HEALTHY Relationships - At A Glance
Outline of Understanding Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Literature Understanding Healthy Relationships
Speakers & Conversations About Healthy Relationships
Literature Understanding Healthy Relationships
SLAA Meetings Focused on Healthy Relationships
Tools To help Get you Started Using Healthy Relationships
Literature Understanding Healthy Relationships
Tools To help Get you Started Using Healthy Relationships
Tools To help Get you Started Using Healthy Relationships
Tools To help Get you Started Using Healthy Relationships
HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS - OUTLINE
SLAA member shares their experience of why they came to the fellowship
Many of us cannot remember many days that we did not feel disconnected, out of place, inadequate, unworthy, alone, and afraid. The way we saw and felt about ourselves on the inside never matched what we saw on the outsides of others. This disconnect in the way we saw ourselves pushed us father into believing were unique and began to isolate from parents, from peers, from ourselves. We so much wanted to be seen and accepted and we thought we were not being seen. The truth is somewhere when we were very young we did not learn how to connect with people. The harder we tried to connect, the more failures would pile up.
In order to save our live many of us turned to fantasy. We plugged in by drinking in the pictures, the images, and pursuing the objects of our fantasies. We craved connection so bad and wanted others to crave us in a way that we could take in and feel.
Because many of us were also romanticized or sexualized at a very young age our brains remembered those warm feelings of energy when the dopamine was released in our brain at those early exposures. We were hurting and barely staying alive and we touched that dopamine producing behavior again this time our brain took note of just how that happened. The next negative feeling we got our brain knew how to make that feeling go away. The truth is we were addicted to connection and had no idea how to find it, but we did know how to treat the symptoms. Headache, take an Aspirin, if I has an emotional ache… I now had something for that symptom too. Finally I could feel normal even if it only lasted for a little while. Feeling normal every once in a while is better than never feeling normal. We became true addicts: sex with self, promiscuity, adultery, dependency relationships, and more fantasy. We got it through the eyes; we bought it, we sold it, we traded it, we gave it away. We were addicted to the intrigue, the tease, and the forbidden.
Soon more and more problems (hurts, failures, fears, resentments, and etc.) were being treated with the same prescription. What starts to happen is as the medicine gets over used the effectiveness of it wears off. We have to add more medicine to have the same effect. A new problem emerges and we start needing to medicate because we took medication. The only way we knew to be ease the cravings was to use stronger medicine and do it more often. What is crazy is we forgot that the real thing we were trying to fix was trying to feel connected. We walk around looking for anything and anyone to make us whole. The reasoning portion of my brain was not numb and I had no ability to reason or understand regardless of the cost or consequences of my actions, I was now in full survival mode. Anything to stay alive.
This craving became so absolutely strong and everything that that we tried on our own did not work so we became willing to give away our power to anything or anyone who we thought might make us feel connected. This produced guilt, self-hatred, remorse, emptiness, and pain, and we were driven ever inward, away from reality, away from love, lost inside ourselves. True intimacy and connection is impossible, I was for all practical purposes an emotional zombie.
We could never have a real connection with another because we were addicted to the unreal. We went for the chemistry,” dopamine the only thing that had ever worked, because it by-passed intimacy and true connection but did make us feel better for the moment. Fantasy corrupted the real; lust killed love.
First we had a connection disorder and we figured out that we were connection cripples. We had lost our legs and could not understand why we could not keep up with the other people. We figured out ways to overcome our being relationally and emotionally crippled by medication. That worked, but at a declining rate of success with each use. We addicts or love cripples took from others to fill up what was lacking in ourselves. Each time we did this we would mislead ourselves that this was the last time or this next one was going to be the one that would really save us. With each game we ran a little more of us would die. We felt less and less, we were really losing our lives.
Scott TX -2020
HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS - LITERATURE RESOURCES
SLAA Pamphlet: Healthy Relationships: Romantic and Committed Partnership
Conference-approved by S.L.A.A., this pamphlet helps the reader understand what bottom lines are and how to use them.
SLAA Basic Text
Conference-approved by S.L.A.A., this book provides insight into the problem of sex and love addiction, information on working the 12 steps of S.L.A.A., the history of Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous, personal stories from members of the program and much more. The SLAA basic text interprets AA's program to give support to recovering sex and love addicts.
Borrow A Digital Version Of The SLAA Basic Text
Connect to Internet Archive and create an account and they have a limited number of copies of the SLAA Basic Text they loan out for 14 days.
NEW RECORDING
21 March 2024 - Jane speaking at the Red Reading Group spoke on learning to apply the 12 steps to relationships by using our sponsoring relationships as practice.