One question separates these three: who decides what sobriety means. Sex Addicts Anonymous hands that to you. Sexaholics Anonymous publishes a fixed definition that a great many people cannot live inside. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous covers the widest range of behaviour, including the avoidant side of it. Read the definition before the meeting, not after.
Why the definition is the whole decision
Most people bounce out of these rooms in the first fortnight, and it's rarely because anyone was unkind. It's because the room had already answered the central question for them, and the answer didn't fit the life they actually live.
So do the reading first. Fifteen minutes on each fellowship's own sobriety page will tell you more than a month of forum posts, and considerably more than a rehab website's summary of them, which is usually written to route you somewhere else.
Sex Addicts Anonymous
SAA declines to define abstinence for you. Its own material says ["it is necessary for each member to define his or her own abstinence"](https://saa-recovery.org/our-program/sobriety/), and members do it with three concentric circles worked out with a sponsor.
- **Inner circle**: the specific behaviours you're calling acting out.
- **Middle circle**: [behaviours that may lead to acting out, or that you're not sure about](https://saa-recovery.org/our-program/sobriety/).
- **Outer circle**: healthy behaviours that enhance your life and your recovery.
The consequence is real freedom and real work. Nobody hands you a rulebook, which means the first weeks involve genuinely thinking about what you're stopping and why. Some people find that liberating. Others find it slippery, and want a definition they can't negotiate with at midnight.
Meetings run in person and online across the UK. The SAA UK helpline is 0800 917 8497.
**Best fit if:** you want to name your own bottom line, your situation has particulars that no general rule covers, or you've been put off by rooms that treated your sexuality as the problem.
Sexaholics Anonymous
SA takes the opposite approach and publishes a single definition.
For a married member, sobriety means no form of sex with self or with anyone other than the spouse, and ["the term 'spouse' refers to one's partner in a marriage between a man and a woman."](https://www.sa.org/) For anyone unmarried, it means freedom from sex of any kind. Masturbation is excluded for everybody, married or not.
Take that literally, which is how it's written, and a gay or lesbian person in a legal UK marriage has no sober state available to them other than lifelong celibacy.
We're not going to pretend that's a small detail or that it's somebody else's problem to notice. It's the reason this page exists in the shape it does. Some people genuinely want an external definition they cannot argue with, and find that clarity steadying, and have recovered in those rooms. Others will find no version of their life in it at all, and walking into that unprepared, at the point where you're already carrying a great deal of shame, does harm.
**Best fit if:** the definition matches the life you want, and a fixed rule helps you more than a negotiable one.
**Avoid if:** you'd be signing up to a standard under which your existing relationship cannot be sober.
Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous
SLAA has the broadest scope of the three. It covers compulsive sexual behaviour, and also romantic obsession, fantasy, serial relationships and the pattern of chasing people, along with the avoidant side of the same thing, which the fellowship calls sexual and emotional anorexia.
Members define bottom-line behaviours in a similar way to SAA, so the sobriety question is again yours to answer.
The avoidance piece is what distinguishes it in practice. If your version of this includes long stretches of shutting down entirely, cutting people off, and then a period of intense pursuit, SLAA is the only one of the three whose literature treats both directions as part of the same pattern. UK regional coverage is good and much of it runs online.
**Best fit if:** the behaviour is tangled up with people rather than only with sex, or if you recognise both the chasing and the shutting down.
What a meeting is actually like
Lower stakes than the anticipation suggests, in all three.
You don't have to speak. You can say your first name and pass, and nobody will think anything of it. You will not be asked what you did. You can leave. Online meetings mean you can attend with your camera off from your own kitchen, which for a lot of people is the difference between going and not going.
Anonymity is taken seriously and it is a norm rather than a legal guarantee, so use your judgement about which meeting you attend if you live somewhere small.
Go to at least three, ideally across two fellowships, before deciding anything. Rooms differ enormously from one another within the same fellowship, mostly according to who happens to be in them.
