Tradition Eleven

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NA

TRADITION ELEVEN

"Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films."

Spiritual integrity is the heart of this Tradition. In NA, we deal with energy and avoid areas of powerlessness. One of the major ways we stay within bounds is not to try to claim responsibility for other people, what they do or what they think. Standing out, alone and on our own, is necessary for us to carry out our Fifth Tradition and carry our message. When people think of NA, hopefully they will think of recovering addicts who help one another. Any departure from this focus hurts our ability to carry our message. While we applaud and enjoy our personal attributes, we set aside our personal preferences in favor of group purpose and this Tradition enjoins us to keep this spirit alive.

We addicts at almost any point along life's way, have some things to learn. Staying on the subject is hard if not impossible for many of us, especially in early recovery. Service workers who specialize in Public Information services, study guidelines developed by members within the Fellowship to pass along what has been learned about creating and maintaining a public presence without violating our Traditions. Please refer to these guides to get what is most current and helpful at present.

To keep our program attractive, we avoid promotional images and postures that would suggest we were other than what we are: A program of recovering addicts who help one another to get help themselves. This is attractive to addicts seeking recovery who would be turned off by professional approaches or treatment programs that may not have worked in the past. While we find many of our members are better able to benefit from treatment due to the radical change recovery makes in a person, we have members who have gotten clean and stayed clean on NA alone.

Promotion would be out of place for a program of recovery based on spiritual principles. Promotion implies the need to add value to a product or proposition especially where there may otherwise be no real value. We try to be sensitive to prospective members who may still be in pain from having been promised help by some other organization or program and felt let down. We are what we are and we are grateful. Our recovery should speak for itself among addicts in pain from active addiction. Until an addict is awakened by their very own custom designed ‘pain’, they are notoriously unlikely to respond to any offer of help. So, promotion would not only not work, it would make real addicts think we were somehow insincere pretenders and therefore avoid us when they become serious about recovery.

The greatest treasure of all recovering persons is being able to live free of the labels of active addiction. We may break our own anonymity privately for any reason, yet we do not grant the right to do this to any other person, even if they have reason to think it will be OK with us. In this world, we never know when our good-naturedness will cost someone their job or result in other problems that would not occur without our interference.

Initial attraction to our fellowship happens in many ways. But the continued attraction that keeps us coming back may often stem from our honesty living the spiritual principles of our program in our daily lives. That is what continues to attract the still suffering addict to us: The fact we live in the spiritual solution and our willingness to share ourselves unconditionally.