Narcotics Anonymous

How Does Narcotics Anonymous Help People With Drug Addiction?

NA helps members work toward sobriety by regularly gathering with like-minded people who encourage each other to abstain from drugs. Many find healing just by being around others who understand their struggles and their desire for recovery. With the help of a sponsor — a person who supports you as you stay clean one day at a time — you’ll learn the program’s 12 steps and how to apply them to your daily life. These steps follow:

• Admit we’ve become powerless over our addiction, which is causing problems in our lives.
• Acknowledge we can recover if we set aside our egos and believe in a power greater than ourselves.
• Decide to turn away from drugs and give our lives to a higher power — such as our loved ones, others recovering from addiction, God or the recovery process itself.
• Take a moral inventory of ourselves to look for strengths and weaknesses.
• Confess our harmful behaviors to ourselves and those around us.
• Invite our higher power to change our lives and help us become better people.
• Admit we need help removing our shortcomings.
• Create a list of people we’ve harmed by our addiction and become willing to ask for forgiveness.
• Make amends with all people we’ve harmed if possible, unless contacting them would hurt them or others.
• Continually take inventory of ourselves and our triggers and admit when we are wrong.
• Try to understand the plan our higher power has for our lives — such as the road to recovery our support system wants us to take.
• Continue to stay clean and help others achieve sobriety using these principles.

Who Should Attend an NA Meeting?

Narcotics Anonymous is open to anyone around the world who wants to recover from drug addiction — including people of all ages, nationalities, genders, social classes and religions. While the name deals specifically with narcotics, NA doesn’t focus on any particular type of drug. You can join NA and participate in closed meetings as you heal from any active drug addiction, and you can attend open meetings even as a non-member or as the loved one of someone abusing substances.