the Journal is a publication of
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
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You have arrived at the home of the Journal , a bimonthly publication of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.
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What it is.What is the Journal ? It is the creative heart and soul of the SLAA Fellowship. It is the creative output of many members brought together to inspire, elucidate, and strengthen each member and each group within the fold of SLAA recovery. Sex addiction and love addiction are significant issues in our day. Everywhere from Romeo and Juliet to the nightly news we see the tragic outcome of sex and love addiction. When do we get to see the bright and hopeful story of recovery? Here in the Journal . Sex addicts; love addicts; sexual, emotional, and social anorexics; and the vast majority of us who suffer from more than one of these related maladies, come together to support one another in mutual recovery. The Journal is like a meeting in print. It is like an SLAA meeting in print because it conveys the hope of recovery and the tools, attitudes, and perspectives that get us there. It conveys the importance of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions that are at the center of the spiritual solution that makes recovery possible. It is one sex and love addict helping another. It is the sharing of experience, strength, and hope. It is the expression of recovery through the eyes of many. |
Brutally Honest
(excerpted from the September-October 2009 issue of the Journal)
God, I’m supposed to be doing the Seventh Step. I’m supposed to ask you to take away my character defects. I’m supposed to know what they are.
I thought I knew what they were when I finished Steps Four and Five, but a few weeks have passed, and now I’m not sure. It was pretty clear that there were some selfish and twisted motives that guided my thoughts and actions. But I’ve started to question more in myself, and, to be brutally honest with myself, I’m not really sure just how bad it is.
Do I even have a single untwisted intention? If you take away my character defects, is there any intention left but biological necessities like breathing?
Can I love? Can you teach me that? Can I care about someone without trying to be caring?
Can you do that? Would you? Should you even try?
I suppose I should be grateful to have one honest intention, even if that one intention is simply to someday have another honest intention. That would make two. That would be a miracle.
I won’t ask for help because that would imply that I have something to offer to this process, and I don’t. It isn’t help that I need; it’s open-heart surgery.
Now I get those ancient ways. Now things I’ve heard make sense.
Spare nothing, God, but a pure desire to have a single thought that would not be tragically self-centered. I guess that’s my Seventh Step. I can’t think of anything else to say.
- Flavia T., Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
What is the Journal?
(excerpted from the September-October 2009 issue of the Journal)
The Journal is a tool of recovery with many uses. It is a personal tool, a home group tool, and a public information tool. It can be read by candlelight when the electricity goes out, at the pool instead of surveying people in bathing attire, or on a plane as a sweet swap for the travel mags. It can be read by patients in treatment centers or their counselors in between the hordes of paperwork, by prisoners or chronically injured lovers who went places with their addiction that are merely possible futures for the rest of us, or by members of religious communities that will never hear a word of inspiration on their particular issues because some things are just not talked about.
The Journal is a personal tool when a subscriber opens the cover and reads the encouraging stories within. It is a portable blessing to be able to read a recovery story from these pages. The story may contain someone’s personal strife with sex and love addiction, the change that occurred, the truths that were discovered, and the resulting freedom that resulted. Each story is a tool of a different shape and use. Various creative contributors throughout the world bring the insights of their culture and their local S.L.A.A. community to the readership, widening their experience of recovery.
The creative contributors to the Journal are at varying places in their recovery process too, so we accept each writer, whether young in recovery or substantially matured, as a member with a right to a seat on the great voyage, and each one has something of importance to say. It is in this context that the Journal is sometimes called a meeting in print. Of course the Journal is not quite the same as a face-to-face meeting, but many of the differences are advantages from both a Twelve Traditions point of view and in terms of personal growth.
The advantage of printed material for the individual in recovery is that people with experience in recovery select, edit, and proofread the contents, typically eliminating rambling, negative thinking, and unnecessary triggering language. There can be no crosstalk because there is at least a month delay between the submission of an article and its publication. The quality of sharing is generally high because it is often people with plenty of solid recovery that like to share their experience, strength, and hope in writing.
