Living Clean
Page 1
L I V I N G C L E A N
Living
CLEAN
THE
JOURNEY
CONTINUES
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Copyright © 2012 by
Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
eBook Edition published 2013.
ISBN 9781557769275 (Hardcover) WSO Catalog Item No. 1150
ISBN 9781557769282 (Softcover) WSO Catalog Item No. 1151
ISBN 9781557769657 (eBook Edition) WSO Catalog Item No. 1152
This is NA Fellowship-approved literature.
Narcotics Anonymous, and The NA Way
are registered trademarks
of Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Incorporated.
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One
Living Clean
NA offers us a path, a process, and a way of life. The work and rewards of recovery are never-ending. We continue to grow and learn no matter where we are on the journey, and more is revealed to us as we go forward. Finding the spark that makes our recovery an ongoing, rewarding, and exciting journey requires active change in our ideas and attitudes. For many of us, this is a shift from desperation to passion.
Keys to Freedom
Growing Pains
A Vision of Hope
Desperation to Passion
Why We Stay
Chapter Two
The Ties That Bind
In recovery, we are free to explore and to consider who we are and who we want to become. The changes we experience in the process can feel pretty disruptive to our identity and our relationships, but through that struggle we find that our acceptance, love, and faith continue to grow. Though our goals and our methods may vary, what we have in common are the tools and principles that allow us to be who we are. Together we rise to a point of freedom.
Connection to Ourselves
Connection to a Higher Power
Connection to the World Around Us
Connection to Others
Chapter Three
A Spiritual Path
The spirituality we experience in NA is simple and practical: It allows us to live in harmony with our world and to experience empathy and compassion for others. The steps are a path to spiritual growth; we awaken to our own spirituality. As we develop a relationship with a Higher Power in whatever way we understand that, we come to understand that our spirituality is not a part of our lives; it is a way of life that brings us to an understanding of our purpose and the freedom we had been seeking all along.
Awakening to Our Spirituality
A Spiritual, Not Religious Program
A Spiritual Journey
Spirituality Is Practical
Walking the Walk
Spirituality in Action
Conscious Contact
Creative Action of the Spirit
Chapter Four
Our Physical Selves
Learning to live in our bodies isn’t easy. We haven’t been kind to them, and often they bear the painful scars of our addiction. Making peace with our physical selves is necessary for our physical survival—but it is also a part of our amends process, an act of self-acceptance, and a way we experience freedom, healing, and joy. This chapter addresses the way we treat ourselves in recovery, learning to find pleasure in being physically alive and aware—and facing our aging, our vulnerability, and our mortality.
It’s a Relationship
Letting Ourselves Go
Sex
Thrill-Seeking and Adventure
Wellness and Health
Illness
Disability
Emotional and Spiritual Crisis
Aging
Death, Dying, and Living with Grief
Courage
Chapter Five
Relationships
Our recovery is based in relationships, and most of us struggle with them in one way or another. Our relationships with one another in the rooms, with the families we come from and the families we create, are all places where we learn to practice principles, including honesty, empathy, and intimacy. Love is a healing presence in our lives, and we experience its power when we allow ourselves to reach out.
Fellowship
Friendship
Bridging Two Worlds: Relationships Outside NA
Family
Being a Parent
Amends and Reconciliation
Romantic Relationships
what we want
what we ask for
the courage to trust
Conscious Contact
Chapter Six
A New Way of Life
As we get some time in recovery, we get some time in the world as well. Social acceptability does not equal recovery, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive, either: For many of us it is something we must learn along the way. Our work habits and our beliefs about work, education, money, and stability change and grow as we stick around—sometimes in surprising ways. Learning to deal with success and failure, with risk and responsibility, with stability and change are all part of the process some of us call “growing up in recovery.”
Moving Beyond “Social Acceptability”
Finding Our Place in the World
Stability
Getting Out of Our Own Way
A Leap of Faith
Commitment
Education
Money
Work
Anonymity
The Gift of Hope
Chapter Seven
The Journey Continues
From the first time we find hope, we are in an ongoing process of spiritual awakening that can last our whole lives, if we are willing. Continuing to feel that our recovery is alive requires us to keep growing. Isolation and complacency hold us back from freedom in ways we may not even feel until we are stuck. Generosity of spirit is the antidote for loneliness and alienation. Being of service frees us into our own lives and opens us to the spirit of love that surrounds us. We experience unconditional hope and understand that there is no limit to how much better we can get. No matter how far we have come, the journey continues.
