Recovering from a substance use disorder takes a great deal of growth, personal strength, and support. Those who make it into the transitional living phase of recovery have likely gone through some major challenges. Getting off the path of addiction and deciding to get sober is just the first step. Then there is detox, rehab, committing to the twelve steps and doing the work of managing each day without succumbing to temptation or being exposed to people and situations that trigger relapse.
Some might even say that as difficult as they are, for people committed to achieving sobriety, those first steps are often the easiest because there is such a high level of support, and there are plenty of people invested in the recovery process. Detox- and rehab-assisted recovery happens in a highly controlled environment. Every minute and every interaction are accounted for. And while it’s difficult being watched all of the time, constant supervision makes it a lot harder to use – especially when the person in recovery is committed to the process.
But once rehab is over, there is often an expectation that people in recovery can just go back to their old routines and live a life of abstinence with little more help than perhaps a weekly therapist and an AA/NA meeting. But the reality is that it’s incredibly difficult to maintain sobriety without support and within the lifestyle framework in which the addiction was able to blossom in the first place.
The truth of the matter is that it’s simply too big of an ask to expect a person to go back to the same stressors, people, and environments that provided a setting for the addiction to flourish without the expectation of relapse. Because of this, transitional living homes make a good buffer between rehab and fully independent living. But not all transitional living situations are created equal.
