What is Sex & Love Addiction?
We in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) believe that sex and love addiction is a progressive illness that, if left untreated, can get worse. It can 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. An obsessive/compulsive pattern, either sexual or emotional (or both), exists in which relationships or sexual activities become increasingly destructive to career, family and self-respect.
However, if we follow this simple program that has proven successful for many people with the same illness, we can recover. In SLAA, we learn to accept the reality of having this addiction and surrender the notion that we can control it successfully on the basis of our unaided will. We cease our addictive behavior and turn to guidance from a Power greater than ourselves (as we each define it), make restitution for harm done to others, and reconstruct our lives physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally.
[Addicted to Sex, Addicted to Love pamphlet excerpted date-2024]
What is Anorexia?
What is Anorexia?
In SLAA, we suffer from addiction to sex, love, relationship, fantasy, romance, and codependency. However, there is still another addiction some of us suffer from: anorexia. As an eating disorder, anorexia is defined as the compulsive avoidance of food.
In the area of sex and love, anorexia has a similar definition: it is the compulsive avoidance of giving or receiving social, sexual, or emotional nourishment.
Some Varieties of Anorexia
We may:
- Not have had sex or been in a close personal relationship in years, or ever.
- Be in partnerships, but find it difficult to be emotionally close.
- Seldom speak in meetings, disappearing the instant the meeting is over.
- Be barely social outside of meetings.
- Not have intimate friendships.
- Have many acquaintances, but no one we’re really close to.
- Have close relations with only certain people, but keep our distance from anyone else.
There are many other varieties of anorexics as well, but whichever kind we are, all of us in some important way have distanced ourselves from experiencing love.
As anorexics or as people with anorexic tendencies, we may have a wide range of feelings and responses. Some of us feel overwhelmed in social settings. Others of us get high by socializing with a great many people in order to keep ourselves from intimacy with any one person. Some of us feel incapacitated by shyness in relationships with others. Others of us are in relationship but are passionate only in one area of it; for instance, we may be emotionally invested in the relationship but remain sexually or socially unavailable.
Just as our feelings have a wide range, so do our behavior patterns. For some of us, anorexia might take the form of an overwhelming dread of making phone calls. Some of us function well in particular situations, such as the workplace where intimacy is not usually valued, but find we are distant with family and friends. Others of us have used alcohol, drugs, food, compulsive talking or other compulsive behaviors to avoid intimacy. Or we used them to become sexually, emotionally, or socially daring, while essentially remaining out of contact with others in any meaningful way. In this way, we have used other addictions to act out anorexically.
Are You Anorexic?
Ten of the fifty questions from the pamphlet are provided here to help you decide if this pamphlet may be of use to you.
- Do you go for long periods without being involved in a sexual or romantic relationship?
- Do you go without social activities for extended periods of time?
- Although in a relationship, have you found that, for a long while, you have not experienced: romance? sexuality? intimacy? friendship?
- Are you alone more than you want, but feel unable to change that?
- At work do you have trouble developing relationships, talk only when absolutely necessary, or hide out in the work?
- Do you avoid relationships with a certain gender?
- Do you stay aloof when in groups?
- Are you afraid of being noticed?
- Does being in the presence of others exhaust you, even if you like them?
- Do you habitually panic or push people away when they start getting too close?
Some S.L.A.A. meetings have a specific focus on anorexia. If there isn’t an anorexic meeting near you, you may want to attend one online or start one in your area.
Anorexia (parts are excerpted © 1992-2024 S.L.A.A.)