What is Nar-Anon?

[admin]

Nar-Anon is primarily for you who know or have known a feeling of desperation concerning the addiction problem of someone very near to you.

When you come into Nar-Anon, you are no longer alone but among true friends who understand your problems as few others could. Your confidence and anonymity are respected, as you respect the anonymity of others. Through Nar-Anon, you will come to understand that no situation is too difficult and no unhappiness is too great to be overcome.

The program, which is not a religious one but a spiritual way of life, is based on the twelve suggested steps of Narcotics Anonymous. Working of these steps will bring solution to practically any problem. Nar-Anon has been as helpful to the friends and family as the Narcotics Anonymous program is to the addict. Through Nar-Anon, we gain the wisdom and courage to see ourselves as we really are, to do something about ourselves with the help of a higher power as we understand this, and the grace to release our addicts with love and cease trying to change them.

With the understanding that addiction is a disease, and the realization that we are powerless over it as well as over other people’s lives, we are ready to do something useful and constructive with our own. Then, and only then, can we be of any help to others.


Helping

Your role as helper is not to DO Things for the person you are helping, but to BE things, not to try to train and change his/her actions, but to train and change your reactions. As you change your negatives to positives -- fear to faith; contempt for what he does to respect for the potential within him/her; rejection to release with love, not trying to make him/her fit a standard or image, or expecting him/her to measure up to or down from that standard, but giving him an opportunity to become himself/herself, to develop the best within him/her, regardless of what that best may be; dominance to encouragement, panic to serenity; false-hope, self-centered, to real hope, God-centered; the rebellion of despair to the energy of personal revolution; driving to guidance; and self-justification to self-understand. As you change in ways such as these, you change the world about you and all the people in your world for the better.

From Nar-Anon of CT/MA