Sober Living Sounds Awful, Why Should I Go?

Okay, long enough. Pause. Hi, guys. Chris Edrington, Cadre. Today I'd like to get specific about a recommendation that somebody, your loved one or you, has been given by your counselor at treatment, inpatient, outpatient to go to sober living. And you have all kinds of ideas about why you don't want to do that. You've probably heard some stories, and I'd like to dig into three main things that come out of that experience that you may not know about. So first and foremost, the reason to go to the sober living home is to use it as an on ramp into the sober community, to follow others in front of you, to do it as a group with people that you live with in the house.

So you're not doing this alone. And there's a thousand reasons why that makes sense, and they won't necessarily make sense to you until you try it. I know you've probably heard things about you got to live in a sleep in a twin bed and have a roommate and seven guys, eight guys, ten guys, maybe, or women together in a sober house, and you got to fight for the bathroom and someone's going to steal your peanut butter. And that's true. And you're going to want to call the FBI, and you can't do that.

So there are those horror stories. But for, and we could, we can talk about how to mitigate some of that stuff. But I think what I would like to focus on for this specific video is, what are the gold? Where can I mine for gold in this experience? Where can I get the most out of my sober living experience? And I'm going to focus on three main areas. First of all, you're going to find a million different reasons and experiences and anecdotal stories of other people who are ahead of you in recovery.

Maybe they're only a few weeks ahead of you, maybe they're a few years ahead of you. But because of the sober living experience and doing things as a group and engaging in the sober community, you're going to be exposed to so many other people's pathway. And that is gold because you can model after those people and learn from them, ask questions of them, find out what not to do. Also, you'll hear horror stories about decisions people made in early recovery because the guys and the girls in the sober house spend an awful lot of time together just sort of talking about the experience that we're sharing.

That's incredibly important. And I think it's really hard to duplicate if you're living by yourself or you're living in your parents basement or something like that. There's a magical sense of unity in the house, kind of the fraternity sorority idea, which is without the booze, which is kind of a true thing. It really is much like a sorority or fraternity, because you become very tight with your people in your sober house. And if it's run well, that energy and that momentum will be like rocket fuel for you.

That will make you more motivated and interested. I mean, the reality of it is, changing your life in early recovery is like shedding a layer of skin. You've got to expose yourself. You've got to get vulnerable. It's not therapy in this overhaul. That's not the role of it. It's just. It's more of a roommate human sort of sense of social model health. So I don't want to make that. I want to make that distinction that living in a sober house is not another group therapy operation or group therapy event.

It's really, really, really cool when it works well, and you will find that the supportive nature of the other people is amazing and super helpful, and you don't even know why it's helpful. I think a lot of the using lifestyle is so isolating that this inclusion piece in this overhaul, being part of something, is really, really, really helpful. Super therapeutic. It's really the medicine in early recovery. So I don't want people to get the wrong idea about what goes on in the sober house. From a chemical dependency sort of therapeutic standpoint.

It is a therapeutic environment. It is helpful, but it's helpful in a very sort of normal, societal way. Just friends doing stuff together, supporting each other, getting to know each other. I think it's really important to look at the early sobriety journey about becoming a person who lives, to a degree, a very transparent life, to where you're not hiding what's going on in your daily life anymore. And it's hard to do that in a sober house when you live with that many people. It's uncomfortable at first, but really, really, really worth it.

And finally, I think, or the third point I wanted to make was about the relationships that you can build. You come out of that sober house experience with the best friends of your life, that you've been through the thick of it. They've watched you grow, they've watched you get honest and vulnerable. And if the sober house is run well, that really is the goal and the momentum for the group in the house. It's not supposed to be. It shouldn't be just a housing model, just sober housing. It's a living model.

It's sober living. Let's all change our lives. Let's all repurpose our lifestyles, and let's do it together. And yeah, we can argue all day about who ate my peanut butter, and I couldn't get in a shower, the hot water was gone, or my roommate snores. And all that stuff just brings you together to a place where you find that you're getting. You're gaining ground. And there's real traction in early recovery. As a group, the group can accomplish what the individual cannot. And that is so true. So true in early recovery.

So think about this as a little analogy. If you leave treatment, it doesn't matter if you've been to treatment six times or one time, and you go back to your apartment and you're up sitting there by yourself on the couch, and you know that the AA meeting you said you would go to is maybe in a half an hour, and you're like, hmm, I should probably go to the meeting. Versus you're sitting on the couch in a sober house, and five other people are walking out the door in front of you saying, hey, man, let's go to the meeting.

You are 1000 times more likely to go to that meeting in that second scenario. And that is just human nature. We like to be included. We like to follow, we like to be part of something. We like people to invite us to things. It's incredibly important to build into your lifestyle and early recovery a sense of inclusion. And all you have to do is show up and they will give it to you. It's not like you gotta go stand out on the corner with a sign said, hey, please include me. You just have to show up at the house, at the meetings, raise your hand, talk to people.

You will have so much inclusion, it'll make your head spin, which is the absolute opposite of the lifestyle of using where we're un included, if that's a word from everything, and we're isolated from everything, and this slow sort of inclusion, I'm part of something becomes a validating thing. It becomes. What it turns into is that you as an individual are the one who makes the changes in your life. You're responsible for getting sober, staying sober, changing your life, changing the way you behave, changing how you show up as an uncle, brother, daughter, son, and you get to own that change.

You didn't just go get a shot from a doctor, and all of a sudden you're a sober person. The fact that you are the one that built it is really, really important. And in the first couple of years of sobriety, you're going to figure out how valuable that is when you can talk to that inner voice inside of yourself and say, you know what? I did this. I did the work, and I got here. Yes, I got a lot of help, but I did it. You got to own it. You have to own that progress that is rocket fuel for the next year and the next year, and it gets easier and easier.

So when you hear about all the stuff at sober living and how it can be, you know, horrible to live with so many people and all that sort of external stuff doesn't have a whole lot to do with what it feels like to live there and what it's bringing you. Those are just external things like sharing a room and that kind of stuff. You got to get past that. You got to look past that for a bigger meaning here, because this is really a h*** of an opportunity to change your life. Lots of good ideas come out of all of the creators at Cadre.

So I invite you to join. Look into it. Listen to me and other creators at Cadre. We've got all kinds of really great ideas and lots of real lived experiences to share. Everybody take care.