Narcotics Anonymous

Just For Today - Daily Email Service

   December 14                                 Addiction, drugs, and recovery

     "Addiction is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease that affects
                          every area of our lives."

                                                            Basic Text, p. 20

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   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.

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   Just for today:  Addiction is not a simple disease, but it has a simple
   solution.   Today, I  will live in that solution:  the Twelve Steps of
   recovery.