A Last House Sober Living Success Story. Brennan Young’s own words on his journey to sobriety and his thoughts on his future. Here from this amazing young man.
Dopamine Detox: How The Last House Sober Living Helps You Reset, Recover, and Rebuild Your Life
Let’s face it—life today can feel overwhelming. Social media, junk food, endless streaming—it’s all designed to grab your attention and keep you hooked. All these things trigger your brain’s dopamine system, giving you little hits of “feel-good” chemicals. But here’s the catch: the more you chase those quick dopamine fixes, the harder it becomes to enjoy the deeper, more meaningful rewards in life.
If you’re recovering from drugs and alcohol or dealing with mental health struggles, this hits even harder. Addiction rewires your brain to crave those instant highs, and even when you’re sober, that pattern can linger, making it tough to feel happy or fulfilled. This is where the idea of a dopamine detox can make a huge difference.
At The Last House in Los Angeles, our long-term sober living program is designed to help you hit the reset button on your brain, build healthy habits, and find joy in the little things again. By combining structure, a strong sober community, and support for your mental health, we help you replace unhealthy patterns with a life full of purpose, confidence, and real connection. Let’s break it down.
What Is a Dopamine Detox?
First off, let’s clear something up—a dopamine detox isn’t about getting rid of dopamine. Dopamine is a natural and essential brain chemical that helps with motivation, pleasure, and reward. The goal of a dopamine detox is to reset your brain by stepping back from unhealthy sources of dopamine, like drugs, alcohol, social media, or impulsive habits, and refocusing on healthier ways to feel good.
For someone recovering from addiction, this is huge. Drugs and alcohol hijack your brain’s dopamine system, flooding it with “false” pleasure that throws everything out of balance. Over time, this makes it harder to enjoy the simpler, slower joys in life, like a good conversation, a workout, or even just feeling proud of yourself for accomplishing something.
A dopamine detox helps you break free from those quick-fix cravings and retrain your brain to find happiness in meaningful, lasting ways. And when you’re working through mental health challenges, like anxiety or depression, a dopamine detox can also help you find stability, balance, and calm.
Why Routine Is Key to Recovery
If dopamine detox is about resetting your brain, routine is the tool that makes it happen. Routine creates structure in your day, helps you stay focused, and builds a sense of stability—something that’s often missing when you’re battling addiction or mental health struggles.
At The Last House, we put a big emphasis on routine because we know it’s a game-changer for recovery. Here’s why:
1. It Boosts Productivity
When you have a clear structure for your day, it’s easier to focus on the things that matter. Instead of feeling overwhelmed or distracted, you can work on what’s in front of you—whether that’s going to therapy, exercising, or learning a new skill.
At The Last House, we help you create a schedule that keeps you moving forward. And trust us, those small wins—like completing your chores or showing up for group meetings—start to add up in a big way.
2. It Builds Self-Esteem
One of the hardest things about addiction and mental health struggles is how they mess with your self-worth. But here’s the good news: every time you stick to your routine and follow through on something, you’re proving to yourself that you can do it.
Those little moments of success—cleaning your room, finishing a project, or simply getting out of bed when it’s hard—build self-esteem over time. At The Last House, we celebrate these victories because they’re the foundation for a confident, independent life.
3. It Improves Confidence
When you follow a routine consistently and see the results, you start to believe in yourself. Maybe it’s noticing you feel stronger after working out, seeing progress in your mental health, or realizing you’re staying sober even when life gets tough. That consistency builds confidence—and confidence helps you face challenges head-on.
4. It Retrains Your Brain
The more you stick to healthy habits, the more your brain adapts. Routine helps rewire your brain to find joy in long-term rewards instead of chasing short-term highs. Over time, this rewiring makes it easier to choose activities that support your recovery and mental health.
Why The Last House Is Perfect for a Dopamine Detox
Recovering from drugs and alcohol, working through mental health challenges, and retraining your brain aren’t things you can do alone. At The Last House, we’ve created a long-term sober living program that provides the perfect environment for growth, healing, and connection. Here’s how we help:
1. Structure and Accountability
We know how important it is to have structure, especially in early recovery. That’s why we provide a daily schedule filled with productive activities, group support, and plenty of time for self-care. Whether it’s attending therapy, participating in house chores, or joining group outings, having a clear plan for your day keeps you grounded and moving forward.
2. A Strong Sober Community
One of the most powerful things about The Last House is the sober community you’ll become a part of. Recovery is hard, but having people around who “get it” makes all the difference. Whether it’s sharing stories during a bonfire at Dockweiler Beach, bonding over a hike in Los Angeles, or simply hanging out, the friendships you build here provide a sense of belonging and support.
