EPISODE 2025-01-31 KRIS

In this episode we hear from Kris who tells her story as an atheist in this program because, in her words, it is the core of what we do here. She starts at the beginning of her personal story and shares about the first try of the NA program which she gave up because she was told point blank that she could not get clean without a god-like higher power and no matter how much she tried, she just couldn’t find faith. 

Twelve years later, in 2021 during Covid Kris walked into a virtual online secular NA meeting, and it was mind blowing because person after person got up and shared and didn’t say they needed god to get them through the program. That began Kris’ true recovery and she keeps coming back; going to meetings 5 days a week, hosting meetings, and being heavily involved in secular NA behind the scenes. 

For more information on recovery from addition through Narcotics Anonymous 12 step program from a secular, non-religious approach, please check out secularna.org

**  This podcast is not formally affiliated in any way with Narcotics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous World Services. **

Transcript

Here is the formatted transcript:

Personal Share: An Atheist's Story in Narcotics Anonymous

I don't think that I will ever not be nervous when I'm doing this. So bear with me, please. I've decided tonight that I want to tell my story as an atheist in this program, because it is the core of what we do here, right? We are here for people that are atheist in this program.

Early Life

I'll start at the beginning. I was born to a single mother — she was still in high school. She was 17 when I was born, and she used to say when I was growing up that she was always about five years behind me. So when I was five years old, she was ready to have a newborn. When I was 10 years old, she was ready to have a five-year-old. When I was 15, and so on and so forth.

This resulted in a childhood that was filled, actually mostly, with neglect. There was some physical abuse from my father, but the neglect from my mother was huge. I don't remember her ever having a religious conversation with me whatsoever growing up.

I remember having one with my aunt. I was about eight years old, and I had gone to her and told her that I didn't believe in God. She argued with me and said, "Why?" And I said, "Because I can't see him — there is no objective proof of God." I probably didn't use that big language when I was eight, but that I couldn't see him. Her argument back was, "Well, when you're in West Virginia and I'm in Maryland and you can't see me, does that mean I don't exist? It means I'm still here, right?" But the point is, I already knew she existed. She was something tangible that I could touch.

A Lifelong Atheist

I was an atheist, I think, my entire life. The closest I ever came to being a religious person was between the ages of five and seven, when I lived across the street from a Baptist church. There was a house adjacent to the church where the preacher and his wife lived. His wife's name was Emily, and I remember her very well because she doted over me. She had me over at her house a lot — she would paint with me, taught me how to make friendship bracelets, taught me how to sew. I even have a memory of making tie-dyes with her. I really adored this woman and loved the attention she gave me.

So I started showing up for church all by myself — just walked across the street. This was the 70s, so we did just walk across the street when we were five or six years old by ourselves. But I never found faith. I just really liked the things that the church offered me. I liked that it offered me attention, that people doted over me, that there was community. I really did like that part, but I never have any memory of believing anything about the religious aspect of it. I just didn't believe in God.

I grew up this way. The closest I can say I ever came to declaring anything was in my 20s, when I had a bumper sticker on my car that said: Militant Agnostic — I don't know, and neither do you. That was about as close as I came to declaring anything in my lifetime.

"Do You Remember That Time You Were a Christian?"

So it was a huge surprise one day — not too long ago, actually — when my oldest daughter, I have two adult grown children and one still at home, said to me as she was reminiscing about her childhood: "Do you remember that time that you were a Christian?"

I instantly said to her, "No, I have absolutely no clue what you're talking about," because I couldn't fathom that she could ever have come up with this idea. But as she started to describe that period during her childhood, I realized when it was. She said that I was packing up to leave to go to Texas and that I was about to go to college. And then it hit me — oh, that time I was a Christian.

What she was describing was, first of all, a time in my life when I was at a rock bottom. I was hitting a rock bottom that was so bad that I was about to be homeless, and she had no idea about this. She had no idea about my drug use, neither did her older brother. I was changing locations the way I know we often do — we change our locations because we believe that we change the people, places, and things, but not enough to actually change ourselves. Changing location is something I think a lot of us tried to do, and it just didn't work out for me.

First Time in NA — 2009

The reason why she remembers me being a Christian was because I had actually entered into the program of Narcotics Anonymous. It was a last-ditch effort before giving up and leaving my children and moving over 2,000 miles away. I had tried quitting drugs repeatedly on my own, just to no avail. Eventually the pain of everything it was causing in my life was so great it was breaking me.

As our literature says: our disease always resurfaced or continued to progress until, in desperation, we sought help from each other in Narcotics Anonymous. And that's what I was when I went into the rooms — desperate.

I actually found NA in the Yellow Pages. I was looking up treatment programs, thinking about anything I could get away with going to during the day, like maybe a methadone clinic — just something I wouldn't have to tell my family I needed. And that's where I saw an advertisement for Narcotics Anonymous, and I made the phone call. The next day I went to my first meeting.

My first meetings, everything was really, really foreign to me. I could figure out that these people had found a magic formula to put down the drugs, but the solution sounded really wild to me because it seemed like it was — with the prayers all over the walls and the word "God" everywhere. "Higher Power" was capitalized, and I didn't escape a single meeting without a prayer that I didn't know the words to, the holding of hands in the circle, and evoking God. The fact that every single meeting was held within a church, within their walls, didn't help me believe that this was anything except a very religious program — despite the fact that they claimed it was not. It sure did feel like every meeting I went to was filled with religiosity.

But I tried. I really wanted to be clean, so I tried. I listened to everything attentively. I heard the things that we hear: We will love you until you can love yourself. Don't quit before the miracle. Don't worry about what your God looks like — eventually you'll come to know him. Him, they said.

