EPISODE 2026-04-17 ANNE MARIE

Coming into NA at age 46 after a lifetime of addiction, violence, and poverty, Anne Marie found in the rooms something she had never experienced: hope, acceptance, and the possibility of change. Over nearly 13 years of recovery, she discovered that special interest groups — secular, queer, women-only — provided the smaller, safer containers she needed to surface and integrate the parts of herself she had long hidden, ultimately reframing the program’s concept of god as the growing self-awareness that allows her to choose healing over harm. 

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

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Greetings. Welcome and thank you for tuning into our podcast, Stories of Secular Recovery from Addiction Through Narcotics Anonymous. I am Michael E., coordinator and producer of the podcast. Each episode in the podcast is a story of addiction recovery from a member of Narcotics Anonymous, NA, who became clean in a secular, non-religious way. For more information about secular NA, check out our website, secularna.org. In this episode, we hear from Anne Marie, who shares how NA saved her life after decades of addiction rooted in childhood trauma and poverty. Anne-Marie found in the room something she had never experienced before: hope, acceptance, and the possibility of change. Over her 13 years of recovery, Anne-Marie discovered that special interest meetings, secular, queer, women only, gave her the space to discover and accept the many parts of herself that a general NA meeting could not fully hold. Now let's listen to Anne Marie in her own voice and her own words.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

