Love Addiction

Thinking you can't live with out someone. Obsessing over that person. That is love addiction.

SLAA is a 12 step program to help people break their addiction to sex and relationships. The program is modeled after the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous but is in no way affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. It is most definitely not a place to meet sexual partners.

In my village, SLAA deals primarily with unhealthy relationships. Unhealthy relationships might be when you loose one relationship and then immediately go into the next or mistake having sex for love or using sex to stay in or get into a relationship. The other part of the addiction is the "S" part which is obsessively view pornography, seeing prostitutes, womanizing, objectifying women or men, etc.

We meet every Saturday night. I have to be very careful at this meeting but it is a good one for me to go to, especially right now. The last thing I need to be doing is medicating the loss of my wife with another relationship only to find out that it is no better than the one I just came from.

At these meetings we share our experience strength and hope. We relate this experience strength and hope to the core of the program - the 12 steps. These 12 steps are:

1. We admitted we were powerless over sex and love addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. 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.
12. 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.