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
Before we started using, most of us had a stereotype, a mental image of what addicts were supposed to look like. Some of us pictured a junkie robbing convenience markets for drug money. Others imagined a paranoid recluse peering at life from behind perpetually drawn drapes and locked doors. As long as we didn't fit any of the stereotypes, we thought, we couldn't be addicts.
As our using progressed, we discarded those misconceptions about addiction, only to come up with another: the idea that addiction was about drugs. We may have thought addiction meant a physical habit, believing any drug that didn't produce physical habituation was not "addictive." Or we thought the drugs we took were causing all our problems. We thought that merely getting rid of the drugs would restore sanity to our lives.
One of the most important lessons we learn in Narcotics Anonymous is that addiction is much more than the drugs we used. Addiction is a part of us; it's an illness that involves every area of our lives, with or without drugs. We can see its effects on our thoughts, our feelings, and our behavior, even after we stop using. Because of this, we need a solution that works to repair every area of our lives: the Twelve Steps.
A Spiritual Principle a Day
We are recovering addicts with the disease of addiction. This is not news.
We have pasts (do we ever!), the present (especially when we can be in it), and futures (hopefully). We have attractions, virtues, and abilities, and yet we have limitations, vices, and liabilities. We do good in the world--sometimes a lot of it. We also make mistakes-- sometimes horrendous ones.
We've been shaped by our cultures, societies, and environments. We have religious beliefs or nonreligious ones. We have relationships, jobs, interests, causes, ailments. We have multiples of any and all of these. None of these elements completely defines us. Instead, they make us human.
As addicts, we tend to focus more on what's wrong with us than what's right. But we are no more flawed than other people, even nonaddicts. We are not pathological, nor are we deserving of stigma because of our addiction.
Being an addict is only one aspect of our humanity. Through working the Twelve Steps, we learn that the story of our drug use isn't as important as the one we create in our recovery. We have the opportunity to identify our gifts as well as our flaws, and we come to understand that our flaws do not negate those gifts. This concept is the core of humility.
Some of us really grapple with perfectionism as one of our character defects. But we are all imperfect because we are human. Recovery won't make us perfect because perfection doesn't exist. It can, however, help us humbly embrace our humanity.
