How To Choose The Right Sober House

Hey, guys. Chris Eddrington from Cadre back talking about the basic top three things you need to know when you're picking a sober house. So say you are with your counselor at treatment, and they're talking to you about sober living, or your parents are pushing you to go to a sober house, or you got out of treatment. It's not working. And everyone says, sober living. Sober living. And you talk to your friends and you find out, you hear horrible stories, or you hear great stories, or they tell you, you got to go here, you got to go there.

Here's a couple of things to look out for when picking a sober house. First and foremost is the house located in an area where there are lots of other sober people. Meetings and functions and events, and lots of sober living people, lots of lifestyle to. For you to engage in. The more the merrier, the more sober people, the better. And one way to identify that is to call what's called intergroup. Intergroup is the name for the office, for the AA district, and they're all over the place. And if you call them, you can find out how many meetings per week are in this area, the zip code of the sober house that you picked.

You can find this out by just asking the people at this overhouse. There are a lot of meetings, you guys going together. So the second thing I was going to say was, talk to the people who live there. Talk to the manager. If they don't call you back, there's a problem. Talk to some people who live there, if possible, before you go there, because what's ultimately going to matter in the sober house you pick is not the wallpaper, is not whether you get your own room, is not how many bathrooms or how nice the house is, or does it have a hot tub.

What's going to matter is the people and the way that the house is run. So there's an overriding sort of way to look at how a sober house is run. And I. And I think for someone trying to pick one, this gets a little bit into the weeds, but this is the way that I sort of say it to a lot of people. Living in a sober house with eight other people, nine other people, it could be even twelve other people. You will never get everybody to do the dishes. You have to look at that living experience like, there are certain parts of it that will never change.

You live with eight or ten people. If you get the people in the house to care about each other, you won't hear about the dishes. That's the key to a well run sober house. So to the extent that you can find out what's the dynamic like, if you can go visit, great, you're probably going to get a variation of responses from sober house operators like, we don't do visits, we don't do tours. You want the bed or not, depending on how much you're willing to pay. You might get a nicer house, you might get your own room.

But these things matter way, way more. The momentum, the energy and the unity. Is the house unified as a group? Are the people there motivated? Do they want to be sober? Good news is most people who go to sober living are not forced into it. They're there because they want to. Maybe it's varying degrees, maybe some of the younger people don't have an option from mom and dad, but it's incredibly contagious, so to speak, when there's some people in the house that are motivated and excited about being sober.

I know, not necessarily excited every day, but by and large, if you can find a sober house where people really are doing the things in recovery, and people who are actually happy in their recovery are the people that are actually doing things for their recovery, as opposed to just thinking about themselves being sober. Like going to meetings, like going to the picnics, like going to the barbecues, like going out to dinner before the meeting and coffee after. And one of the most important things is once you build that routine of what you're going to do with your meetings, your job, your gym, your friend's house, you stick to it and you continue to do that routine even when it doesn't really feel that interesting.

And you have to, because you need to give it time. You need to give that routine time to give back. And these are really great things that you can notice about a sober house. And you can notice it very quickly. If there is a house full of individuals and they don't talk to each other and there's disunity and there's no real recourse of management. I mean, the hardest thing to do is to get a group of people to reconnect once they've disconnected. So if you get a sense of that, get out, in my opinion, go get a different house.

You can put up with certain things like, you know, somebody ate my peanut butter, or I couldn't get into the bathroom in the shower in time to get to work. I had to skip it. You have to live in a twin bed with a roommate. You can live with a lot of these things. I mean, it's certainly better than the lifestyle I was living when I was using, it was horrible. And I lived in a sober house in Los Angeles, and I lived in another one in Minneapolis, and it wasn't awesome all the time. And I've been running them now for over 20 years.

And I love the work that pays off for the individuals. I love the work that me and my staff do, I should say, to watch it pay off for people. I watch people get better because there's an atmosphere going on there, and they don't even really realize it until maybe they're thinking about leaving or if they get asked to leave, or if they leave and then they go, man, my recovery was so much better when I was in the sober house. There's just a magic that goes on there. So when picking a sober house, try to meet the people.

Try to at least talk to somebody who lives there. Ask questions about not just rules or how nice the house is, or can I have my car or my dog? Ask about, are the people in the house doing things together? Do they go to meetings together? Do they make meals together? Do they hang out? Is there a camaraderie? Is there unity? Girls or guys? It doesn't matter. Ask those questions before you go. Don't just be sold on a website because the wallpaper looks nice. That isn't going to keep you sober. Lots of people on Cadre with lots of really good ideas, not just, you know, full of hot air.

These are people who, with lived experience, like me, that are sharing what we did, what we know. So sign in. Sign up, see you next time.