SLAA ยท UK
Every SLAA meeting is open to everyone. Some meetings simply have a focus, a theme they centre on, like sexual anorexia, or the experience of women or men. And some run in a particular format, like HOW. Knowing the focuses and formats makes it easier to find a room that fits.
This page explains each one in plain terms and points you to some of the meetings that carry it. Every SLAA meeting is free, confidential, and anonymous. You are never required to speak, you can keep your camera off online, and you can leave at any time. Many people go to more than one kind.
The focuses below are ways in, not walls.
In SLAA, anorexia is the compulsive avoidance of giving or receiving connection: sexual, social, or emotional. The fellowship describes it simply as not doing. Not trusting, not committing, not letting people in. It is understood as the flip side of the same difficulty as compulsive acting out, and it has its own meetings.
People notice it in different ways. Emotionally, shutting down or staying behind a wall of self-sufficiency while feeling anxious or alone underneath. Physically or sexually, going months or years without closeness, or holding back to stay in control. Socially, having plenty of acquaintances but no one really close, dreading a phone call, or staying so busy with work or other things that closeness never gets any room. SLAA UK puts it as feeling fine where intimacy is not expected, like the workplace, but distant with family and friends.
None of that is a diagnosis, just patterns some people recognise. The meetings below name an anorexia focus directly. Other SLAA meetings also hold an anorexia focus on certain days, so it is worth reading the notes on the full SLAA meetings page too.
HOW stands for Honesty, Open-mindedness and Willingness. A HOW meeting runs in a more structured format, with clearer commitments between meetings, such as regular contact with a sponsor and written step work. Many SLAA meetings in the UK run as HOW, and you will see HOW in the meeting name. It is a format, not a separate fellowship, and it is open to anyone.
Some meetings hold a withdrawal focus, a steadying place to be during a chosen period of stepping back from the specific behaviours a member has decided are their bottom line. You will usually see it named in a meeting's notes on the full SLAA meetings page.
Some SLAA meetings centre the experience of women. People choose them when they want that as the shared starting point for talking about sex and relationships. A dedicated page for women in recovery is on the way.
Some SLAA meetings centre the experience of men, for the same reasons.
Some SLAA meetings centre LGBTQ+ members. You are welcome in any SLAA meeting; some people simply prefer a room where this is the shared starting point.
Some SLAA meetings centre neurodivergent members, whether autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. You are welcome in any SLAA meeting; some people prefer a room where this is the shared starting point, and where the pace and the sensory side are understood.
Last checked: June 2026.