If you want to use drugs, that’s your business. If you want to stop but can’t, that’s ours.
Attend one of our meetings or call the helpline (800) 539 0475 to find out how Narcotics Anonymous can help.
All of the efforts of Narcotics Anonymous are inspired by the primary purpose of our groups. To carry our message to addicts who still suffer.
Upon this common ground we stand committed.
Just For Today
August 14, 2025 |
Letting go of our limitations |
| Page 236 |
| "We don't have to settle for the limitations of the past. We can examine and reexamine our old ideas." |
| Basic Text, p. 11 |
| Most of us come to the program with a multitude of self-imposed limitations that prevent us from realizing our full potential, limitations that impede our attempts to find the values that lie at the core of our being. We place limitations on our ability to be true to ourselves, limitations on our ability to function at work, limitations on the risks we're willing to take--the list seems endless. If our parents or teachers told us we would never succeed, and we believed them, chances are we didn't achieve much. If our socialization taught us not to stand up for ourselves, we didn't, even if everything inside us was screaming to do so. In Narcotics Anonymous, we are given a process by which we can recognize these false limitations for what they are. Through our Fourth Step, we'll discover that we don't want to keep all the rules we've been taught. We don't have to be the life-long victims of past experiences. We are free to discard the ideas that inhibit our growth. We are capable of stretching our boundaries to encompass new ideas and new experiences. We are free to laugh, to cry, and, above all, to enjoy our recovery. |
| Just for Today: I will let go of my self-imposed limitations and open my mind to new ideas. |
Spiritual Principal a Day
Even those of us who were raised by wolves were taught the difference between right and wrong. The code of ethics we inherited may have been a bit twisted, but it gave us a point of reference nonetheless. As a result, many of us suffered from a guilty conscience when we screwed up or caused harm early in our using careers. At some point, though, we made a choice--knowingly or not--to behave in ways that were contrary to the values we had internalized. It's not that we lacked a moral compass; we'd just put it away for a bit. On those occasions when we still felt bad, we turned to denial, defensiveness, and drugs--lots of drugs--to help us stuff the discomfort of a guilty conscience.
Our awareness of that still, quiet voice within starts to return almost as soon as we put down the drugs. Our first reunion with our conscience can feel pretty distressing. Without drugs to mask our feelings, many of us experience an uncut dose of the shame we'd been stuffing for years. We're relieved to read that "we are not responsible for our disease" in the Basic Text. People who know their way around the Twelve Steps assure us that the second half of that sentence, "we are responsible for our recovery," will help us make peace with the past and develop our own conscience.
We begin to tune in to what's right for us and focus on aligning our actions with spiritual principles and our own values. We learn--sometimes through trial and error--to behave in ways we can be proud of. Not wanting to pay a spiritual price, we're slower to act out on our most basic urges and selfish desires, so we do so less frequently. We can even observe our impulses without acting on them--who knew? With practice, we recalibrate our value system and develop a code of behavior that reflects our intentions.