3. Fun, Healthy Activities
Let’s be real—sober living doesn’t have to be boring. At The Last House, we plan activities that make life in recovery exciting and fun. From beach days and sports to creative projects and community service, these experiences help you rediscover joy in simple, healthy ways. Plus, they’re a natural way to reset your dopamine system.
4. Support for Mental Health
We know that addiction and mental health struggles often go hand in hand. That’s why we create a space where you can work on both. With access to therapy, mindfulness practices, and tools for managing stress, we help you address the deeper challenges that come with recovery and mental health.
5. Life Skills for Long-Term Success
Recovery isn’t just about getting sober—it’s about building a life you’re excited to live. At The Last House, we help you develop skills that set you up for success, whether that’s cooking, managing finances, or finding work. These practical tools are key to feeling confident and independent.
Rediscovering Joy and Confidence in Recovery
Recovery is more than just quitting drugs or alcohol—it’s about learning how to enjoy life again. A dopamine detox, combined with structure, support, and community, can help you reset your brain and find fulfillment in the everyday moments that make life meaningful.
At The Last House, we’ve created a program that’s not just about getting sober—it’s about thriving. With our structured routines, strong sober community, and focus on mental health, we help you build the habits, skills, and mindset you need for long-term recovery.
If you’re ready to break free from old patterns, heal your mind, and create a life you love, we’re here to help. Contact The Last House in Los Angeles today, and let’s take the next step in your recovery journey together.
Your fresh start is waiting.
Going to Sober Living for Addiction as a Young Man
We’re humans, and as humans, we’re conditioned to want more out of life. We want more fun, more adventure, more enjoyment. One of the incredible concepts about addiction recovery is that it teaches us that we can have “more” and lead fulfilling lives while being sober and without using substances.
As a Los Angeles-based sober living facility, we understand that the world often defines being “sober” as a boring way to live life. Practically everything that’s considered “fun” seems to be tainted by drugs, alcohol, or both. It’s the way big industry makes money– and it’s also the reason why there are 278,544 drug and alcohol related deaths among men every year. Here at The Last House, we ascribe to a different idea of what living “sober” is. We believe that sober living means making a lifestyle change that transforms us into confident, independent men ready to make the most of our lives. We believe that by fostering brotherhood and community, the young men that come through our doors can take Los Angeles and the rest of the world by storm when they graduate. We believe that living sober is the absolute best version of life, and that nothing else really compares.
Getting sober at a sober living facility helps us learn how to deal with life’s challenges as they happen, with the support of brothers and mentors to help us make the right decisions. When we focus on getting sober, we realize that we don’t have time to think about “what we may be missing”– and we really don’t have any desire to. Truth be told, with countless activities here in Los Angeles, we actually find that we’re able to both be more productive men and have more enjoyable and fulfilling experiences when we’re not using substances.
Sober living isn’t just a halfway point between addiction treatment and life outside. With the resources provided and the tools created here in the sober living community, young men in Los Angeles, New York, DC, and all over the country are learning how to make the most of their lives by realizing just how much strength they have without substances. Getting sober is a journey, not a sentence. It’s the most rewarding action you can take for yourself as a young man battling addiction, and sobriety will open up a world of opportunity that you never thought possible.
Here at The Last House sober living facility, we believe that getting sober is a gift, and we teach our young men to embrace the possibilities of a sober life. Situated in sunny Los Angeles, we provide a number of activities and resources for our men to learn responsibility, accountability, independence, and brotherhood. When our men leave The Last House, they’re not just not using. They’re leading more fulfilling lives than they’d ever imagined. Call us at 1-866-677-0090 to get started with The Last House today.
When is an Addiction an Addiction?
Misuse/abuse. Regular use. Tolerance. Dependence. Addiction.
The stages of addiction might manifest differently based on the place or person, but misuse or abuse of drugs is still one of the most likely ways to start down the slippery slope towards addiction. In fact, the misuse or abuse of substances is so prevalent that the FDA indicates that “in 2017, an estimated 18 million people (more than 6 percent of those aged 12 and older)… misused [prescription] medications at least once in the past year.” While misuse is not the same as abuse, both actions are often our first foray into using drugs in ways that they aren’t supposed to be used. In misusing drugs, we’re using drugs for a purpose other than what they’re intended for, although we may not be necessarily be looking to get high. In abusing drugs, we’re using drugs for one alternative purpose: getting high.
