To anyone with a Narcotics Anonymous background my blog may seem insensitive or undermining toward addiction recovery! I'm sorry but these are my individual experiences, my life as well and as controversial as this maybe, I'm going to call it like I see! I believe things are as serious as we make them out to be and that you can find laughter in anything! Even the perils of Crack addiction! So sit back stop being so serious and be entertained at my expense!
So I make it through rehab 3 months successfully but the recovery center had found out that I wasn't participating in (NA) Narcotics Anonymous meetings alongside the rehab program I was attending! So the founder of "Cross Roads" confronts me like you have to start attending NA meetings or we won't allow you to graduate! I tell her I really wasn't interested in a volunteer style help program! The structured rehab recovery was working for me and I was feeling good about myself! I could actually see my way out of the woods! I still had to walk my way out but I could see the right direction to begin the walk but I was concerned about Narcotics Anonymous possibly undermining my recovery! Being as though it was a volunteer program run by recovering addicts! I felt like what I was doing was working with the professional rehab! So why fix something that's not broken!
All of these Rehabilitation centers and so call counselors don't know what's good for everyone! What was successful for one person may not work for another person! They insisted, so I knew this meeting that they held over at the E. Baltimore St. & Lakewood ave. It's held in a church right across from Patterson Pk. That was the neighbor hood I started getting high in and I'd always seen all the addicts out front of there before and after the meetings, so I figured I give it a try!I go down there my first day with 3 months of clinical recovery under my belt! Some of my will was back and I was feeling good about myself! So they were all looking at me like who the fuck is this dude! I think they thought I was a bounty hunter or something! Cause no one was really reaching out to me! Eating, hydrating and a couple of push ups will bring you back fast! The wild part about NA was everyone is allowed to speak and what everyone has to say isn't conducive to rehabilitation & recovery! You gotta sit through it and listen though! No matter how relapse provocative, sexes or inappropriate this story may be, you have to entertain this bullshit! Its a program that's really unfair or counterproductive to someone fighting literally to stay sober! Cause some of those people undermining the group ain't even clean! It's just like a junky high school reunion! It's a shame people come up in a serious place playing with peoples lives! Trying to meet women who are confused and weak! People with a couple dollars they can fake befriend, as if they know the path to recovery! Just set you up, lead you back into getting high and keep you trapped on never one day clean with them, its sad! They say its all apart of the recovery process but I wanted to stay clean, not play "Lord of the Flies" or "Survivor!" I made it another three months, then I relapsed! To many glamorization and war stories about drugs, with no solid recovery experience to balance them out!
2 comments:
Your experience with NA isn't that much different than what I have heard from a few people. For some NA works really well. It gives the people who were hanging out together while addicted and new place to hang out together while in recovery. For people that like large groups of the same people that used to hang out in the same places, though now in a different setting, NA is for them. But for some people that just want to go to a meeting to learn to better manage themselves and don't wish to partake in drama then NA might not be for them. I guess it depends on which NA group, where and who is running the show.
FWIW, you haven't convinced me you are going to be lifelong crack smoker. Relapsing is the norm when on the path to recovery.
It's true that AA and NA don't boast any higher rates of recovery than a person just deciding to quit. Maybe do what I do in lame forced meetings-- doodle, make up nicknames for people, try to imagine having sex with everyone in the room... keep your sense of humor! It's all material you can use in your writing at least!
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