Have you viewed any of the laracast on this?
http://laravel.io/forum/search?query=many+to+many

@jimgwhit Yes, in fact I have many-to-many tagging working.

I think your problem is the ContactContact model. I'm not sure why you need it, because it looks like you're using the pivot table as a model as well as the pivot table for the two other connected models. The sql error tells you exactly what's happening. It's trying to join on a non-unique table alias. I would have to see more code to help you.

rickshawhobo said:

I think your problem is the ContactContact model. I'm not sure why you need it, because it looks like you're using the pivot table as a model as well as the pivot table for the two other connected models. The sql error tells you exactly what's happening. It's trying to join on a non-unique table alias. I would have to see more code to help you.

I am using ContactContact to link Contact records with other Contacts as well as relationship/role details, etc.

Even if I removed the use of the Model ContactContact and only use contact_contact as a pivot table, I suspect I would still encounter the same non-unique table alias error.

I don't have a problem self joining. Here is my User model with both relationships using the same pivot

 public function childs()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'user_user', 'parent_id', 'child_id');
    }
    public function parents()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'user_user', 'child_id', 'parent_id');
    }

If you need data in your pivot you should look into "withPivot".

Thank you @rickshawhobo, withPivot put me on the right track.

It's late now, but once I clean things up, I will share what I did.

Laracasts: Favorites Part 1 & Part 2 were very informative as well.