I have been blessed with a beautiful partner and in 25 days..we are having a commitment ceremony..invited over 400 folks..all who have been amazing gifts to our lives..and 98% NA family..I feel blessed..overwhelmed with gratitude..now..on the flip side..I'm nervous, anxious, scared and also disbelief..that I have come to this part of my journey..who would have thought..dope fien, player, hustler, hopeless, pennyless and drawless would be having a beautiful life and no longer live the way I use to ..It all started when i put the glass pipe down..AMAZING!!
Hi Terry,, Congrats. Please read the draft from "Living Clean", the latest in NA literature. Its not a lecture or "NA counselling", but real experience shared by real recovering addicts.
All the best luv !! Hugs.
"Relationships Recovery doesnt happen in a vacuum. We need one another, and we need to be involved with the world around us in order to recover. Living clean is all about relationshipswith ourselves, with our loved ones, with our fellow members, with society, and ultimately with our Higher Power. The people in our lives are the means by which we experience grace. We see the miracle of change in others, and they reflect our own changes back to us. They are windows through which we see the world, and vehicles by which weachieve spiritual progress.
The truth is that most of us have not been very good at relationships. Some would say thatan inability to form or maintain long-term relationships is one of the symptoms of addiction.The Basic Text tells us that the disease makes us devious, frightened loners, that we develop strange habits and lose our social graces. When we came into recovery, we didnt always recognize what was wrong with the ways we related to people. Our experiences as using addicts shaped our habits and our expectations.
We have not been easy people. We do harm when we are using, and the people who are closest to us get the worst of it. We can be stubborn and suspicious, angry and afraid, sarcastic, willful, and set in our ways. We have been through hell, and we have put others through hell, too. Weve experienced loss and failure and often violence. Even if we come in with families or careers intact, we need to change how we deal with them. Gaining these skills in recovery can be a long and sometimes painful process. When we look back on our active addiction and see the harm we caused, the relationships we destroyed, and the opportunities for intimacy we threw away, we may be overwhelmed by the wreckage. But we can also find some gratitude for the fact that we are clean now and we are changing. Our history with relationships can lead us to think that there is no hope for us in this area, but our experience with the Second Step proves to us that we can be restored to sanity. We need help that our loved ones cannot give us. The therapeutic value of one addict helping another really is without parallel. Caring and sharing the NA way is the ultimate weapon against our alienating, isolating, destructive disease.
Serious work is required. The issues we need to deal with emerge in the course of our interactions with others in and out of NA. As we go about our lives, just being who we are, we begin to heal. While we are healing, we experience difficulties and conflicts. When we no longer have the drugs to blame, we begin to understand the part we play in our own struggles. When we see ourselves creating wreckage while clean, we have a harder time making peace with ourselves. Some of us struggle to believe that lasting change is possible. Members who care about us will help us to see the ways we are still creating our own problems, but its our responsibility to do something about it.
We learn to share, and share intimately. For many of us, sponsorship is our first honest, functional relationshipat the very least, the first in a long time. Sponsorship can serve as a model on which we begin to build other relationships that are healthy, loving, and productive. Many of our longtime members recall that they were impossible newcomers questioning, doubting, arguing, and admitting their reservations. We made mistakes in public and dealt with the consequences. We built our foundation not by pretending, but by going through the struggle honestly and courageously, and accepting help along the way. Recovery is not always a tidy process; we are building intimate relationships with other people and with a power greater than ourselves, and neither of these comes naturally to all of us.
We dont all come into NA alone: Many of us come into recovery with partners, children, parents, and others we are close to. But many of these relationships have been damaged by our disease. As we recognize that we cant fix it all at once, it can be tempting to just walk away. But relationships are not like drugs, even though we may have used them for the same purposes; we cant simply abstain. The real work of living clean happens when we are in the world, relating with others. Our only choice is to learn as we go. We learn to deal with our family, our workplace, and our community at the same time that we are learning to find our place in the rooms. Each relationship we have affects every other. Each one teaches us things that help in the rest of our relationships.
We dont get long-term recovery without having relationships, both in and out of the rooms. Its the meat and potatoes of lifeand the dessert! Relationships affect everything we do and everything we are. The ways we respond to our experiences shape who we become. When we are willing to stay in recovery, to allow ourselves to grow and change, we experience a full range of emotions. That we get clean at all is a miracle. But it doesnt stop there: We grow to be steady, reliable, loving people who can be a force for change in the lives of other addicts and beyond.
Relationships are central to everything we do. There is no step or tradition that is not somehow about relationships, and all of our literature talks about relationships in some way or another. There is no other area in our recovery that causes us more pain or more joy; its where we see our growth and our recovery most clearly."
-- Edited by Raman on Thursday 7th of July 2011 03:17:46 AM
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Raman an addict clean and serene just for today in NA Worldwide ; live to love and love to live the NA Way !!!
Then again, after the above quoted, seems like this is again is very much in context;
"Bridging Two Worlds: Relationships Outside NA
Our NA relationships might not be like any other relationships we have, but that doesntmean they are the only relationships in our lives, or even the only important ones. We have family and friends outside the fellowship. Our jobs generally bring us into contact with others; many of us go back to school, or find other ways to pursue our goals personally and professionally. We develop interests and skills that have nothing to do with recovery, except that without recovery its likely we wouldnt pursue those interests. In pursuing our passions, our careers, or our hobbies we make connections with the world beyond our doors in all kinds of surprising ways. Some of us are part of faith communities or other organizations that have their own ties that bind. In all of these relationships we learn and grow, practice principles, and try new ways to deal with old feelings. Our anonymity may be something we must guard carefully in order to maintain our place in those worlds.
Earthlings, normies, civilianswe use these terms to separate ourselves from people outside the rooms and mistakenly reinforce our own alienation. We struggle with the fear that if we get too integrated into the outside world, we will slip away from NA. Each of us seeks our own balance that allows us to participate in the world without sacrificing our recovery or putting ourselves at risk.
With a base of intimacy and safety in the fellowship, it can be easier to venture out into theworld. Learning to live and serve by the traditions gives us particular skills that are very welcome outside the rooms. Willingness, honesty, belief in unity, and faith in the process make us valuable wherever we choose to serve. We know how to make ourselves useful, how to be teachable, and how to show respect and allow others to speak. Being able to focus on a primary purpose and work creatively toward it is so much a part of our way of life that we may not realize how highly valued that is in the world at large. Learning to serve gives us skills to lead. But its in our relationships inside NA that a particular kind of work happens, and thats one of the reasons that it is so important for us to plug in to the fellowship.
With all of our talk about NA as the last house on the block, or the place we need to be, or the place where we are always welcome no matter what, we sometimes lose track of what a beautiful thing we have. When we allow others to see our recovery and what it means to have a fellowship in our lives, we are sometimes surprised at how attractive it is. Its not unusual for us to hear a nonaddict sigh, I wish I had what you all have. They can see the beauty of the gift, but they may not understand the stakes in our membership, or what we had to go through to earn our seat. If they are fortunate, they will never understand that. We can be glad for their good fortune even as we are grateful that we have what we do.
We learn to care and share with others. Even though the boundaries can be very differentwith people outside, the principles we learn in our recovery can be practiced in all our affairs. Honesty and sincerity are almost always appreciated. We sometimes think that we have the market cornered on pain, but other people have their stories too. When we share with them we discover that we have much to learn from one another"
-- Edited by Raman on Thursday 7th of July 2011 03:26:55 AM
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Raman an addict clean and serene just for today in NA Worldwide ; live to love and love to live the NA Way !!!