Awakenings
Living Our Principles
The Lifelong Practice of Surrender
Complacency
Setting Ourselves Apart
Keeping It Real
Being of Service
Principles, Practice, and Perspective
Love
Preface
Our Basic Text assures us that more will be revealed, and our experience bears that out. More has been revealed in the years since those words were written, and more continues to be revealed every day that we live clean and practice the principles of recovery. We grow as individuals, and we also grow and mature as a fellowship. As we learn from our experience, we pass on that knowledge. This means that each generation of newcomers has more resources available in NA than the one before. Whether this strengthens or weakens us depends entirely on how well we understand our primary purpose and practice the principles of sharing, caring, and service.
Our greatest treasure and resource is the depth of our personal knowledge of the recovery process. We share that treasure at meetings, at our celebrations
, over coffee, and in our literature. Once again, we offer in written form as much as we can of our collective experience, strength, and hope. This book, written by addicts for addicts, is a snapshot of our fellowship: addicts in recovery who have helped each other face life on its own terms, without the use of drugs, for consecutive days, months, years, and decades. It is intended both as an offering to new members and to rekindle the passion of our oldtimers. It could not possibly contain all that our members know or believe, but it does reflect what we have been discovering and sharing since 1982, when our Basic Text was approved.
The first draft of a book titled “Living Clean” was created in 1983, but the history of this project goes back even further. As our Basic Text, Narcotics Anonymous, was being written, some of our members knew that it would not be our last word on the subject of living the NA way. The versions that were created in 1983 and 1990 contained a lot of concrete advice, suggestions, and rules for how to get clean and stay clean. But most of us don’t follow rules very well. Our experience is sometimes very different from what we wish were true about the process. We found that what we share in common are not the particular actions we take, but the principles we try to practice as we live. In the years that have followed, generations of addicts have gotten clean and stayed clean using the Basic Text as our guide, and that experience has given us a perspective on the principles of recovery unlike any other.
We knew from the beginning that we were describing a problem not related to any single substance, but a disease that, left untreated, would manifest in one symptom or another until it killed us. A focus on one symptom or substance is too narrow for us. Just as we understand that addiction affects all aspects of our lives, we can see that recovery affects everything we do. Our relationships with our families, our work, our spirituality—even our own bodies—are profoundly shaped by where we come from and the ways in which we address our disease. Just as the rewards of our recovery are often beyond our wildest dreams, we know that the impact of our recovery on our own lives and on those around us is beyond measure. We may never know the good we do just by staying clean and living a principled life to the best of our ability. Our gratitude for our new way of life motivates us to keep giving more, living more, and loving more.
We are called to tell our story in NA not just once, but over and over. We cannot see the entirety of ourselves in one Fifth Step or one share, and we can’t see the entirety of our recovery all at once, either. We see it in layers, and our vision of ourselves changes each time we have a shift in perspective or a change in perception. Telling the truth about our lives is one of the most powerful things we can ever do. We start to see the threads that run through our experience, even though we may feel like we have been many different people over the course of our lives. We can see the patterns that help us or hold us back, and we can find hope even at times when our lives are very difficult.
Recovery is a full-contact, lifelong process. The more serious we are about it, the more clearly we can see how much growth is still available to us, no matter where we are on the journey. We are never done learning. Continued practice of the program of Narcotics Anonymous doesn’t just make our lives easier. It makes them richer, better, and more interesting. We begin by staying clean, and from there the program gives us the tools we need to find the answers that are right for us. Different moments teach us, reach us, or help us break through. We hope that the experience we share here will serve to propel our members forward, beyond what we know now.
This book is not a catalog of advice, but rather a collection of experience, strength, and hope about living clean as we experience it in our daily lives, in our relationships, and in our service to others. Not everything in the pages that follow will be equally important to everyone. Each of us has different challenges on our journey. However, we hope that there is something here for every member.
What follows is the experience of many addicts from all over the world. Hundreds of members shared their insight on living clean in workshops, letters, conversations, electronic bulletin boards, and audio recordings. The book took shape as it developed. As our journey continued, the focus of Living Clean shifted as well. The content and structure changed according to the input. The process swung the doors open, and we were amazed at what developed. We learned from one another, and the sum was greater than its parts. The common thread through our varied experience is that we continue to draw strength from NA no matter how much cleantime we have, no matter how many steps we have worked, and no matter where life takes us. Sharing our experience gives it meaning and value. And the deep relationships we form in NA—with one another, with ourselves, and with our Higher Power—become more valuable than we can imagine. We stay connected with the program and the fellowship over many years because we find what we need here. Where once we may have wondered how we could ever make NA a part of our lives, now many of us cannot imagine our lives without it. When we use the tools available to us, our recovery continues to thrive no matter what we face or how long we stay clean.