My name is An Moody, and I am an addict. Pleased to see you all, meet you all. It's nice to see some familiar faces. Hello, Mandy. I work with Ken in um chairing another meeting, another secular meeting, and he asked me to come into this one and um just share a wee bit on my experience in light of it being as being like a special interest group, so to speak. Or particular behaviors don't make people an addict, or everything that we human beings could possibly need is in a general in a program. When I first came into the program, I didn't have very many identifiable kind of values or beliefs in terms of how things should look or what I needed. I was I was really, really broken. I I came into the program when I was 46. I started using when I was using consenting when I was nine, but when I was like a wee baby, so my family, I grew up in a family of alkies and crimson and drug users, etc. I grew up in extreme poverty, a lot of violence, a lot of gangs. Um I I just seen Tracy, I remember your face from the other day, hi yeah. Um anyway, sorry about that got distracted. Anyway, so I remember my granny telling me that they would give me a bottle of milk with whiskey in it when I was like an infant. And I think that was a done thing. Like there's no big judgment on that. That era, that cult subculture, that time, that's was like you you dosed your reins to keep them fucking quiet, like kind of thing. And anyways, so what I'm saying is that um I was introduced to um mind-altering substances at a very, very young age, and then by the ages of nine, I was seeking it out. Um and I stole my granny's lager and her whiskey, and I went over to the lock, and I'd like I had a couple of pals, and we were all gonna get smashed. So, and my sister was there as well, and everybody was meant to bring something to drink, and we were we crossed the fields and went up to Bishop Locke, and nobody else had broke booze, and so I didn't share it with anybody else, by the way. I just drank it off. Um, and I remember feeling like invincible. I remember feeling like I was a I had superpowers. I remember the feeling of being out of myself, beyond myself, above myself, not in my body, and with any and all of the life experiences I had garnered in that time, which none of it was very pleasant. Anyway, fast forward to 46. I've run a mock in the time that I used drugs. I've run a mock in a way that when I came into the program, I didn't care what I had today. I didn't care what other people said about other people's opinions, about a God or a no God, a special interest group, queers, um any men's groups, women's groups, none of it, trans groups, none of it mattered to me. What mattered to me was I knew I was dying, and I perchance had held heard on the radio um public announcement about NA. And I called the number and I and I I went to my first meeting, which Ken was Foot Square in Australia, in Melbourne. Um and I got to be known as the Scottish woman who did the angry shares because I was always furious that I had come to this point where I had to stop pretending I didn't know everything, even if I made it up. That my double life was falling apart, like that I had been so close to death through drug-seeking behavior. I had emotionally abandoned my child to dragged her up through um my drug addiction. So when I came in, it was I had nothing, I had nafe, I had nothing to say other than is it is it possible to get better? Is it possible for me to like and it what what I got with my first few times coming to meetings was hope, like the the absolute true realization that change was going to be possible for me. Even though I was who I was, I'd done what I'd done, I was the person that was done to, like shaped and formatted from all of that experience, and then all of that maladaptive coping behavior, all of that acting out, all of that bad behavior, all of the theft that I'd done. Like I grew up in a family of criminals where they said, you know, Anne-Marie, there's the haves and the have-nots. We are the have-nots, so the haves have to take, the have-nots have to take from the haves and make it big business and make it government. Don't do your pals, don't steal from your pals. And it didn't take long for me to steal from my pals in my um seeking for um drugs. Anyway, I came in with the biggest chip on my shoulder, I came in with like pure shame and humility at that, like being caught out, called out, being seen for what I was, and then trying to get my head around people sharing what their experience was amongst raucous, raucous laughter. Like, and and and so I started to feel like maybe I was it wasn't necessary to have the same kind of shame, um, or to have the shame that I carried because people had done the same sort of stuff, and everybody was laughing about it. Like there was an acceptance, a lack of judgment. There was a um, yep, been there, done that kind of you're in the right place, anyway. So I can't tell you how grateful I am for the programme. I can't tell you how much I have gotten alive, how much relief and grief I've been able to release, uh, how much relationship I've been able to build of myself, how much of a productive member of society I have become. Like I'm using some of the jargon, and I don't know why, because I never usually use it, but I'm just it it's a I think that their cliche isn't apt for a reason. So go into four or five years into recovery, and I start feeling like I'm getting to know myself a bit better, and there's parts of me that I kinda bring into some meetings, like I can't talk about. I feel like I have to kind of sit with or hold back or hide still. And what I know is that if I'm lying to myself and I'm not telling the truth and I'm keeping secrets, I'm gonna get at risk of relapsing. And so I started to go to queer meetings. Um, I started to go to um women because I'd never been really to women-only meetings. I started looking around at the special interest groups um and found that so I'd bring this so I had my sense of annuity had was nothing. I was either better than everybody or it was less than everybody. But my sense of my rightful size, my rightful self, how I fit in the world, what I thought, what I believed, any and all of that, I had nothing. After a few years in recovery, I started to build that. And I started to become aware of um being able to find language, I guess, about there were different parts of me. Like I wasn't just this one, wasn't one size fits all, it wasn't just one human. There was many parts that sat within me, and I felt like I needed smaller groups, closer groups, or special interest groups in order to me to bring this stuff out and to share it. And so being the biggest one that for me was um as a lesbian, queer, per identified person, I went to these meetings and I was I was it felt it felt euphoric because uh another part of me was being had felt identified, it was res it was resonating with other people. It felt like more another another building block to my acceptance of myself because when it's normalized, when I'm in a in a in an atmosphere where this part of my