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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.
In active addiction, many of us used self-pity as a survival mechanism. We didn't believe there was an alternative to living in our disease-or perhaps we didn't want to believe. As long as we could feel sorry for ourselves and blame someone else for our troubles, we didn't have to accept the consequences of our actions; believing ourselves powerless to change, we didn't have to accept the need for change. Using this "survival mechanism" kept us from entering recovery and led us closer, day by day, to self-destruction. Self-pity is a tool of our disease; we need to stop using it and learn instead to use the new tools we find in the NA program.
We have come to believe that effective help is available for us; when we seek that help, finding it in the NA program, self-pity is displaced by gratitude. Many tools are at our disposal: the Twelve Steps, the support of our sponsor, the fellowship of other recovering addicts, and the care of our Higher Power. The availability of all these tools is more than enough reason to be grateful. We no longer live in isolation, without hope; we have certain help at hand for anything we may face. The surest way to become grateful is to take advantage of the help available to us in the NA program and to experience the improvement the program will bring in our lives.
Most of us have heard it said that "none of us gets here by accident." It wasn't exceptional skills for handling life on life's terms that got us here--it was unmanageability. Working Step One helps us to see how addiction creates chaos in our lives and shows us how we can begin to gain some freedom.
Some of us, while floating on that early-recovery pink cloud of hope, might prematurely celebrate the end of all the drama in our lives. We might rush off and make amends to our families--or our exes or virtual strangers--eager to let them know that our problems are all in the past now.
Then, life gets tough and reality sets in again. We are let down by people and institutions we think we should be able to respect. Rent is too high. We get sacked from our job for no reason. A public health crisis occurs. On top of that, our favorite television series is canceled. The injustice of it all! And our stepwork doesn't stop any of it from happening.
Our disease creates unmanageability in our lives, sure--and arresting the disease by working Steps can help us put an end to our needless, self-inflicted suffering. However, not all of the messes in our life are self-created. No amount of stepwork or meditation will prevent us from ever experiencing loss, sadness, rage, frustration, and other unpleasant feelings; no amount of prayer will guarantee freedom from unpleasant encounters with coworkers, family members, or random people in traffic.
We may not know how to react to every new type of weather pattern that comes our way. Still, the freedom from our self-made storms that we gained by working Steps is a source of faith: We can endure all sorts of chaos and nonsense by getting right with ourselves and our Higher Power. Things might not go our way, but we can still go with the flow.
