Ontario Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
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Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
Welcome to the Ontario Intergroup website for SLAA. You are not alone.
What is a Sex and Love Addict?
We come from all walks of life. We are men and women. We
have differing sexual orientations. We have different life
experiences, different lifestyles; some of us are in
relationships, some live alone. Despite the differences in
our individual experiences, we share a common focus: a need
to change our obsessive/compulsive patterns.
The Twelve Characteristics of
Sex & Love
Addicts
- 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 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, fear and
envy. We use sex or emotional dependence as substitutes
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 obsessions 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.