affect us today. And being able (finally) to laugh at ourselves as we act out on that shortcoming--yet again!--is a strategy that can help us to not beat ourselves up and to be okay with where we are right now. Humor becomes a way we identify, connect, and express empathy and forgiveness, for others as well as ourselves. Humor is a practice of surrender.
For many of us, humor can also be a hazard. It's a strategy we may use to escape our feelings or avoid being real in our relationships. We sometimes use it to put people down, including ourselves. Self-deprecating humor has a place, but self-ridicule breeds self-doubt. Some of us used humor to survive out there, but in recovery we aren't living in that life-or-death cycle. As we become more aware of these issues through working our program and receiving input from our sponsor and others we trust, our relationship to humor may shift. Ideally, the sense of humor we gain in recovery becomes less self-pitying, protective, or aggressive than the one we came in with. And we can finally breathe because we don't take ourselves quite as seriously as we used to.