About the fellowship
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Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, or SLAA, is a free, anonymous fellowship of people who help each other recover from compulsive patterns around sex, love, and relationships. In its own words, members share their experience, strength and hope so they can solve a common problem and help others recover.
There are no fees and no referral. The only thing asked is a desire to be free from sex and love addiction.
SLAA is for anyone who recognises compulsive patterns around sex, romance, or relationships, whether that shows up as acting out, or as its flip side, the avoidance and withholding the fellowship calls anorexia. You do not need a label or a diagnosis to come along.
If you are wondering whether it fits, SLAA publishes its own gentle self-assessment: the 40 Questions for Self-Diagnosis, alongside the Characteristics of Sex and Love Addiction and the Signs of Recovery. They are there for your own reflection, not for anyone to label you.
People describe it in different ways: a pull they cannot control toward romance or sex, staying in or returning to relationships that hurt, using fantasy or pursuit to avoid difficult feelings, or the opposite, shutting down and keeping closeness at arm's length. None of that is a diagnosis, just patterns some people recognise in themselves.
SLAA's own Characteristics and 40 Questions are the place to reflect on whether it speaks to you, in your own time.
SLAA began in Boston in 1976, started by a long-standing member of Alcoholics Anonymous who could not stop compulsive sexual and romantic behaviour and adapted AA's twelve steps to it. It is sometimes called the Augustine Fellowship, because early members saw their own experience described centuries earlier by Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions.
The fellowship's Basic Text, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, was published in 1986. SLAA has met in the UK for decades, in person and, increasingly, online.