Characteristics of Sex and Love Addiction
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 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 substitutes 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
obsessions 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.
© 1990 All Rights Reserved
The Augustine Fellowship, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Fellowship-Wide Services, Inc.
http://www.slaafws.org/download/core-files/Characteristics-of-Sex-Love-Addiction.pdf
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