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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.
Addiction affected every area of our lives. Just as we sought the drug that would make everything alright, so we sought people to fix us. We made impossible demands, driving away those who had anything of worth to offer us. Often, the only people left were those who were themselves too needy to be capable of denying our unrealistic expectations. It's no wonder that we were unable to establish and maintain healthy intimate relationships in our addiction.
Today, in recovery, we've stopped expecting drugs to fix us. If we still expect people to fix us, perhaps it's time to extend our recovery program to our relationships. We begin by admitting we have a problem--that we don't know the first thing about how to have healthy intimate relationships. We seek out members who've had similar problems and have found relief. We talk with them and listen to what they share about this aspect of their recovery. We apply the program to all our affairs, seeking the same kind of freedom in our relationships that we find throughout our recovery.
For some of us, our first perceptible encounter with a power greater than ourselves comes in the form of other recovering addicts. We find it in that vibe we feel in the rooms of NA. Many of us pick up on it even before we've taken that leap and given abstinence a try. We sense this energy unlike anything we've experienced elsewhere. One addict described it this way: "I felt oddly connected to these complete strangers and they seemed to know me, to understand, and to genuinely want to help."
Putting this intriguing something into words is difficult at best and runs the risk of becoming quickly outdated since the words to describe it change with the times. To our ear, our predecessors' attempts to explain it may sound pretty trippy today. It's hard to capture the essence of this almost indescribable thing in words. Had our French-speaking members written "We Do Recover," they may have used the phrase "je ne sais quoi," which translates literally to "I don't know what" but signifies something more in its naming of the unnamable. As the Basic Text notes, "The problem with literature is language."
To be sure, the atmosphere of recovery we find in NA is intangible. Maybe it's too cosmic or mystical to pin down in a description that will stand the test of time and translations. Even so, groups and service bodies sometimes find it useful to talk about how we support or create an atmosphere of recovery. Most will identify empathy as a key ingredient.
Perhaps empathy stands out as central to our atmosphere because it's a quality that's been missing in our lives when we get to the rooms. Nevertheless, we recognize and respond to the empathy like it's a long-lost friend. The world has little empathy for using addicts; they haven't been where we've been. NA is different, and thank goodness it is.