being is normalized, i.e. being queer, this I don't know, there's a fundamental shift in for me being able to accept myself and and and own that. And then I was so afraid of women for many, many years, and I finally went to a women-only meeting and had an incredible experience with talking about the my sexual conduct, my my sexual abuse stuff, my what femininity might have been for me, what masculinity is, what am I a trans person, all sorts of things were like that. I wouldn't talk about at a regular meeting. I was able to table, share with folk who had had the same thoughts, the same kind of ideas, the same sort of inklings, the same sort of I'm gonna keep this a bit secret and away from people. Um and there was another building block about, you know, I didn't fit into a male or female particularly role, but I was um I I was okay with that. I was okay, and again, it's that stuff about if it's normalized, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, when it's normalized, there seems to be less shame and more ownership. And so that was another um kind of building block. And then I've been to all kinds of meetings, like I've been to Overeaters Anonymous, I've been to Codependence Um Anonymous, I've been to Alcoholics Anonymous, I've done a whole lot of different 12-step programs as I've become aware of where my addiction is playing out, and where my addiction is playing out could be in shopping, could be in food, could be in relationships. Like one of the big things for me, particularly around codependency, was um I had my whole life been a serial cheater and went from one person to another. There was always somebody in the sidelines. Um I was terrified of being with myself. I was terrified. I thought my biggest, the biggest thing that my the biggest thing to be afraid of was me. Because I know what I thought, I knew who I was, I knew that I was in my mind, I was like a fat, ugly, dirty cunt that should be dead. That was my narrative my whole life until I came into a 12-step program. That I was a dirty, fat, ugly cunt who should be dead. That was the level of self-hatred and loathing that I had in my actions in my active addiction only, um, made that more pronounced. Okay, so here we go. Like I'm coming up to 13 years away from my last drug, right? And I'm for the last year or so, I'm getting a sense of I don't actually know if I believe in God. I don't know if I believe in this part of the program. I don't know if that feels right for me. I think about I'm a I'm a survivor of incest. So I've been in lots of support groups outside of 12 step, and I've heard lots and lots of people talk about religious abuse and cults, and I I know that they wouldn't come anywhere near a program like a regular NA meeting that talked about God left, right, and centre. Even though NA is about God being a term and it not be religious, and it's about spirituality and individual um meaning around that, the language is there. And if you're coming in, if you're new and you got some sore parts of your body, like in Scotland, we say my heart's sore in terms of being hurt as a child, or my heart's sore because the priest abused me, or whatever. Like, but so there's lots there's lots of people who are heart sore and who want and need a program, but because of life experience and what their heart soreness is, they wouldn't come into a regular NA meeting that has no idea that this it does have an idea, but the that for some people the word is uh neon light flashing and it's a red flash, and it will prevent people from coming in. And then I think about um women who who who the same who have been sexually assaulted and being in a room with men and women and just finding some safety in a room with just women, like there's there's so much in my being to support a special special interest group, um, not because of any reason other than we're all human, we all come with our own heart soleness, and we all come with our own experience, and we all come with the same right to recovery. And so overall, NA for me saved my life. And as I developed and as I found myself, parts of myself, I was able to take that part of myself that couldn't be shared, exposed, um, in general meeting to special interest meetings, which that was like the that that was the identification with the the shared shared understanding. And so there was a lot more breath, like I take I can take my seat here because I don't believe in God. I don't believe like my step, you know, the step where it says God removes all these defects of character, and I'm like, ah fucked because that's not what I think. I don't I don't know how that's gonna work for me, but then what happened as time went on, so I kind of just acted, I affected, affected the whole a lot of times, and then what I realized was the I think that it saved my life the program, but being able to discover when I discovered the different parts of myself and my truths and my beliefs and my faith and my lack thereof, I was like, okay, so that step whereby God removes my defects or higher power removes my defects of character, what it's been for me is working the 12 steps and getting to know myself and hearing other people and sharing with other people, it's awareness that allows me to choose a different path. Oh, times up. It's the people in the rooms, it's the program, it's the commonality of um shared experiences, and then the special interest groups that reflect even more niche shared experiences, and it builds my knowledge of myself and my awareness of myself, which when it comes to a defect of character and God removing it, where I sit with that is the program's giving me an awareness of that defect of character and why I behave like that, and then I have the choice to choose the path that heals or the path that harms. So it's my awareness, my mindfulness that allows me to choose or turn to a different path from the one that I used to be on, and my defective character is not acted out. I don't know, I wanted to say, I don't think 20 minutes is enough. I think I need an hour and 20 minutes, by the way. But I want to thank you all for um listening to me, and I hope you got something from that, which is basically any's for everybody. You've got a seat, and as you find yourself in the different parts of your being, you'll find different groups and special interest groups that's going to allow you to solidify that part and seek it out really bravely. That end of the story. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

You've got a seat. And as you find yourself in the different parts of your being, you'll find different groups and special interest groups that will allow you to solidify that part and seek it out really bravely. Thank you. A reminder to everyone for more information on recovery from addiction through the Narcotics Anonymous 12 Step Program from a secular, non-religious approach, please check out our website, secularna.org. That's S E C U L A R N A.org. This is Michael E for the stories of secular recovery from addiction through Narcotics Anonymous podcast. Staying clean, one speaker at a time.