Sober living house is an intermediary place for the inpatient and the outside world. Once the patient leaves a hospital, they need a sober place to gradually adjust to everyday life, which in most cases offers the same lessons as in rehab.
Sober living house offers a wide range of advantages to patients, which is always regulated; the regulations may also vary from house to house depending on patient type. It is expected of patients to know the house rules before they transition between the rehab and the sober living home.
For many people in the recovery period, living in a sober home offers a huge difference between relapsing to their former habits and adjusting fully to the new society. Therefore, the living sober home needs to offer a wide range of benefits, which will not alleviate the patients’ deviating back to their old ways through a moderately controlled environment.
What can One Expect in a Sober Living House?
To Understand it Better, We Need to Compare the Inpatient Treatment Center and the Sober Living House.
- In the rehab treatment center, the patients are required to be very involved in rehab programs, which do not possess a great amount of dependence, but in sober homes, the patients are not totally immersed in the house’s programs.
- The patients in the sober living houses are not curtailed to live there, which is to offer them a feeling that they are transitioning back to normal life. Still, they can leave at their own will, which is not often the case with rehab centers as the patients are bounds and strictly protected from leaving. But that does not mean that patients should do anything of their own will. They are expected to obey the rules such as curfews and attending group meetings.
Among the benefits of staying in a sober living- home is the friendships that will help you reinforce the feeling and need to transition from substance and alcohol abuse to normal life. This connection will help you transition carefully without sliding back to your former life due to loneliness and lack of support in the real world.
Other Benefits that Can Be Experienced While Living in A Sober Living Home Include the Following:
- Finding a Job: Will help the patients transition and, most importantly, give them enough income to start over.
- Reconciliation with Loved Ones and Family: Due to drug abuse, some patients may have ruined their relationship with their friends and family members. The sober living house provides a platform where the patient’s will and the loved ones connect and mend their relationship.
- Securing Accommodation After Treatment: The sober life home offers the patient a chance to find a proper house that they will stay after the whole process is complete.
- Abiding by the Rules of Sober Living in a Free Environment: The environment in sober living homes is controlled so that the patients are not allowed to do certain things that may get them back to their former life. The observed rules may include no drugs, obey the curfews, and attend support group meetings.
In addition, a carefully formulated post-care strategy, which includes a plan to mitigate relapse developed during therapy, gives you the opportunity to pinpoint triggers that have the power to tempt you when you go back to live in the community again. It also provides wholesome coping methods and emergency contacts to help you in periods of stress or intense cravings. This will give you a strategy for how to deal with these situations.
The sober living house will also provide a support contact if the patients have a temptation to go back to a former life, which is crucial in a manner that the patient is expected to face. To enable the whole process to run smoothly, the patients need to abide by the house rules, which means that a slight mistake they are kicked out to protect the sobriety of other patients.
Sober Living Rules
Every sober living house is different, and so are the rules; a patient is therefore expected to read the rules before joining the home. It is against the patients’ expectations that every home can be different from their liking; some may be a haven where alcohol and drugs are prohibited. Some offer extra services such as aftercare support out in the community. The patient is always allowed to choose the level of support that is good for them.
However, the Following Rules are Used Relatively Common:
- Drug testing – the patients are expected to be regularly tested to check the system’s number of drugs. In addition to that, the same as rehab, the patients are not supposed to take any drugs, and if they are caught having any drug, they lose the sober living house privileges or leave immediately. The patients are expected to maintain sobriety.
- Support meetings – according to the rules of the house, there are regular meetings whereby all the patients are supposed to converge. This allows everyone to share their own views, assign duties, air grievances. In turn, the patients will learn the importance of connection and unity within themselves.
- The 12 steps: Sober Living House Offer 12 Step Meetings which Include;
Step 1: We Confess that We Were Powerless Over Alcohol and Substance Abuse— that Our Lives Had Become Uncontrollable
The first step to recovery is to emphasize that our lives were miserable, the addition was tough to bear, but we are ready to change everything to have our freedom back.
