Welcome to the County Line Area
of Narcotics Anonymous
Serving: Agoura Hills, Moorpark, Newbury Park, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Westlake Village in Ventura County, California
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Serving: Agoura Hills, Moorpark, Newbury Park, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Westlake Village in Ventura County, California
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
There are no strings attached to NA. We are not affiliated with any other organizations. We have no initiation fees or dues, no pledges to sign, no promises to make to anyone. We are not connected with any political, religious, or law enforcement groups, and are under no surveillance at any time. Anyone may join us regardless of age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion.
We are not interested in what or how much you used or who your connections were, what you have done in the past, how much or how little you have, but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help. The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away. We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.
For more information on Narcotics Anonymous,
please go to the: Narcotics Anonymous World Services Website
July 28, 2026 |
Secrets and intimacy |
| Page 218 |
| "We feared that if we ever revealed ourselves as we were, we would surely be rejected." |
| Basic Text, p. 32 |
| Having relationships without barriers, ones in which we can be entirely open with our feelings, is something many of us desire. At the same time, the possibility of such intimacy causes us more fear than almost any other situation in life. If we examine what frightens us, we'll usually find that we are attempting to hide an aspect of our personalities that we are ashamed of, an aspect we sometimes haven't even admitted to ourselves. We don't want others to know of our insecurities, our pain, or our neediness, so we simply refuse to expose them. We may imagine that if no one knows about our imperfections, those imperfections will cease to exist. This is the point where our relationships stop. Anyone who enters our lives will not get past the point at which our secrets begin. To maintain intimacy in a relationship, it is essential that we acknowledge our defects and accept them. When we do, the fortress of denial, erected to keep these things hidden, will come crashing down, enabling us to build up our relationships with others. |
| Just for Today: I have opportunities to share my inner self. I will take advantage of those opportunities and draw closer to those I love. |
We don't all enter the rooms of NA certain that we are addicts like those people. Some of us are dubious. Now that we have a couple of weeks clean, we remember our using days a bit differently: Was it that bad? Do we really have a "disease"? Sure, we have a problem with drugs, but it's not like we were ever arrested for it. We have a roof over our head and teeth in our mouth. Never have we exchanged sex for drugs, and all our student loan payments have been on time. Was our bottom so terrible? Was it terrible enough to warrant a daily surrender? An oldtimer offers some unhelpful advice: "Maybe you aren't done yet." That sounds ominous, and we definitely have some sort of problem, so . . .
We stay clean and get a sponsor. We pick up the NA Step Working Guides and, at our sponsor's direction, begin to answer the questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible. By the time we get to the section on surrender, we've already written about our "disease" at length: our profound dishonesty and denial, our manipulation of the people who loved and trusted us, all the laws we broke (even if we didn't get caught), the powerlessness over our addiction, our obsessiveness, our compulsiveness, our obsessive-compulsiveness, the unmanageability we've created in our lives, and the reservations we may be holding onto.
Seeing it all there on the page, all that proof in black and white--it's undeniable. I am an addict. In an ideal world, that's the moment of surrender we never look back from. Sure, that happens for many of us. That's the beginning of our process of surrendering, opening the door to recovery. Others of us end up getting loaded, doing more "research," hitting a lower bottom, and surrendering later. Still others never make it back.