Sober housing effectively provides a haven for recovering addicts, but with a harsher ruleset than most residential treatment facilities. The onus in sober housing is not to transition into recovery, but to transition into real life without fear of relapse.
Residential treatment and other similar treatments exist to help people transition from addiction into recovery. That means surviving withdrawal, fighting against the cravings, and figuring out what to do with your day without falling back onto old habits.
With time, staying sober gets easier. But stress, tragedy and loss can still affect you heavily, compounding over time without proper coping skills. With addiction fresh on your mind, the possibility of relapsing remains high in early recovery. Yet even years later, people can still slip back, sometimes with fatal consequences. Sober housing can help many people better manage these challenges and develop stronger defenses against relapse.
What Is Sober Housing?
Sober housing provides a sober living environment for people struggling with addiction, looking for a treatment program to help them transition into real life after recovery. Sober housing allows tenants to life in a drug-free environment, and gives them the freedom to pursue their hobbies, if they follow the rules of the house as a template for their own responsibilities after recovery.
Often, sober housing tenants will be asked to seek/have a job, participate in certain events, perform mandatory drug testing, perform chores, and obey house curfews.
Most sober housing environments are built on a similar ruleset, with certain rules changing from group to group. In general, sober housing:
- Does not allow drugs on the facility and will have regular drug testing.
- Requires that all tenants pay rent on time.
- Has a curfew, and limits on allowing guests onto the premises.
- Makes it mandatory to seek work/education while going through the program.
- Has no limits on how long a tenant may stay.
How Sober Living Prepares People
The established rules in sober living communities allow individuals to follow a guideline for living life without drugs – they provide structure, the kind tenants can take with them anywhere and everywhere.
But sober living is more than just a set of rules binding people together. Sober living means living in a community, coexisting with various people struggling to stay sober, each with their own methods and preferences, all sharing their desire to stay clean but with wildly different backgrounds and futures.
Just like real life, sober living is often about living in a diverse environment and becoming part of the group. You maintain your unique individuality, your approach to sobriety and treatment – but the ability to interact with others, support them in their quest, and seek support from them allows people to develop meaningful friendships, gain and give trust, and work together as a community. The community is central to combatting addiction outside of the context of recovery. We must stick together to support one another, be empathic towards each other’s struggles, and offer a helping hand when the odds are too great to face alone.
A united community is important to avoiding addiction in society. It is often the isolated and the ostracized that struggle the most with mental illness and addiction, because being unaccepted or discriminated against fosters negative thinking, low self-esteem, and can even lead to trauma.
In sober living communities, everyone can find a place to be with others, in a group, making friends and sharing notes. It is about more than just discipline and responsibility in a temptation-free environment. It is about the benefits of a tightly-knit community oriented towards compassion and support.
Transitioning Into Real Life After Treatment
Sober living environments mimic real life, with an added enforcing factor. Anyone with addiction issues can join into a sober living program, but they must follow the rules to stay in the program. In real life, all rules are optional. You must force yourself to follow certain rules and structures, for your own good. In the same way, relapse is always a danger no matter how long you have been sober – but you still have the power to continuously and consciously refuse to use ever again.
When transitioning into real life, you will find that you have the freedom to do anything – and the power to choose to do the right things. By transitioning into real life too early, that temptation to steer off the right path can be very powerful, and highly attractive. Sober living can help you steel yourself and maintain your sobriety, finding alternative ways to deal with stress, cope with the cravings, and manage your struggles and challenges without opting for old habits.
The freedom to do anything, and the power to do the right thing. No matter how bad things get, sober living treatment gives you the ability to choose sobriety every time, even if it is the harder choice to make at first.
Learning To Live with Relapse
In addiction recovery, a relapse is defined as a deviation from the program, when someone who was previously clean uses again. Relapses occur for many reasons, from specific triggers that cause extreme urges and cravings, to emotional distress too great for someone in early recovery to handle.
Relapses are most common in early recovery, when a person is still learning about their sobriety. However, it is not only the relapse that deals damage to your recovery – your perception of it affects how you act going forward. Many people relapse once or twice and give up, seeing it as a sign of emotional and mental weakness, and choosing a life of addiction as their only option.
This is terrible thinking. Relapses are not failures, they are setbacks. And life is full of them. Very rarely does someone do something perfectly. We all make mistakes, and have crude, difficult beginnings. Relapses are not a sign that you are incapable of getting better, they are a sign that you still have much to learn about your own addiction and what keeps you sober.
In other words, a relapse can be a teaching moment, and it always should. It should teach you to be mindful of certain triggers and avoid certain stimuli until you are more capable of confronting it, until you have a more solid foundation under your sobriety.
When you relapse, the best course of action is to get back on the horse, so to speak. Most people will hit a snag at some point in their early recovery, and the key to overcoming it and letting it not happen again is to simply not give up and be mindful.
If you let mistakes and misfortune turn into reasons to give up, then your recovery will be short lived. But if you turn them into learning opportunities to keep going, you are going to get through this addiction no matter what.