Information about Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
The Worldwide SLAA web site is at www.slaafws.org.
The following brief is duplicated here, without modification, for convenience
only.
What is sex and love addiction?
We in SLAA believe that sex and love addiction is a progressive illness
which cannot be cured but which, like many illnesses, can be arrested. It may
take several forms -- including (but not limited to) a compulsive need for sex,
extreme dependency on one person (or many), and/or a chronic preoccupation with
romance, intrigue or fantasy. Sex and love addiction may also take the form
of a compulsive avoidance of giving or receiving social, sexual, or emotional
nourishment. This avoidance of intimacy is known in SLAA as anorexia.
We have found that obsessive/compulsive patterns exist in which relationships
or sexual activities have become increasingly destructive to career, family
and sense of self-respect. Sex and love addiction leads to ever worsening consequences
if it continues unchecked.
In SLAA, we learn to accept the reality of having this addiction and surrender
any notion that we can control it successfully on the basis of our unaided will.
Admitting personal powerlessness over this affliction, we cease our addictive
behavior and turn to guidance from a Power greater than ourselves, make restitution
for harm done to others, and reconstruct our lives physically, mentally, spiritually,
and emotionally.
How can someone tell who is a sex and love addict?
Only the individual can tell if he or she is physically, mentally, or emotionally
addicted to sex and/or love. Going to several meetings will allow them to tell
if they can identify with other sex and love addicts. Obtaining the pamphlet
Sex and Love Addiction: 40 Questions for Self Diagnosis will help to evaluate
sexual activities, romantic behavior, emotional involvements and avoidance behavior.
The 40 Questions for Self Diagnosis are also posted on the SLAA website
at www.slaafws.org.
Characteristics of Sex and Love Addiction
- Having few healthy boundaries, we become sexually involved with and/or emotionally
attached to people without knowing them.
- Fearing abandonment and loneliness, we stay in and return to painful, destructive
relationships, concealing our dependency needs from ourselves and others,
growing more isolated and alienated from friends and loved ones, ourselves,
and God.
- Fearing emotional and or sexual deprivation, we compulsively pursue and
involve ourselves in one relationship after another, sometimes having more
than one sexual or emotional liaison at a time.
- We confuse love with neediness, physical and sexual attraction, pity and/or
the need to rescue or to be rescued.
- We feel empty and incomplete when we are alone. Even though we fear intimacy
and commitment, we continually search for relationships and sexual contacts.
- We sexualize stress, guilt, loneliness, anger, shame, fear and envy. We
use sex or emotional dependence as substitute for nurturing, care, and support.
- We use sex and emotional involvement to manipulate and control others.
- We become immobilized or seriously distracted by romantic or sexual obsession
or fantasies.
- We avoid responsibility for ourselves by attaching ourselves to people who
are emotionally unavailable.
- We stay enslaved to emotional dependency, romantic intrigue, or compulsive
sexual activities.
- To avoid feeling vulnerable, we may retreat from all intimate involvement,
mistaking sexual and emotional anorexia for recovery.
- We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them, then
blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.
What is SLAA?
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who help each
other to stay sober. They offer the same help to anyone who has an addiction
with sex and/or love and wants to do something about it. Since S.L.A.A members
are all addicts themselves, they have a special understanding of each other
and the disease. They know what the illness feels like and they have learned
how to recover from it through SLAA
SLAA Preamble
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous is a Twelve Step, Twelve Tradition-oriented
fellowship based on the model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.
The only qualification for SLAA membership is a desire to stop living out
a pattern of sex and love addiction. SLAA is supported entirely through
contributions of its membership, and is free to all who need it.
To counter the destructive consequences of sex and love addiction we draw on
five major resources:
- Sobriety. Our willingness to stop acting out in our own personal bottom-line
addictive behavior on a daily basis.
- Sponsorship/Meetings. Our capacity to reach out for the supportive fellowship
within SLAA
- Steps. Our practice of the Twelve Step program of recovery to achieve sexual
and emotional sobriety.
- Service. Our giving back to the SLAA community what we continue to freely
receive.
- Spirituality. Our developing a relationship with a Power greater than ourselves
which can guide and sustain us in recovery.
As a fellowship SLAA has no opinion on outside issues and seeks no controversy.
SLAA is not affiliated with any other organizations, movements, or causes,
either religious or secular.
We are, however, united in a common focus: dealing with our addictive sexual
and emotional behavior. We find a common denominator in our obsessive/compulsive
patterns that renders any personal differences of sexual or gender orientation
irrelevant.
The Twelve Steps of SLAA
- We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction, that our lives
had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as
we understood God.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature
of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends
to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so
would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted
it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with
a Power greater than ourselves, praying only for knowledge of God's will for
us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to sex and love addicts, and to practice these principles
in all areas of our lives.
© 1997-2004 The Augustine Fellowship, Sex and
Love Addicts Anonymous, Fellowship-Wide Services, Inc.