Learn How Sober Living Homes Can Change Lives
In a study, “An Evaluation of Sober Living Houses,” funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which was conducted over a 5- year period and concluded around 2010 there was found to be significant benefit to sober living homes.
This Sober Living Study takes an extensive look at 300 individuals who reside in one of two sober living programs and covers a wide range of socio-economic categories.
Why Are Sober Living Environments critical to the success of an individuals recovery?
Primarily because the difficulty in finding a stable, alcohol and drug free living environment can be a serious obstacle to sustained abstinence. Many individuals who struggle with addiction and mental health disorders live in environments where the continued drug and alcohol use is rampant and the temptation is too great to give them a fighting chance to rebuild their lives.
Sober living houses provide those alcohol and drug free living environments for individuals attempting to stay clean and sober and help them to develop lasting skills, patterns and behaviors that can truly change their lives. Sober living programs are not licensed or funded by state or local governments and are not part of the insurance funded level of care.
Sober living services are the long term, 24/7, level of care that helps to keep the client in a pattern of healthy living and accountability while they reincorporate real life. There is no other way to provide this sustained support. There are no insurance policies for 6 – 12 months of housing and recovery support. This level of care is under funded and stigmatized to operate under the radar in many cases throughout cities and communities around the country.
Here is where the individual truly works and processes the 12 steps, reincorporates the major life components of work, family time, leisure time and all other aspects of life in a gradual experience to not overwhelm or trigger the addictive behaviors.
Here is where the owner operators grind out the individualized care to the client from a real life perspective and help the families work through their struggles of co-dependency and hopelessness. Many times the families at this level have tossed in the towel and been so devastated, emotionally, financially and spiritually that they are glazed over and at a point of not caring anymore. Here is where HOPE is born, here is where lives are resurrected, here is where families are reborn and reconnected.
Sober living is not typically owned by corporate entities. They are not funded by large grants that help them sustain and staff layers of support and outreach. They are not “invested in”. They are lived in by those who care and work tirelessly. There are good and bad one’s, just like any other business, but this is where long term recovery is built.
This study helped to prove that.
The findings of the study were based on a 6, 12 & 18 month assessment. There was a wide variety of individuals that experienced positive outcomes. Here are some of the consistent factors that played a part in the success:
- High involvement in a 12 step program
- Low drug & alcohol use in social network
- Lower psychiatric severity
- Length of stay was between 6 and 12 months
The study also concluded that although the fact that clients in Sober Living Homes make improvement over time does not mean that Sober Living Programs will find acceptance within the community. This continues to be a frustrating issue for addiction recovery and research.
There is much that needs to be done to break the stigma but one of the most impactful ways is to highlight and document the outcomes of those programs where communities are accepting and open to recovery. This will provide a way of assessing and building a more consistent model that sustains the quality of care and reincorporation of the individual back into the community.