For some of us, misusing drugs for purposes that seem as innocuous as relieving a headache or getting over a cold can lead our bodies to crave more and more of the feeling the drug provides. In a very short matter of time, what was our attempt to self-medicate can lead right to regular use, tolerance, dependence, and then addiction. As for abusing drugs, if we’re willingly consuming substances with the purpose of getting high, then there, too, is only a matter of time before addiction becomes a real threat.
How is addiction defined?
Because misuse and abuse of drugs are not the same, yet often used interchangeably, it follows that many of us might also be confused as to how the other stages of addiction are defined.
To start, regular use is best defined as the point in which we begin to display a pattern of use. If we misused a prescription drug once, say for a headache, and liked the feeling, we may do it again– though this time not so much for the pain as for the feeling we get from it. Later on, we may try it once more. Eventually, we’re no longer using the drug for pain, but simply out of habit.
We might not be addicted yet, but we’ve reached the first phase– where drug use has gone from misusing to now using consistently.
At the next phase is tolerance. When we’re becoming tolerant of a drug, we find that we need more and more of it to obtain the same high that we used to get from a much smaller amount of it. If we abused a prescription drug just for the thrill of it the first time, because we liked it a little the second time, and maybe because we wanted some more the third time, by the time we reach tolerance, we’ve built up a habit of using the drug and our system now needs more in order for us to feel it. As we increase the amount of the drug we use, some of us actually begin to feel like we can operate even with a large amount of it in our system. This is why this stage can also be called the “risky use” stage. We can, in effect, become so used to having large amounts of the drug in our system that we feel like there’s nothing in our system at all. Some of us get behind the wheel, attempt to go to work, and exhibit outwardly dangerous behavior due to the drug’s now habitual place in our system.
Following tolerance is dependence, which is when our bodies begin to enter periods of withdrawal if we don’t have access to the drug we’ve misused or abused. Withdrawal is a combination of physical and mental symptoms that can be relatively mild or life threatening. The severity of withdrawals often depends on the drug, the user, and how long the drug has been in the system. When we’re dependent on a drug, we haven’t quite reached the stage of complete addiction, but we are dangerously close to it.
Finally, addiction follows dependence. What makes addiction different than the other stages is that addiction is a mental disease. Addiction results from a person taking a drug repeatedly, but the telltale sign of addiction is when that person cannot stop taking it. A great definition of addiction is that it is a state “marked by a change in behavior caused by the biochemical changes in the brain after continued substance abuse.” Unlike dependence, where we exhibit physical distress when we try to stop using, tolerance, where we need more of a drug, or regular use, where we’ve first started a habit, addiction is the culmination of all of the above. Using the drug becomes our main priority, at the expense of anything and everything that may get in our way. When we reach the point of addiction, whether our drug use started as a result of abuse or misuse becomes secondary. At this point, professional help is highly recommended to help get us on the right track to recovery.
Defining when addiction starts can be difficult, but at The Last House sober living facility, we help our men conquer addiction once and for all. We believe that addiction is wholly treatable, and that the sober living community can help men identify the underlying issues behind why they misused or abused a drug in the first place. We focus on brotherhood, unity, and responsibility here– traits that, when combined, can help a man transform into a better version of himself than he ever thought possible. Call 1-866-677-0090 to get started with The Last House today.
Being a Young, Sober Man in Los Angeles
Los Angeles. The home of film, dreams, beautiful people, and activities galore. Being a young, sober man in Los Angeles means tons of exciting opportunities to explore, mature, and strengthen our independence. After all, there’s no better way to enjoy the City of Angels than with a clear mind and a sense of adventure.
Here at The Last House sober living community, we help our men make the most of the opportunities Los Angeles offers by arranging social engagements like sober parties, service
events, conventions, fellowships and mandatory house outings, all designed to help us learn how to face common challenges with the support of our peers.
As a young, sober man in Los Angeles, the city is your oyster, and we help you find new ways to make your mark on life. As strong, independent men, we’re designed to be so much more than what addiction wants us to be. It’s the skills we learn, the passions we find, and the activities we enjoy in sober living that help us become the best versions of ourselves.
Some of the sober activities we enjoy here at The Last House on a sunny Los Angeles day include yoga, morning meditation, and surfing. On weekly outings, we like to mix it up with activities like golf, restaurant outings, and a skiing trip every once in a while.
Getting sober in Los Angeles starts with a mindset, and the sober living community that we foster here helps our men see sobriety as not just avoiding alcohol and substances, but as a new way to look at life. Every activity we enjoy ties us to something deeper– be it a sense of brotherhood, renewed confidence, or strengthened independence.
