stairwell-clipart-l_152Sober Living Stability

Sober house, sober living environment (SLE), recovery residence, halfway house or three quarters house: whatever the “classification,” there is no doubt that many people in their first years of addiction recovery can and do benefit from safe, affordable, recovery-focused communal living as a continuation and progression of initial treatment. The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs in a 2010 article about sober houses notes that for those in early recovery “lack of a stable, alcohol and drug free living environment can be a serious obstacle to sustained abstinence. Destructive living environments can derail recovery for even highly motivated individuals.”

Sober houses, in theory, are designed to provide the stability and drug free living environment that keep recovery on course, especially when they build upon the gains made during long-term residential treatment and after the minimum 90 days of drug rehab recommended by the Center for Disease Control.

In fact, researchers editorializing in the article “A Clean and Sober Place to Live: Philosophy, Structure, and Purported Therapeutic Factors in Sober Living Houses,” published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, write that:

“sober living houses are an excellent example of an underutilized modality that could help provide clean and sober living environments to individuals completing residential treatment, engaging in outpatient programs, leaving incarceration, or seeking alternatives to formal treatment.”

What Are Sober Houses?

Sober living houses are essentially specialized group homes that cater to persons in recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism.  The best sober houses promote and require active attendance at 12-step meetings (such as AA or NA), abstinence, accountability, structure, and peer support. Every sober house or chain of sober houses is different, but common practices include house rules, shared bedrooms and shared bathrooms, conduct contracts, curfews, random or scheduled drug tests, and mandatory community meetings. Houses don’t actually require celibacy, but it can often feel like they do. Rent (which usually includes utilities but not food) is typically paid weekly, in advance, by each resident.

Sober Houses Are NOT the Place to Start Recovery

In the fall of 2010, a Suffolk County, New York mother helped her 19-year-old son move into a facility with a promising description: a “sober home.”

But four months later, her son was dead.

He had overdosed on heroin—in a place where drugs and alcohol were supposed to be forbidden.

His mother thought she was sending him to a safe place to deal with his addiction, but as she navigated New York’s labyrinth of oversight agencies, she realized she had let her son move to a place where no one was watching out for him.

“I have to live with this every second of my life … when you hear ‘sober house,’ you think ‘sober,’ but it clearly wasn’t a safe environment,” she said.

The loss of a child to addiction is a heartbreaking tragedy, too often exacerbated by the addiction industry’s habit of overselling its services. Sober houses are no exception. When promised a safe environment and accountability, we are given — or create for ourselves — the impression that a qualified person in a position of authority is watching out for our sons or daughters once they enter a sober house.

The “safe environment” promised by the sober house industry sounds comforting without actually providing a specific definition of “safe.” Given the chronic, manipulative, relapsing, life-long nature of addiction, it might be more honest to admit that there will never be a truly safe external environment for our loved one in recovery from addiction. Safety – through the practices of recovery – becomes an internal state that the recovering person must cultivate from within, over time, through a progression of treatment and support levels.

Do we misinterpret a sober house’s promise of “accountability” as an institutional promise of supervision? I think we do.

Supervision is crucial in early recovery, but under supervision the person supervised is a passive participant; supervision is imposed upon him.

Accountability, on the other hand, requires active and willing participation from the person held accountable. The imposed supports and structures of supervision so helpful to very early sobriety become more flexible as the person with addiction grows in recovery, progresses through a continuum of recovery supports,  and attempts to handle greater responsibility and freedom. This progressive ability to handle responsibility and freedom develops over time, ideally over an ample period of time in residential treatment. Sober houses are the final residential phase of recovery in that their very lack of supervision allows our sons and daughters to gain experience in watching out for themselves, with the help and support of their peers, before venturing out into independent living.

It is important to understand that regardless of their seeming affordability, sober houses are not the place to start recovery; they are the destination before independent living.