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
May 15, 2026 |
Fear of the Fourth Step |
| Page 141 |
| "As we approach this step, most of us are afraid that there is a monster inside of us that, if released, will destroy us." |
| Basic Text, p. 27 |
| Most of us are terrified to look at ourselves, to probe our insides. We're afraid that if we examine our actions and motives, we'll find a bottomless black pit of selfishness and hatred. But as we take the Fourth Step, we'll find that those fears were unwarranted. We're human, just like everyone else--no more, no less. We all have personality traits that we're not especially proud of. On a bad day, we may think that our faults are worse than anyone else's. We'll have moments of self-doubt. We'll question our motives. We may even question our very existence. But if we could read the minds of our fellow members, we'd find the same struggles. We're no better or worse than anyone else. We can only change what we acknowledge and understand. Rather than continuing to fear what's buried inside us, we can bring it out into the open. We'll no longer be frightened, and our recovery will flourish in the full light of self-awareness. |
| Just for Today: I fear what I don't know. I will expose my fears and allow them to vanish. |
As a twelve-step program, stairs are an easy go-to metaphor we often use to describe the recovery process. We climb up out of the darkness and despair of active addiction into the light of recovery. Some members say that the farther we go up the staircase, the more we have to lose should we go tumbling back down again. Living Clean describes recovery like a spiral staircase: "Again and again we come to the same view, only each time we are seeing it from a different perspective." One member shared with a laugh, "My staircase feels more like one of those trippy optical illusion paintings where the stairs circle back on each other and the laws of physics don't apply."
The longer we stay clean, the more life we experience. And when we're actively working our program, we experience life deeply and continue to encounter more truth about ourselves all the time. Finding a new way to live takes on a different meaning when we stay clean for decades. We discover ourselves, reinvent ourselves, lose ourselves, find ourselves, discover ourselves--again and again and again. The staircase circles back on itself.
When we stay clean through it all and stay active in NA, much of our process is visible to those around us. It can be messy. We may grow in ways that cause us to drift apart from some friends in recovery. We may form new connections with other members we never thought we would get close to. We might have moments where we feel silly or slow for having a realization about ourselves so far down the path, only to have our friends respond, "Oh, yeah--we've known that about you for a long time."
Few of us end up having the lives that we would have expected to have--or even being the people we would have expected to be--when we first got clean. Our fellow members love us through it all. No matter how far along we are, when we share our new discoveries, we share our hope.