Step 2: I Came to Agree that the Power Stronger than Ourselves Could Help Us Return to Normal Life
The second step is believing in faith, In that there is power great than ourselves and that addictions are the basis for our recovery. The high power can be anything; God, the concept of fellowship, trees, ocean, or even nature, and this power are ready to guide through to sobriety.
Step 3: I have Decided to Turn Our Whole Lives to God
With step 3, we agree with God the highest power that we give him our whole lives and surrender, whereby we put the trust in him to manage our lives.
Step 4: We have Made a Deep and Fearless Moral Inventory of Ourselves
To make the inventory of ourselves, we have to take away our life from addiction. It is a process that seeks to identify and ask ourselves questions where and what led to our lives being messed up. This step is meant for recovery, which in turn makes positive changes in our thoughts.
Step 5: We Admit to Ourselves, God, and Other People how of Our Wrongdoings
This step is for sharing our faults and how the addiction was to other people, which finally sets us free because we have begun to understand who we really are. Which in turn enables us to build the cornerstone of humility, honesty, and truth
Step 6: We Entirely Ready to have God Remove All the Addictions and the Bad Character
This step requires us to leave anything that hinders us in our recovery and allows God to remove them from our behavior. This will enable us to grow.
Step 7: Genuinely Ask Him to Remove Our Problems
We were supposed to do this in step 3 with the objective of understanding our problems, and in step seven, we ask God to remove them for us so that we may find healing and peace. In this step, we change our life to humility and allow the supernatural to use his ways to heal us.
Step 8: Make a List of the People We have Harmed During the Addiction Period and Prepare Ourselves to Amend the Relationship
In step 8, we are looking forward to amending the relationship we have destroyed over the period of addiction which, if left unsolved, will ultimately prevent us from loving others and ourselves.
Step 9: Here, We Mend the Relationship Except in Critical Moments
This step, also known as remorse, requires the patients to go directly and apologize. In doing so, the patient can heal the rational damage and start a new life completely free. The step also requires that we have to be careful on who and the time of apol0ogising to prevent them emotionally.
Step 10: Continue Adjusting the Inventory and Admit Where We Went Wrong
It is as human beings to make problems, and maybe one made a problem during recovery. Step 10 seeks to continually take inventory, which opens us up to problem identification and solving.
Step 11: Seek to have Conscious Contact with God and To Seek His Knowledge to Guide Us Through
This step seeks to have connections with our highest power through meditation and prayer; through this, we can maintain spiritual devotion and maintain our relationship with God.
Step 12: Having Hard the Spiritual Awakening, We are Supposed to Take the Message to Others in Addiction
This final step of recovery reminds us it is our duty to carry the same message we have learned to other people with addiction. Through this, we can give them a guide to self-discovery.
- Curfews. The patients are supposed to report to the sober living house at a certain time, especially for new patients. If there is an improvement in the patient, then the rule might be loosened under some guidelines.
- Schedule Concerning Bathroom Use. The patients are supposed to abide by the shower times. This will help everyone get a shower in time.
- House Cleaning. Sober living house cleaning is specifically up to the residents, and chores are assigned on a rotational basis.
- Meals. If there is a communal sharing of the meals, every member has a duty to do grocery shopping, which is assigned on a rotational basis.
- Personal Treatment Plan Goals. Some sober living house may require patients to develop a treatment plan.
Sober Living House Privileges
- Having frequent Group outings
- Personal outing
- Family day
- Reduced restrictions
Educate Yourself More About Rehab and How These Services can Help you Overcome Addiction. by calling 615-490-9376 today for sober living house guidance.
Ben Lesser is one of the most sought-after experts in health, fitness and medicine. His articles impress with unique research work as well as field-tested skills. He is a freelance medical writer specializing in creating content to improve public awareness of health topics. We are honored to have Ben writing exclusively for Dualdiagnosis.org.