What Is the Narcotics Anonymous Program?
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.
When we heard the Twelve Traditions read aloud the first several times--maybe even the first 1,000 times--the First Tradition sounded like some sort of recovery jargon to our newcomer ears. Am I supposed to put NA's common welfare ahead of my own? Really? To many of us, "common welfare" was a new concept. Because we'd consistently been self-obsessed in our disease, we hadn't thought of ourselves as part of any whole, and that was fine with us.
During our first days clean, the NA Fellowship's collective whole wasn't something we imagined being a part of or even caring about. In time, we began to surrender to the truth that we need each other to stay clean. We got a glimpse of the reciprocal relationship between personal recovery and NA unity. We realized that we're part of a worldwide Fellowship, made up of tens of thousands of groups, with literature available in scores of languages. Wow, all I wanted to do was quit using drugs!
"I can't, but we can" underpins the First Tradition. As our recovery deepens, our capacity to surrender to the principle of unity evolves and becomes more fluid. Surrendering to the needs of the group takes precedence over our desire to get our way at whatever cost. Many of us who struggle with the idea of a "god" working in our lives can surrender to the idea that the power of the group supports us. We begin to understand how our investment in something greater than ourselves through service improves our own lives and increases our feelings of self-worth. And something as basic as seeing a keytag with its "clean and serene" message etched in an unfamiliar language becomes awe-inspiring to us.