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The 12 Steps

12 Steps

The Twelve Steps outline our program for personal recovery. They form the core of recovery in Narcotics Anonymous. They are simple guidelines that we can apply in our daily lives to help us get and stay clean.

The 12 steps include spiritual principles that we can use to clean up and realign our lives. The term “God” is used in the wording. This does not refer to a religion or belief system but rather the sense of a power greater than ourselves that each person can personally define.

The 12 Steps of NA

  1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
  2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
  4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
  5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
  6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
  7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
  8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
  9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
  10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
  11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

© Narcotics Anonymous