Addiction, drugs, and recovery
“Addiction is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease that affects every area of our
lives.”
Basic Text p. 20
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.
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.