A sober living home operator describes the final step before residents move to permanent housing. She listens to traumatic histories during intake, believes in their capacity to recover, and shares a success story: a former resident three years clean who reunited with family.
I also always tell people that this should be the last place they live before moving into permanent housing. We really saw a lot of people moving into our homes early on who had been in sober living homes for years, just bouncing from home to home, or they would be in a home for six months, relapse, go to treatment, be on the street, go back into a home, relapse, stay in a car. In this circle, you know, the cycle continued. And so what we really took heart in was sitting down, listening to people's stories, especially my first, a year or so, sitting down listening to their story while we went through the intake sheet process asking, hey, how did we get here? Like, how did this end up? And as heart wrenching as it was those first few times to hear the terrible, like, trauma that people have been through, it was really cool to then sit and look at them and say, I believe in you. You've made a decision to better yourself and to, to not stay in that situation or to not let that kind of derail their life moving forward. They've chosen a better future and this should be the last home that they stay in before they move on to their own permanent home. That simple statement, that belief, man, we've seen a lot of people move into their own apartments, move back in with family and loved ones and really get their life back on the right track, not go back into addiction. In fact, I just heard about somebody, one of our former residents, who is three years clean now, recently got married and reunified with his three sons. And those are just amazing stories to me to hear that we had a part in that. And all they needed was a safe, clean, drug and alcohol free place to lay their head and focus and rebuild.
