About Sex & Love Addiction

In a general way we can describe Sex & Love Addiction as a set of compulsive and obsessive traits in the realms of sex, love and romance, which help a person to self-medicate, producing a high which allows them to avoid the pain of not being able to feel comfortable relating to other people. Just like heroin addiction, the high may be replaced over time by just the feeling that life is OK again, once we’ve had our ‘fix’.

 

Of course, the roots of this illness are buried deep in childhood experiences of fear and abandonment, and poor boundary control. But we do not have to rake over the coals of the past in order to make substantial progress in healing, and becoming happy and valued family and community members.

 

To list all the various symptoms of this disease would be impossible, especially when you consider that they also include entrenched avoidance patterns, which we call "Sexual, Social & Emotional Anorexia."

 

We cannot produce an exhaustive list, but some of the more common experiences are a sense of constantly getting caught in unhealthy and "toxic" relationships, compulsive flirting, fantasising, or sexualisation of our interactions with others, a sense of shame and lack of freedom around masturbation, and or the use of pornography etc. Some people have been caught in a repeating and ruinous pattern of promiscuity, or serial monogamy, or polygamy, or paying for sex, others have had one single partner all their lives, some avoided all forms of relationship altogether, and yet all of us have felt an increasing sense of isolation, desperation and shame. Most of us have switched from one pattern to another over any significant period of time.

 

Many of us come to SLAA because of a sudden collapse in our ability to maintain a front of "normality." We have arrived here in the throes of an internal crisis we could no longer postpone or evade.

 

A sudden realisation, "being found out", leaving or attempting to leave a toxic situation etc., can land us into a deeply unsettling experience of Withdrawal. This very real phenomenon has many physical and psychological hallmarks and is a very intense and prolonged experience.

 

It is impossible to summarise all the experiences which you may be able to relate to right now, so we recommend instead that you read our "12 Characteristics of Sex & Love Addiction" which will allow you to consider if this fellowship may be the place you have been looking for.