But that is not the only reason that the Journal is an important element of the S.L.A.A. community. For many sex and love addicts, the Journal is the only thing within reach that resembles a meeting. Most of us do not have an S.L.A.A. meeting within the radius of an hour’s drive. Some do not own a car or are homebound for physical, mental, or legal reasons. Some have no Internet access for sobriety reasons or because of location, or they cannot type well enough to participate in online meetings. There are members who, because of hearing or speech impairment, cannot easily participate in face-to-face or phone meetings. The Journal may be a primary source of strength for many S.L.A.A. members.
Even for those in areas with densely planted S.L.A.A. meetings, the ability to read at night, in the morning, during travel, or on vacation is of great benefit. During every stage of recovery, the Journal enhances the experience and maturity of the recovering S.L.A.A. member, but the Journal’s usefulness does not end there.
The Journal, for many of the same reasons, is a significant tool for home groups, and a year’s subscription relatively affordable. As a solid adjunct to the S.L.A.A. basic text and the pamphlets, a collection of back issues of the Journal is a wealth of recovery-filled pages containing diverse experiences in both addiction and recovery. It is a quick solution for someone who is coming straight from work to chair a meeting. A subscription is a perfect gift for a new member or a sponsee to get them reading recovery materials between meetings, which leads us to perhaps the Journal’s most important use.
The Journal is a great outreach tool too. Allow me to use fictitious names in a fictional story to describe one of the realities of contemporary mental health care and the opportunities that we have to pass the message of S.L.A.A. recovery forward.
Imagine Jane, who is in an alcohol and drug treatment center. She is not at all happy with losing connection with her rain checks and late night booty bodies. Of course her primary counselor isn’t aware of the reason for Jane’s anxiety because her counselor belongs to one of the fellowships that denounces all other fellowships. It is assumed by staff that the reason for her anxiety is cocaine withdrawal, even though there is absolutely no statistical support for this convenient supposition.
Tihra had been given some money by the Atlantis Underwater Intergroup to buy a subscription to the Journal for the local treatment centers. She found it easy to get permission from the Program Directors to set up complementary subscriptions, provided that she promised they would never receive a bill. This particular Program Director had been looking for some free resources for the rack in the community room, especially ones better produced than the run-of-the-mill recovery periodicals. Consequently, there was an issue of the Journal in the rack when Jane happened to be waiting for her primary counselor to get off a call with another patient’s mother who was freaking out. (Those of you who have worked or otherwise frequented treatment centers know that this isn’t at all far fetched.)
So Jane, seeing an interesting cover on an unintimidating-looking booklet, picks up the Journal. When she opens it randomly, it opens to the centerfold, since stitched booklets, which are held together by staples, naturally do that. (You can try it with the issue that’s in your hand.) Jane finds a cartoon about recovery in the centerfold or a picture of something that stirs her curiosity. She knows that she won’t find a Cosmo in the magazine rack, and she can hear the parent yelling through the phone all the way through the door to the counselor’s office, so she sticks with the Journal.
Suddenly, intelligence rings through her half-dead brain, and she decides to look at the table of contents. The word jumps out: “Fantasy.” She opens to the page and starts to read.
It is a little over her head, and she almost goes back to the magazine rack for another choice when she realizes that a man wrote the piece, but some comment about chatting on the Internet kept her on track for a few more paragraphs. That’s when she got it. The sentence, “It may lead to a sexual climax or an emotional high, which can just as neurochemically charged,” raised a question that she had never asked.
So, after finishing the piece and half of the next story, she is finally beckoned into the office with one question on her mind, “What is an emotional high?” That becomes Jane’s beginning, and the beginning for the counselor too, who later came to realize that more than half of her clients had strong symptoms of sex and love addiction.
That would be the treatment center that, over the next twenty years, refers a fifth of their patient upon discharge to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. That is what the Journal can become, should we in S.L.A.A. begin to use it in that way.
Don’t let the Journal flounder. Consider supporting the Journal’s growth as a publication, as a resource for the individual member, for our home groups, and for key public information and outreach projects.
- Kaleb C., South Florida