The activities Los Angeles offers don’t serve as mere distractions from drinking or using, but become new ways for us to exercise our passions and stimulate our interests. With the right mindset and a community of brothers behind us, we can make the most of young, sober life here in Los Angeles– because every day can be a new adventure.
Here at The Last House sober living facility, the young men that we work with learn just how fun getting sober in Los Angeles can be. Through the activities they enjoy at our sober living facility, they form powerful bonds with brothers, strengthen their self-confidence, and become independent men that will let nothing stand in the way of living their best lives. Call us at 1-866-677-0090 to get started with The Last House today.
Goodbye Doubt, Hello Hope
The very beginning of The Big Book’s third edition makes a bold assertion that describes the path from addiction to recovery: “Each day, somewhere in the world, recovery begins when one alcoholic talks with another alcoholic, sharing experience, strength, and hope.”
For many of us, hope was never something we considered while addicted. To be hopeful was to expect better days, and to look for more to come even in a situation that seemed grim. No– we merely survived during our addiction. We went through the motions of living, but the only thing that was functioning properly was our physical body, and even that showed signs of deterioration. Our mind and our soul were both gone, taken hostage by a substance that we’d thought was our savior.
Somehow, however, we managed to say that we needed help, and with the guidance of family members, friends, loved ones, and professionals, we got that help from an addiction treatment center. We learned how to look deep inside of ourselves to identify flaws, triggers, and imbalances that may have led us to use substances in the first place. We learned to forgive ourselves for the actions we could not control during our addiction, and how to make things right with the ones we’d hurt. We learned to free ourselves from addiction, and to love ourselves again.
Here at The Last House, we’re here to help you restore the hope that addiction took away. While treatment provides us with the knowledge and practices to defeat addiction, it’s sober living that gives us the confidence that we can return to the real world and be even better than we were before. As men, there are certain things that we’re expected to do in this life, certain responsibilities that we’re expected to take care of. Sober living teaches us how to dive right back into life and handle those responsibilities with poise and tact, without the fear of returning to substances or vices. It teaches us some of the last lessons we must learn in order to be truly free– not just from addiction, but from the doubt that we may not be able to stay on the right track post-treatment.
What does sober living teach me?
Sober living is the first step in taking control of your life after treatment, and, as such, the lessons you learn in a sober living community will no doubt be of high importance. It may surprise you, however, to learn that the sober living spin on “teaching” is less about telling you what not to do, and much more about helping you expand your independence and hone your own decision-making skills. “Lessons” are traded for experiences, and “classmates” are your community brothers. At The Last House and most other sober living communities, we work to help you turn the person you already are into a better version of yourself that will be ready to take on anything life throws at you. In a way, if you had to categorize the sober living experience as “teaching,” then it would be fitting to say that sober living teaches you how to be a better version of, well, you!
So, where’s the whole “doubt” concept fit into all this?
If we pause and think for a second, we can probably all remember a time during our addiction where we doubted whether treatment was worth it. We may have taken a hard look at our lives up until that point, and decided that treatment would be pointless, and that we were better off ignoring our situation, or attempting to fix it ourselves. Of course, we didn’t know then what we know now about addiction: that, as The Big Book says, fighting it is all but impossible without the help of others (so we can’t be too hard on ourselves) but, regardless, we can probably all remember how much doubt and helplessness prevented us from reaching out for help sooner.
These behaviors are learned. Through no fault of our own, our addiction takes our mind and body hostage and forces us to do things, think things, and crave things that we would have never done otherwise. Through treatment, we learn to get to the root of these causes and beat that addiction, but it’s via sober living that we hone the skills we need to stop doubt and helplessness from creeping back in even after our treatment.
At The Last House, we train ourselves to beat doubt and those feelings of helplessness by focusing on building our independence and a strong sense of community. Everything we do in our sober living community hinges on our being accountable to our brothers. Even something as simple as being late to dinner invokes a consequence. The goal is that by training ourselves to be responsible for the sake of others, we will learn to be responsible despite of ourselves. After all, it’s a lot harder to doubt what we can do when we’ve practiced doing it for others. As The Big Book says, learning to take responsibility for others is the spirit of successful recovery.
Through our sober living community, we learn how to use experiences and community to become even better versions of ourselves. In so doing, we eliminate feelings of doubt and hopelessness, replacing them with hope for and confidence in our ability to excel in the future. There’s no magic going on here, and everything we learn is already inside of us. Sober living just helps us realize it!
The Last House is a men’s sober living facility in West Los Angeles. Our talented staff and carefully cultivated approach to sober living helps us churn out amazingly talented, self-aware gentleman, primed to make a difference in their communities. Call us at
1-866-677-0090 to start your plan today!
