A minimum stay of three months is recommended, but many benefit from a longer stay for sustained sobriety. Once leaving an inpatient facility and returning home, you may be struggling with adjusting back to daily life. Sober living homes offer an in-between recovery option that allows you to reinforce the lessons learned in rehab.

Is it good to live a sober life?

When living a sober life after addiction, your overall health improves immensely. This is because you're no longer attacking your body by putting dangerous amounts of toxic substances in it. Due to the toxicity level of alcohol and drugs, when you chronically abuse them, your immune system lowers.

Correctional facility for adult males involved with corrections, 24-hour staff on site for high risk, high needs persons. This is a six-month transitional living program specifically designed for men on MOUD in Tulsa. Oxford House is a democratically peer-run, self-supporting, and drug-free home. The Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations evaluates quality of care provided by healthcare organizations.

How Do Sober Living Homes Work?

Addiction is a complex issue, and recovery is a continuous commitment. Once you’re finished a clinical treatment program, it can be hard for many people to move right back into life, with all its responsibilities and potential triggers. You’re free to work or go to school while also being held accountable for your recovery.

  • While similar to sober living in that patients also live at the residential facility, inpatient treatment requires residents to adhere to a strict daily schedule.
  • Participants were interviewed within their first week of entering a sober living house and again at 6-, 12-, and 18-month follow up.
  • If they think you might be a good fit, they’ll likely ask you some of their own.
  • In addition, the government funds or owns some halfway houses in California.

To assess current psychiatric severity we used the Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983). This 53-item measure assesses severity of psychiatric symptoms on nine clinical scales as well as three global indices. Items are rated on a 5-point scale and ask about symptoms over the past 7 days. We used the Global Severity Index (GSI) as an overall measure of psychiatric severity.

other recovery resources

Through peer support, proven recovery principles, peer empowerment, and individual responsibility, residents can solidify their sobriety and prepare to return home or live independently. In some cases, sober living homes will contract with licensed drug rehabilitation centers and therapists as a means for providing an even greater level of care. These types of sober livings do tend to charge higher fees, however, they are often able to provide a very affordable alternative to what would otherwise constitute high-priced inpatient treatment. Sober Living Homes, a type of group home, have recently become a topic of interest to many citizens of Fountain Valley as well as City staff.

sober living houses

Some SLHs offer intensive outpatient services, including on-site medical care. These homes are often staffed in shifts by psychiatric nurses and licensed clinical social workers, who provide residents with 24-hour supervision and centralized recovery care. Residents become more accountable, take on more responsibilities, and make their own decisions. Although the resident sober house still reports to sober living home staff in this phase, the individual gains complete independence. Generally, residents must complete a 12-step program, attend group sessions, and must have been on the second phase for at least 30 days. After completing this phase, the individual can move into their residence and, in some instances, act as sponsors for new residents.

The Challenges of Sober Living Houses

Those who reside in a halfway house are likely to be connected with a corrections officer, social worker and additional support to set up a life so they’ll be less likely to relapse after leaving. Halfway houses provide a transitional period in a regulated environment to increase the likelihood of life success. When you’re embarking on the first steps toward recovery, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the jargon of the addiction treatment world. Terms like “inpatient,” “partial-hospitalization,” and “medically-managed” may be different terms that you’re accustomed to in daily life, but are common to the world of addiction treatment. How long you stay depends on the sober-living facility and your progress in recovery. Some sober-living facilities are only offered for as long as you are in the treatment program.

They are designed to be a transitional space from residential treatment to mainstream society. Despite the enormous need for housing among the offender population, SLHs have been largely overlooked as a housing option for them (Polcin, 2006c). This is particularly concerning because our analysis of criminal justice offenders in SLHs showed alcohol and drug outcomes that were similar to residents who entered the houses https://goodmenproject.com/everyday-life-2/top-5-tips-to-consider-when-choosing-a-sober-house-for-living/ voluntarily. The two types of recovery houses assessed in this study showed different strengths and weaknesses and served different types of individuals. Communities and addiction treatment systems should therefore carefully assess the types of recovery housing that might be most helpful to their communities. CSLT is located in Sacramento County California and consists of 16 houses with a 136 bed capacity.

Characteristics of Sober Living Houses

You should move into a sober living home after a stay at an inpatient facility if you have any concerns about staying sober on your own. Today, sober houses are “free-standing,” independently owned and operated. They’re not licensed by an official body, nor do they provide licensed professional services onsite.

During the interviews, the salience of these experiences was apparent, as was their emotional impact on the respondents in recovery. Recovery journeys can be long and involve several attempts in order for people to resolve their problems. Treatment can be part of this for many, but there are multiple factors outside of treatment that also influence outcomes. Some facilities require a minimum number of days of sobriety from substance abuse, but many will work with you to determine if you’re a good fit. While you may want to live on your own right away, you might not be ready to manage total freedom at first.

First, we could not directly compare which type of SLH was most effective because there were demographic and other individual characteristics that differed between the two types of houses. Second, individuals self selected themselves into the houses and a priori characteristics of these individuals may have at least in part accounted for the longitudinal improvements. Although self selection can be viewed as a weakness of the research designs, it can also be conceived as a strength, especially for studying residential recovery programs. Our study design had characteristics that DeLeon, Inciardi and Martin (1995) suggested were critical to studies of residential recovery programs. They argued that self selection of participants to the interventions being studies was an advantage because it mirrored the way individuals typically choose to enter treatment. Thus, self selection was integral to the intervention being studied and without self selection it was difficult to argue that a valid examination of the invention had been conducted.

  • The houses are different from freestanding SLHs, such as those at CSTL, because all residents must be involved in the outpatient program.
  • An inpatient treatment center requires 30 days where the recovering addict will check-in and stay at the facility for ongoing therapy and treatment.
  • Residents may not have to pay for utilities at all, making housing very affordable.

You live in a substance-free environment while navigating the responsibilities of life in the real world. It further provides healthy coping skills and emergency contact numbers in times of high-stress or high-cravings/urges to use. This way you will have a plan of action for what to do during these times and have healthy ways to manage triggers in your daily life. A sober living home acts as a supplement to an individual’s recovery. It is an alternative to going from an immersive care environment straight to a totally unstructured environment at home. Because sober living homes replicate normal, everyday life situations while instilling healthy habits, they help to reduce the chance of relapse.