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SAA or Sex Addicts Anonymous is an organization that seeks to help the sexually addicted individual to continually and progressively seek help in managing their addiction. In their words:
A fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other so they may overcome their sexual addiction and help others recover from sexual addiction or dependency.
The meetings are usually once per week, they have several attendees seeking to recover from sexual addiction, and they are typically held at a church, civic building, or other neutral location. In my experience they have faithfully held to the principles of the 12 step program as outlined in the SAA Website,
The good and bad, but not ugly...
My experience is not everyone’s experience. And maybe this is just my own personality flaw, but I want to outline what I liked, what I didn’t like and maybe put a wrapper on the whole thing so you can see this as one person’s opinion and not the gospel truth for everyone.
The Good
- Great place to meet people with common struggles.
- Common struggles make stronger friendship bonds.
- A place to seek guidance
- A place to learn tried and true methods for controlling and managing addictive drives and behaviors.
- A way to find other resources for sexual addiction.
- The place to go to find reassurance that not all is lost because of a personal addiction to a destructive behavior.
- There is help.
The Bad
- Potentially meeting people “in the wild” small communities makes for an uncomfortable exchange. Maybe an online option or a phone option would be better in smaller settings.
- “Story-swapping” quite often occurs where a person who “enjoys” stories gets a little too involved in hearing them for fodder in the bathroom later.
- Matching grounds. Some meetings turn into a way for people to meet others that have similar issues and unhealthy relationships can and have formed in this way.
- Meeting people you already know in a situation that makes outside friendships awkward.
- Recovery junkies: Those people who addictively derive self-worth from recurring validation. That is… saying bad things about self in order to receive the validation.
- My personal dislike is having to call myself by a negative term “addict” every time I opened my mouth. I don’t like to put myself down and reminding myself why I am there seemed a bit over the top for me.
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