How can someone tell who is a sex and love addict?
Only the individual can tell if he or she is physically, mentally, or emotionally addicted to sex and/or love. Going to several meetings will allow them to tell if they can identify with other sex and love addicts. Obtaining the pamphlet Sex and Love Addiction: 40 Questions for Self Diagnosis will help to evaluate sexual activities, romantic behavior, emotional involvements and avoidance behavior.
The 40 Questions for Self Diagnosis are also posted on the SLAA website at www.slaafws.org.
1. Having few healthy boundaries, we become sexually involved with
and/or emotionally attached to people without knowing them.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. We confuse love with neediness, physical and sexual attraction, pity
and/or the need to rescue or to be rescued.
5. We feel empty and incomplete when we are alone. Even though we
fear intimacy and commitment, we continually search for relationships
and sexual contacts.
6. We sexualize stress, guilt, loneliness, anger, shame, fear and envy. We
use sex or emotional dependence as substitute for nurturing, care,
and support.
7. We use sex and emotional involvement to manipulate and control
others.
8. We become immobilized or seriously distracted by romantic or sexual
obsession or fantasies.
9. We avoid responsibility for ourselves by attaching ourselves to people
who are emotionally unavailable.
10. We stay enslaved to emotional dependency, romantic intrigue, or
compulsive sexual activities.
11. To avoid feeling vulnerable, we may retreat from all intimate
involvement, mistaking sexual and emotional anorexia for recovery.
12. We assign magical qualities to others. We idealize and pursue them,
then blame them for not fulfilling our fantasies and expectations.