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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.
August 23, 2026 |
Decision-making |
| Page 245 |
| "Before we got clean, most of our actions were guided by impulse. Today, we are not locked into this type of thinking." |
| Basic Text, p. 90 |
| Life is a series of decisions, actions, and consequences. When we were using, our decisions were usually driven by our disease, resulting in self-destructive actions and dire consequences. We came to see decision making as a rigged game, one we should play as little as possible. Given that, many of us have great difficulty learning to make decisions in recovery. Slowly, by working the Twelve Steps, we gain practice in making healthy decisions, ones that give positive results. Where our disease once affected our will and our lives, we ask our Higher Power to care for us. We inventory our values and our actions, check our findings with someone we trust, and ask the God of our understanding to remove our shortcomings. In working the steps we gain freedom from the influence of our disease, and we learn principles of decision making that can guide us in all our affairs. Today, our decisions and their consequences need not be influenced by our disease. Our faith gives us the courage and direction to make good decisions and the strength to act on them. The result of that kind of decision making is a life worth living. |
| Just for Today: I will use the principles of the Twelve Steps to make healthy decisions. I will ask my Higher Power for the strength to act on those decisions. |
| Copyright (c) 2007-2026, NA World Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
August 23, 2026 |
Striving for Emotional Maturity |
| Page 243 |
| "Emotional maturity is our reward for letting go of anger and resentment." |
| Living Clean, Chapter 7, "Principles, Practice, and Perspective" |
| Perhaps we've all encountered circumstances when another member gets on our last nerve. When that happens, sometimes it takes everything in us not to attack them, mock them, shut them down using whatever tactic we can. We may want to bolt from the room because we see how this person--who may or may not have wronged us in some way--enjoys the respect of other members in the group. We want to expose them as a fraud and a hypocrite, but we don't. We say nothing because we know our personal feelings about another member should play no role in how, for instance, our area contributes to the region's Fellowship development efforts. At other business meetings, we'll have no problem keeping our mouths shut because we'd much rather roll our eyes--and smugly watch the same two members battle it out like they always do over the finer points of coordinating an effective public relations campaign. In those situations, we have to stop ourselves from sharing the eye roll with everyone else in the room, revealing our displeasure with the proceedings. We'd love to break our silence by audibly groaning at how much time they are taking up. A member shared, "The second I start thinking about how I'm the only adult in the room, I know I'm not coming from a place of emotional maturity." With some practice, we can learn to check ourselves in situations where previously the monster that lives in our head would have burst out in full force in an effort to kill the proceedings. Similarly, we find a way to restrain our inner adolescent, who would snark, scoff, and snipe at members merely for being themselves. Emotional maturity may not sound like a big enough reward for not acting out on our character defects--but doesn't it make our lives so much more manageable? And peaceful? And isn't that a big part of why we came here in the first place? |
| I will practice reining in my reactiveness in situations where my personal feelings about other members serve no relevant purpose. Today emotional maturity is a reasonable reward for those efforts. |
| Copyright (c) 2007-2026, NA World Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved |