Sexual, Social, and Emotional Anorexia

[from SLAA pamphlet, ANOREXIA Sexual, Social, Emotional]

Anorexia is the compulsive avoidance of giving or receiving social, sexual, or emotional nourishment.

Are You Anorectic?

Here are fifty questions you might want to address. There is no score for these questions. Your own instinct will tell you to what degree they apply to you. Following the questions is information, should you wish to explore further.

  Yes       No
1. Do you go for long periods without being involved in a sexual or romantic relationship?
2. Do you go without social activities for extended periods of time?
3. Although in a relationship, have you found that, for a long while, you have not experienced: romance? sexuality? intimacy? friendship?
4. Are you alone more than you want, but feel unable to change that?
5. At work do you have trouble developing relationships, talk only when absolutely necessary, or hide out in the work?
6. Do you avoid relationship with a certain gender?
7. Do you stay aloof when in groups?
8. Are you afraid of being noticed?
9. Does being in the presence of others exhaust you, even if you like them?
10. Do you habitually panic or push people away when they start getting too close?
  Yes       No
11. Do you usually try to withdraw from or completely control emotions, sexual feelings, or group situations?
12. Do you feel uncomfortable when offered nurturing, affection, or love?
13. Do you usually dread encountering someone to whom you are attracted?
14. Do you feel safer when a relationship remains at the level of flirting and intrigue?
15. Do you feel a deep pessimism about your ability to experience a lasting intimate relationship?
16. Are you continually attracted to pepole who don't meet your needs?
17. Are you afraid to relax around people because you fear it might lead to a sexual situation?
18. Do you fantasize about having a relationship without actually pursuing a relationship?
19. Do your sexual habits, masturbation for instance, keep you from relationships?
20. Anhedonia means the refusal to receive or give pleasure. Do you practice it?
  Yes       No
21. Do you regularly disown your physical and emotional need for others?
22. Do you have a hard time playing and having fun with others?
23. Is it so difficult for you to set healthy boundaries with others that you withdraw entirely?
24. Does everything have to be perfect before you get involved?
25. Do you envy more outgoing people?
26. Do you feel your demonstrativeness is inauthentic?
27. Does shame about your life cause you to avoid relationships?
28. Do you use your feelings of superiority or inferiority to set yourself apart from others?
29. Do you think that no healthy, attractive person or group of people would want someone like you?
30. Do you have a hard time letting people know you care about them?

  Yes       No
31. Do you think you are not "enough" - smart enough, attractive enough, old enough, young enough, sucessful enough, healthy enough, _________ enough to deserve a relationship?
32. Do you stay in relationships because you feel you don't deserve anything better or can't have anything different?
33. Do you find it overwhelmingly difficult to show emotion or to tell the truth to someone you wish to be involved with?
34. Do you drive others away by coldness? aggression? timidity?
35. Do you prefer being alone, rather than question the choices that keep you alone?
36. Is your fear of rejection or of looking foolish so intense that you seem to be permanently stuck?
37. Do you suspect that your capacity to move toward intimacy with another is damaged or dead?
38. Do you have an overwhelming fear of being socially, sexually, or emotionally exploited or used?
39. Do you usually feel resentful or envious toward people who have intimate relationships or active social lives?
40. Do you find sex repugnant?

  Yes       No
41. Do you feel sex is only for healthy people and will therefore never be for you?
42. Are you more open to people you cannot be sexually close to?
43. When you do date someone, do you set a time limit beforehand on how long you will date that person?
44. Are you tied to your family of origin to the exclusion of others?
45. Are you mainly attracted to unavailable people?
46. Do you consider it not worth the trouble to engage with others because past experiences have been threatening or painful - especially if others want to get close to you?
47. Do you feel more comfortable or more in control when you decline sex or relationship or social invitations?
48. Are you habitually more open to strangers than those you are close to?
49. Do you feel so different from others that you are afraid no one can care about you or understand you?
50. Do you feel that love is missing from your life, yet don't know what to do about it?

What To Do Now?

If enough questions here seem to apply to you, you may feel relieved -- or you may feel stunned or doomed or angry at this moment -- and all these would be natural responses. However, if something fundamental in your being has been touched by these questions, we do want to say this to you: you are not alone. There are many who are in the same situation as you. There are many who respond as you do and who feel as you do. Or who once felt that way.

We are the anorectic members of Sex And Love Addicts Anonymous. We know that there may have been good reasons for our having become anorectic; we also have come to realize that there is nothing to blame ourselves for in being anorectic; but now we want nourishing emotional, sexual, and social lives. Our anorexia may have come out of a precious sense of ourselves and of our own preservation, but still we want to change; we don't want to go on being anorectic. We have begun to do the work of recovery and change in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.