Welcome to Narcotics Anonymous of NJ. Our Message Is…
That an addict, any addict can stop using drugs,
lose the desire to use, and find a new way to live.
Helpline
If you feel you have a problem with drugs, call our helpline
Events
See upcoming NA events and activities in NJ
Narcotics Anonymous 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.
– Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text, page 9
Recovery from addiction is possible and available through the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Narcotics Anonymous.
Narcotics Anonymous is FREEDOM from active addiction.
Narcotics Anonymous is an international, community-based association of recovering drug addicts with over 61,000 weekly meetings in over 131 countries worldwide.
Just for Today
No sooner do we get clean than some of us begin putting other priorities ahead of our recovery. Careers, families, relationships-all these are part of the life we find once we've laid the foundation of our recovery. But we can't build a stable life for ourselves before we do the hard, basic work of laying our recovery foundation. Like a house built on sand, such a life will be shaky, at best.
Before we begin putting all our attention to rebuilding the detailed framework of our lives, we need to lay our foundation. We acknowledge, first, that we don't yet have a foundation, that our addiction has made our lives utterly unmanageable. Then, with the help of our sponsor and our home group, we find faith in a Power strong enough to help us prepare the ground of our new lives. We clear the wreckage from the site upon which we will build our future. Finally, we develop a deep, working familiarity with the principles we will practice in our continuing affairs: honest self-examination, reliance upon our Higher Power's guidance and strength, and service to others.
Once our foundation is prepared, then we can go full steam ahead to put our new lives together. But first we must ask ourselves if our foundation is secure, for without our foundation, nothing we build can stand for long.
A Spiritual Principal a Day
The spiritual principle of discernment--exercising good judgment--is central to practicing Tradition Two. In our personal recovery, we work on developing a guiding conscience in our own decision making that helps us decipher what's healthy for us and what isn't. Many of us have described that conscience as a voice in our head that tells us right from wrong. Many others say it's our loving Higher Power working in our lives.
We bring this awareness into our groups and try to practice it there, in fellowship with each other. Discernment is group conscience in action; using it requires some common sense, experience, and, hopefully, clarity about what's our opinion, what's factual, and what's actually important. Some of our groups develop trust and a collective conscience over time, but we need to stay open-minded as our membership evolves. To sustain our practice of Tradition Two, we need unity, faith, goodwill, and even more trust.
Speaking of trust, discernment helps us choose our trusted servants and guides us in our efforts to be trustworthy as we serve. We create guidelines that outline preferred qualities for particular roles in our groups. These may aid the process but aren't the whole of it. Other circumstances that aren't on paper and still meet our need to serve the greater good may play a role in our decisions. We listen to our fellow members offer qualifications for a position, learn about each other's capacity for effective leadership, and then use discernment, expressed through our group conscience, to match talent to task.
As trusted servants, we're trusted to serve the needs of our group and NA as a whole, rather than our own egos, individual opinions, and desired outcomes. To keep our leaders in check, we are each other's eyes and ears, shining light on one another's blind spots and turning up the volume when we aren't listening carefully.
