LAA
Love Addicts Anonymous

Start Your Own Meeting

Greetings! and thank you for your interest is starting a Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. There is no perfect way to start a meeting. You just need the willingness to start small and build on what you have. Remember that LAA is a 12-Step program and that you have a Higher Power to guide you.

To start, you must select a time and place. The place can be anywhere. Some people start in their living rooms. Some people find a donated space in a church or hospital. Others pay rent.

Having said this, I must warn you that meetings which are not linked to some kind of local community recovery center do not last more than six months (the tenure of the founding secretary). This is because the word is not getting out. Most cities have some kind of recovery center that houses other 12-Step programs. This is ideal. Flyers can be posted in a location where they will be seen constantly. You can also visit SLAA meetings and ask if you can announce the separation of love addicts from sex addicts in LAA. You will have to be very diplomatic.

Once you find a time and location, you have to advertise the meeting. You can post flyers all over town. In the first LAA meeting in Oakland we put flyers in an Oakland Recovery Center, where all kinds of 12-step programs meet, and that is how we got our first members. Most of them transferred over from a SLAA meeting held at the same time.

Our early members also spread the word at other 12-step meetings they attended like AA, O.A. and CoDA. Keep your flyers handy and pass them out to everyone you meet, or make up some inexpensive business cards to pass out. (Vista Print has free cards.)You can also send the press release to local newspapers. Some of them may want to do a story on LAA.

The Suggested Meeting Format has evolved through trial and error. We will provide you with an electronic version if you want. If you are unhappy with this format, you can create your own. We recommend keeping the 10-minute reading. We have found that the discussion following the reading is rich with emotion and insight because of what has been read. Choose any book you want from the Annotated Reading List.

Note from Susan P. LAA was founded to separate recovery for love addicts and sex addicts. If you are new to recovery for love addiction don't worry. If your meeting follows the suggested format, you will see that you are reading from a book for 10 minutes and that this will be the topic. So you learn and discuss at the same time. So even if the meeting goes off topic you will always be learning and not just venting. After months in the program you will understand love addiction. This is how I studied the book of Alcholics Anonymous. I learned a new page every week at the literature meeting. That is about the right absorption rate for me. A little bit at a time.

Don't forget to contact LAA and register your meeting.

PDF files you will need to start your meeting.