The most important thing about living clean is that we are alive to do it, and for people with the disease of addiction this is nothing less than a miracle. We do recover to live full and rewarding lives. Those lives present us with challenges, some of which we never expected. Living beyond our wildest dreams often means that we are in uncharted territory. The countless addicts who have contributed to this book have made clear that the miracle of getting clean is not the last one we experience, or the last one we need. We have learned that we really can survive anything and stay clean. It’s never too late to start over, reconnect with the fellowship, work steps, have a spiritual awakening, and find a new way to live. As long as we are willing to stay clean and keep coming back, our recovery continues to unfold in ways we couldn’t imagine. We are living clean, and every day the journey continues.
Living Clean
Living clean is a lifelong journey, and the NA program gives us tools to build a life infused with hope. No matter where we are on our journey, we believe that it can get better, and that we can get better. We practice living a principled life and find a new way to live. We try new things, and some of them suit us better than others. As we experience living clean with its ups and downs, miracles and struggles, dead ends and open doors, we see the world more clearly and better understand our place in it.
The program of Narcotics Anonymous is the way we have found to escape lives of desperation and pain. But that’s not all NA is: It’s a path, a process, and a way of life. Many of us come in with just the barest hope that we can get the pain to stop. In the beginning, our willingness is born of our suffering and fear. Living the program changes us in ways we might expect, and in ways we never imagined.
NA gives us the ability to turn our desperation into a passion to live fully and grow spiritually. We experience relief almost from the beginning of our recovery, and our first experiences of joy are like seeing color for the first time. Our minds are open and our spirits are free. Even if we experience it only for fleeting moments, that joy carries us through our hardest days and nights.
It’s not what we think about our recovery that matters; it’s what we do. Living clean is a spiritual process, and it teaches us that the world is bigger than we imagined and not as far out of reach as we had feared. Our flawed beliefs about people who didn’t use drugs shaped our opinions about what we might be like when we stopped. When we first got clean, many of us worried that our lives were about to become small and boring. What we find really is beyond our wildest dreams. We have opportunities and the ability to follow through on them. Perhaps more importantly, our connections with people become intensely important and satisfying to us. The close friendships we have with members who share our recovery can be a deeper connection than family. We share an intimacy that is really special, and when we carry that over the course of many years, it grows into an abiding affection and understanding of one another.
Commitment to recovery is essential for us
. Maintaining recovery as a priority may come to mean different things for us over time. We need to maintain our connection to NA, but taking responsibility for our lives also matters. So many things compete for our attention, and as addicts we have a tendency to think in extremes: all or nothing, right or wrong. Finding the balance is an ongoing negotiation.
Attending meetings regularly doesn’t have to mean every night of the week, but meetings continue to matter for our own well-being and for our ability to carry the message. Keeping that lifeline strong and ready is a matter of continuing maintenance. It gets easier when we let go of the idea that it ought to be hard. After many years of recovery, a member shared that he was finally able to answer the question “Is it possible that life is really this simple?” with a simple “Yes.”
The principles we practice in NA have meaning throughout our lives. They offer us a way to stop using and to free ourselves to be ourselves. Working the steps, studying the traditions, and applying ourselves to service in and out of NA helps us to discover who we are and what we believe. Carrying the message brings us awareness of our gifts and limitations, and guides us to change.
We can measure our lives not in years or by the things we gain or lose, but by the degree to which we make peace with our own lives and the world around us. Spiritual growth is the real success. As our recovery unfolds, we find ourselves resolving feelings we never admitted we had. Open-mindedness gives us the ability to see more and more clearly within ourselves as we go through the never-ending process of surrendering, taking inventory, and inviting change.
The message we carry has three parts: Any addict can stop using, lose the desire to use, and find a new way to live. We talk a lot about the first two, because stopping is an emergency when we get here, and losing the obsession is necessary for us to enjoy our lives. But the hard work does not end there. Finding a new way to live is not something we do just once. Some of us experience great upheaval as we try again and again to find a life that makes sense for us. But we continue to carry the message, using our experience to help others. The more experience we have to share, the richer our message can become.