Going to a Sober Living house is hardly a controversial recommendation when you’re in rehab: the counselors at pretty much every single rehab I’ve ever been to have suggested pretty strongly that I—and every other patient, really—go to some kind of continuing care program after the 28-day inpatient stay is over. It makes sense, of course. Theoretically, the longer someone stays in treatment, the better their chances of staying sober. Going right back into your old life after just one month of inpatient seems clearly more dangerous than transitioning into a controlled sober living environment.
But is that really the case?
Are Sober Living houses useful in terms of helping addicts achieve long-term sobriety?
Well, truthfully, almost every time I ended up in a Sober Living, it was because I had no “old life” to go back to. Usually I was completely broke and had lost everything and Sober Living houses were the only places that would have me.
There were the places where you could tell that the owners were just in it for the rent they collected every month and didn’t give a fuck about who was shooting what in the bathroom.
I was incredibly lucky to have my family’s support. And the tact they took—which, I believe, helped save my life—was to leave me with the ultimatum that they wanted nothing to do with me unless I agreed to go into treatment. Then, once in treatment, the counselors, like I said, would convince my parents that the only safe place for me to go was Sober Living.
My parents were desperate. They would’ve probably strapped me to a rocket and blasted me off to the moon if that’s what the counselors had suggested. But that’s not what they suggested. They suggested Sober Living.
So that’s where I went.
I’m not sure how my parents found these particular Sober Living houses. I guess they were recommended by the rehabs themselves a lot of the times. And I’m not sure what qualifications people need to have in order to run a Sober Living but based on what I experienced, I can’t imagine they’re too rigorous.
The fact is that some places I went to it definitely seemed like the owners really knew what they were doing and genuinely wanted to help the residents while at other places you could tell the owners wanted to help the residents but were totally clueless as to how to do it. And then there were the places where you could tell that the owners were just in it for the rent they collected every month and didn’t give a fuck about who was shooting what in the bathroom.
Surprisingly—to me, anyway—the Sober Living business seems to be pretty lucrative. At one of the places I went to in Mar Vista, a not terribly great town with a large Hispanic population and a lot of tract houses, I lived in a small house where I had to share a room with two other guys. The cost was $1800 a month, and this was back in 2002. So the owners were getting about 14 or 15 grand from a three-bedroom house.
And what do the owners have to do?
Not a whole lot, really.
They had to run a meeting once a week where all the residents would bitch at each other and accuse one another of stealing shit, and have someone do drug tests once in awhile.
There’s not that much to it.
Back then, of course, I was always deemed the sick “crazy” one because I’d already been to four different rehabs and had actually ran away from two of them. So if I complained that other residents were doing drugs in the Sober Living, or that the owners weren’t around at all, no one listened. No one listened to any of us.
But, in some ways, I’d say absent owners were maybe better than the fucked up, sadistic ones—the ones that seemed to somehow almost get off on breaking addicts down and humiliating us.
There was a place I went to, also in Los Angeles, that was all male and that held this weekly meeting where they singled out one or two residents to sit in the middle and be basically told all the terrible things about themselves. Basically, they had to sit there until they admitted these character defects—even if it took 12 hours. That was the same place that literally made residents clean the bathroom with a toothbrush if they walked on the carpet wearing their shoes.
Maybe some addicts benefit from such treatment. All I can say is that, for me, life in a place like that seemed not worth living. I decided I’d rather be a homeless tweaker junkie then go on in a place like that.
And so I left.
I eventually ended up back in another Sober Living, this time in Arizona. That was another all-male place. It was up in the mountains in the middle of the desert and I think everyone felt trapped and claustrophobic and crazed from sexual frustration so there was a strange desperation in the residents there. One of the rules there was that you weren’t allowed to read, write in a notebook, or play the guitar because they said it would distract us from concentrating on sobriety—whatever that meant.
I lasted there for about three days. The guy they had doing my incoming U.A. was a resident and he tried to force me to turn around and pee facing him—telling me that was protocol. The whole thing was so weird and creepy. Really, whoever decided to isolate a bunch of horny guys out in the desert without even allowing them distractions like reading or playing music seems like a total fucking idiot.
Again, maybe it works for some people. It sure as hell didn’t for me.
Of course, as I said, not every Sober Living was a total disaster led by psychos or greedy profiteers or who knows what else. At best, the ones I’ve been to offered me safety and company and structure when I couldn’t have needed that more. I actually believe that good Sober Livings can be even more helpful than inpatient treatment because they can teach you how to stay sober while also maintaining a job and relationships in the “real” world. In rehab, you’re completely isolated and have nothing to do but go to groups all day, which doesn’t necessarily provide you with the tools you’ll need to function in society.
When I first moved back to LA in 2005, I didn’t really know anyone and I’d just broken up with my girlfriend and I was still pretty newly sober so I decided to move into a Sober Living on my own. It seemed like the safest thing for me at the time. So I got the recommendation of a couple places and I went to look at them.
As I said already, different things work for different people, and I think I’d finally started to figure out what worked for me.
After that creepy desert experience, however, I wasn’t going to check myself into an all-male house. In the end, those just seem to end up being full of horny frat boys with too much testosterone and this strange competitive something, I’m not even sure what.
And I wanted to make sure the owner was going to be present but not too present and nuts-o crazy. I didn’t want to be back in some behavior modification place.
Basically, my theory with Sober Livings, and with sobriety in general, is that I have to build a life for myself that I want to fight for. And being fuckin’ miserable in some place where they take away all the things I actually do love about life seems totally counterproductive. Stripping me of joy and hope isn’t going to do help me make healthier decisions.
Herbert House in West LA, where the owner really cared about helping each resident and Victoria’s House in Santa Monica, where you are given just the right amount of freedom and responsibility, were two great Sober Livings I went to here in LA.
Without places like that, it’s safe to say that I might not be alive today. If only the other ones out there could follow their example. And I think the only way for addicts, or their loved ones, to find Sober Livings like these are just to ask for advice and to be flexible so that if you check into a place and find the owners are either totally absent or totally psycho, you can allow yourself to move—without blaming it on “addict behavior” or buying into the notion that it’s your “disease talking” or that you’re on your way to a relapse. Accept that maybe not all Sober Livings are going to be right for you but that the right one is out there—so to keep trying.
Which is, I guess, the best advice for anyone struggling with addiction—to try and try again and never give up. Whether that’s about finding the method of treatment that best works for you or just continuing to ask for help in getting sober. Because it’s never too late.
Until it is.
Nic Sheff is a columnist for The Fix and the author of two memoirs about his struggles with addiction, the New York Times-bestselling Tweak, and We All Fall Down. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, two hound dogs, and a cat and has previously written about selling himself for sex and his father David Sheff’s book Beautiful Boy, among many other topics.
