How can I tell if Sex Addicts Anonymous is right for me?

Updated

Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) does not diagnose anyone, and saa-recovery.org does not ask you to prove you belong. The site's own framing is a question: "Are your sexual behaviors causing you problems?" If the answer is yes, the site offers a self-assessment and a meeting search so you can decide for yourself whether to try a meeting. Membership is a personal judgment, not a professional verdict.

What the site actually offers

The SAA homepage lists two entry points for someone who is unsure:

  • "Am I a Sex Addict?" — a section that asks whether your sexual behaviors are causing you problems.
  • "How Do I Know if I'm a Sex Addict?" / Self Assessment — a page intended for reflection rather than scoring you.

Alongside those, the site provides Find A Meeting, Meeting Search, and What to Expect At Your First SAA Meeting. The sequence the site implies is: read the self-assessment material, then look for a meeting if it resonates.

What SAA says about who it is for

The site describes SAA as "a fellowship of individuals 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."

Two things follow from that description:

  1. SAA is peer support built on shared experience, not a clinical service.
  2. The decision to participate rests with you. The site does not present a checklist that qualifies or disqualifies anyone.

Questions to ask yourself

The site's self-assessment material is built around whether sexual behaviors are causing problems. In practice, that means looking at your own life rather than matching a stereotype. Useful things to notice:

  • Do your sexual behaviors create consequences you keep returning to despite wanting to stop?
  • Are they affecting relationships, work, finances, health, or your sense of self?
  • Do you hide or minimize them?
  • Have you tried to change and found you couldn't on your own?
  • Does the pattern feel compulsive, or does it feel like a way of avoiding something else?

None of these is a diagnosis. They are prompts for honest reflection, which is what the site's self-assessment pages are for.

If you are still unsure

The site also addresses related experiences that people sometimes don't connect to sex addiction: Intimacy and Sexual Avoidance is listed as its own topic, alongside pages for Women, Men, LGBT Members, and Prisoners. If your difficulty shows up more as avoidance than as pursuit, that material may describe your situation better than the headline question does.

The site also explains Understanding Anonymity, which matters if concern about privacy is part of what's holding you back.

Next step: try a meeting

If the self-assessment material sounds like your experience, the site's suggested path is to find a meeting rather than to keep researching. Meeting Search lets you look for one, and What to Expect At Your First SAA Meeting describes the format beforehand so the first visit isn't a surprise. You can attend and decide afterward whether it fits — the site does not require you to commit to anything before showing up.