One useful neutral description of what these organisations are, from a government guideline rather than from a fellowship: twelve-step fellowships ["maintain independence from professional bodies and make sure they remain led by people in recovery in a volunteer capacity and do not accept funding from external sources"](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/clinical-guidelines-for-alcohol-treatment/6-recovery-support-services-and-lived-experience-initiatives). They are free, they are peer-run, and nobody there is a clinician in that room.
Sponsorship and the circles
A sponsor is another member further along who works through the steps with you. It's the mechanism by which the bottom line stops being a private idea and becomes something you say out loud to a person every week.
If you want to start before you ever go to a meeting, write the three circles tonight. Inner, middle, outer, on one side of paper, in concrete language. Name the specific app, the specific route home, the specific hour. Vagueness is where the pattern hides, and [mapping the cycle before acting out](/guides/sex/mapping-the-cycle-before-acting-out) is the longer version of the same exercise.
Choosing, practically
- **Want to set your own definition?** SAA.
- **Behaviour tangled up with people, or long shutdowns between?** SLAA.
- **Want a fixed rule and the definition fits your life?** SA. Read the sobriety page in full first.
- **Want to understand why rather than only stop?** Therapy, in parallel. A preregistered systematic review found [24 studies in total, only four of them randomised controlled trials](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36083776/), with early support for cognitive behavioural approaches. Check any UK practitioner's Accredited Register before paying, because these titles are not protected here.
- **Can't afford anything?** All three fellowships are free and much of it is online.
- **Both?** Extremely common, and the combination often works better than either alone.
Whichever you choose, the practical layer underneath is the same and no room replaces it: friction on the routes you actually use, and one person who knows the truth. That's [cutting off access: apps, cash and contacts](/guides/sex/cutting-off-access-apps-cash-and-contacts) and [how to stop compulsive sexual behaviour](/guides/sex/how-to-stop-compulsive-sexual-behaviour).
What none of them is
None of these fellowships is a clinical service, and none of them can diagnose you. If you want a diagnosis, that's a clinician.
None of them is a reason to accept being made to feel worse. If a room leaves you dirtier than you arrived, week after week, that's information about that room. Try another one, or another fellowship. And on the specific fear that brings a lot of people here: a study across 42 countries and 82,243 people found ["no sexual-orientation-based differences"](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37352095/) in levels of compulsive sexual behaviour. Your orientation is not the thing being treated anywhere that's doing this properly.
If things get darker than frustration at any point in the deciding, Samaritans is 116 123, free, any hour. In England, 111 and option 2 reaches urgent mental health support.
Common questions
**What's the difference between SAA and SA?** Who defines sobriety. SAA has each member define their own abstinence. SA publishes a fixed definition covering no sex outside a marriage between a man and a woman and no masturbation for anyone. They are genuinely different programmes rather than regional variants.
**Which fellowship is best for me?** The one whose definition of sobriety you can live inside for more than a fortnight. That's a question about your life rather than about the quality of the programme, and it's why reading each one's own sobriety page first matters more than any comparison.
**Are these fellowships religious?** They use the twelve-step framework, which is spiritual in language and not tied to any denomination. How much of that language appears in practice varies a lot between individual meetings, so try more than one before deciding it isn't for you.
**Do I have to tell my partner to attend?** No fellowship makes disclosure a condition of attending. Some rooms encourage it and some sponsors will push. Disclosure has serious consequences for another person and belongs on a considered timetable, which is what [disclosure: what to tell a partner](/guides/sex/disclosure-what-to-tell-a-partner) is for.
**Can I go to more than one?** Yes, and many people do, particularly early on while working out which room fits. There's no membership to breach and nobody is keeping a register.
Sources
- [SAA on sobriety](https://saa-recovery.org/our-program/sobriety/). Members define their own abstinence, using inner, middle and outer circles.
- [Sexaholics Anonymous](https://www.sa.org/). The fellowship's fixed sobriety definition, including how it defines "spouse".
- [GOV.UK clinical guidelines, recovery support services](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/clinical-guidelines-for-alcohol-treatment/6-recovery-support-services-and-lived-experience-initiatives). Twelve-step fellowships as independent, volunteer-led and externally unfunded.
- [Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in 42 countries, Journal of Behavioral Addictions](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37352095/). No sexual-orientation-based differences in levels of compulsive sexual behaviour.