I did what I was told. I came to 90 meetings in 90 days. I got a sponsor. I listened for the similarities. I tried really, really hard. But I was told point blank that I could not get clean without a higher power, and nobody was there to explain to me things I've learned more recently — like that a higher power really can be the people in the rooms, or the fellowship itself.

I heard the old "it can be a doorknob" thing, and I never did understand that. I thought, what a strange object to pick — although somebody later explained to me it's the doorknob you opened to your first meeting. Oh, that's what that means. And maybe if somebody had said that to me, I would have caught on that this higher power thing didn't have to be a supernatural god in the sky. But it just didn't hit me like that.

Especially with the capital-H "Him." And where I lived, Christianity was big. I've since come to learn that a lot about your experience in NA depends upon where you are when you first walk into the rooms. I was in West Virginia — a pretty Christian area. I know people in Southern California, for example, might find a lot of Buddhists at meetings, or if you go overseas, I hear there's not really a whole lot of God talk in Australia. And you certainly don't hear people saying that if you don't find God, you're gonna die.

So I figure that the God that is around you is the one that you would try to find. That made sense to me — that I would try to find the Christian God, because that was what was all around me. It was the God that I knew of.

I dove headfirst down the rabbit hole. I tried to buy into it so hard that I left my children with the impression that I was a Christian. They remember me trying to read the Bible to them and trying to explain it to them. I went to Bible study classes, I tried going to church in the evening, I tried a couple of different churches — but it never felt right to me. I never ended up with this epiphany of feeling faith in God.

I never got the feeling. I never got the faith. I never found it. And I always was really jealous of people that had faith, because it sounds like such a beautiful thing. Even as I say all of this, I don't hate on people that have faith at all. I think it can be a beautiful thing, obviously, and if it helps somebody, I think that's absolutely wonderful. But it did not help me. It was not my path, it was not my way.

One of the things I also heard while I was in the program was that you have to be honest — the three most important things: honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. I had the open mind, I was completely willing, but the honest aspect was not happening for me. I was lying about who I was. I was pretending to be a Christian when I was not a Christian. Even in my shares I would say things like "God of my own understanding," just trying so hard to fake it till I made it.

It was the lack of honesty on my behalf, and the firm belief that I had to believe in this God to get through this program, that drove me from the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous.

What's interesting is that my kids never noticed that I gave up Christianity. Maybe that's because they didn't notice that I was an addict, either. I was hiding so much successfully from them that they were just seeing what I presented.

This was back in 2009. I ended up leaving the fellowship because of the lack of faith that I just never felt.

The Years Between

It was nearly 12 years before I walked into the rooms again and actually stayed. I tried a few times over the years because I kept hitting various rock bottoms. When I say rock bottom, I mean I ended up pregnant and homeless, with absolutely nowhere to go. I had burned everything and destroyed so much of my life that everyone around me was affected by my using in consequential ways and they didn't want me around. I practically had to crawl and beg my mother to take me in when I was pregnant, and ask her for the sake of the baby to please help me out. I don't think if I hadn't been pregnant she would have let me in. Everybody was sick of me.

I did try a couple of times to go back into the rooms — in South Carolina and again in West Virginia — but again, in the Bible Belt, in a heavily religious area, the God stuff was prominent when I walked into the rooms. Everybody there was preaching, and it just never fit. I continued to walk out of the rooms of NA.

Final Rock Bottom — 2021

I hit my final rock bottom in 2021, when my youngest child was taken from me. She was eight at the time. I was arrested, facing two very serious felony charges. And despite all of that, I still couldn't stop using. I could not figure out a way to quit until it was put before me: I was either going to sit and rot in jail until my court case, or I was going to go to rehab. I chose rehab — only over going to jail.

It took me a few weeks in detox and a few weeks in rehab to finally open my eyes to the fact that I had a really serious problem. When I came out, I didn't have much of a plan. I had an outpatient center that was going to see me once a week — but once a week was really not enough for me with just 45 days clean.

The good news is that I was ordered to go to the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous. And because it was 2021, I could go to virtual meetings from the safety of my own home.

The first few meetings I went to, I picked by their names — because how else are you gonna pick a meeting? I chose one that had the word "Misfit" in it, because I thought that I was a misfit and it made sense that maybe I could go to a place where they accept people that don't fit in, and I could be an atheist out loud. Maybe I could say, I don't believe in God, but I still have to be here. I have to be in this program and I don't know where else to go anyway.

But it was around my third or fourth meeting that one of the co-hosts said something to the effect of, "And my God, whom I call Jesus Christ. And if you disagree with that, then you need to go talk to your sponsor." It was said in a really angry way. Hearing that, I instantly felt like I couldn't come out and state my truth and be who I really was. While he may have meant it to be defensive, it felt like he was on the offense.

Finding Secular NA

I left that meeting, but I was still determined that no matter what, I was gonna do whatever it took to get my daughter back. So I was going to go to these meetings three days a week regardless. But I decided to Google "secular meetings," and I came across Beyond Belief Seattle.

That meeting changed everything for me.

The first person sharing never said the word "God," and they were talking about real recovery — and that was mind-blowing to me. Person after person got up and shared and didn't say that they needed their God to get them through this program. I did hear "higher power," but I heard it put in a much different way.

It really changed everything for me. The next day I went to a meeting because I wanted to. And the day after that, I went to a meeting because I wanted to. And this continued to happen for me with the secular meetings, and it's still happening now.

Long after the court order disappeared, I'm still coming. I go to a meeting five days a week. I'm now hosting meetings. I'm involved in secular NA behind the scenes. Things have really, really changed for me.

I love this program, and I am beyond grateful that secular NA exists.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Thanks for letting me share.