Let Your Feelings Fuel You
Ever notice how fierce competitors like to get slapped before the start of an intense fight? It’s not because they like the pain. It’s because the pain fuels them.
Sober living is a lot like that slap in the face. It’s gonna hurt like heck, but if we let it, it can make us even more amped up to go out and take control of our lives when we graduate. If we end up liking it, we’ll see gains in our lives like never before.
The Big Book is very direct about the importance of pain in recovery. “Pain is the admission price to a new life,” it says. It also says that eventually, we “begin to fear pain less, and desire humility more than ever.” Couldn’t get much clearer than that.
Sober living isn’t designed to hurt us, but it is designed to help us work out those kinks in our lives that we either thought no one knew about, or genuinely forgot about ourselves. Once we recover from addiction, we learn very quickly that there are things and people in this world that will stop at nothing to see us back where we were– helpless and on our backsides. If we don’t learn to trim ourselves of all of the extra mental and spiritual fat we put on in the years leading up to our substance use, it’s going to be quite difficult to get through some of the tough times we might face after graduation.
We do that by being real with each other in sober living. We’re accountable. We work as a unit. We learn respect, punctuality, and how to build the right kind of pride. We may feel picked on or like we can’t keep up with the demands and rigor that sober living requires, but we’ll never feel alone. Using these feelings to push ourselves to work harder, make smarter decisions, and step outside of our comfort zones is the only way to do things here. If our feelings aren’t fueling us, we’re doing something wrong.
Sober living is like P90X for our feelings. Ready. Set. Go.
The Last House is a premier men’s sober living facility based in West Los Angeles. We turn men into gentlemen by helping them build the skills and confidence they need to demolish the competition: the real world. Call 1-866-677-0090 to see how we can help you, your son, or your husband today!
Making Lessons out of “Losses”
Sober living wouldn’t be very effective if we didn’t feel comfortable screwing something up every once in a while. In fact, though sober living communities like The Last House are here to help us plot the right path to the real world, they also function as a great place to make the mistakes we simply couldn’t afford to make out there.
Why?
Because mistakes make us stronger, smarter, and better. The Big Book mentions mistakes eight times, and almost every time, it’s in encouraging us to do one thing: learn from them. Think about it- in just about everything we learn, mistakes are par for the course. Baby’s going to walk? He’s going to fall down first. Making the transition from a tricycle to a bicycle? Prepare for some scuffed knees. Driver’s permit time? More like time for some bumped orange cones.
If even the most fundamental lessons we learn in life are meant to be accompanied by mistakes, then why should sober living be different? It shouldn’t, and it isn’t. It’s okay to make mistakes in sober living. The important concept is learning from them.
The Big Book suggests we learn from our mistakes by analyzing them (“we [should] continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along.”) Here at The Last House, we add to that by making sure that we hold ourselves accountable to our brothers. We live in unity, and, as such, any mistake one man makes affects the team. This teaches us that every action we take affects more than just us, and that, no matter what, even in the wrong, we’ll always have someone to support us and lift us back up.
We can make lessons out of everything we do, but learning to make lessons out of mistakes in particular teaches us that our battles aren’t lost when we mess up, and that forward progress can be made even when we think we’re screwed.
Sober living doesn’t just teach us how to live as recovered men. It teaches us how to live as conquerors. Let’s slap a band-aid on and learn from our mistakes. When we put our minds to it, our forward progress can’t be stopped!
The Last House is a men’s sober living facility based in West Los Angeles. We know the tools men need to become recovery warriors, and we equip them everyday to take control of their lives and make gold where others said was bronze.
Call us at 1-866-677-0090 to get started today!
Shedding the Stereotypes of Addiction
When most people think of addicts, they think of three things: ego, entitlement, and selfishness. People believe that, particularly in the millennial era, addiction is characterized by spoiled twenty and thirty-somethings who weren’t used to hearing the word “no” enough when they were growing up. We know that isn’t really the truth, and that addiction affects a great deal of people of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities. If addiction was only an issue for “spoiled brat millenials,” then the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a notorious drunk in his own right, would not have co-founded the iconic organization at nearly forty years old, and it certainly wouldn’t have been founded in the 1930s (millennials weren’t around then, yet).
While we know this stereotype is not completely accurate, of course, some young men do fit the bill. As a sober living facility in Los Angeles, we take on a wide range of men that come to us from situations in which entitlement, ego, or selfishness did drive them to use substances (or if it didn’t drive them to use, drove them to continue using). After recovery, these men aren’t necessarily ready to take the plunge into a world that might not be as forgiving as family members or loved ones were, and they enlist our help to get them prepared.
At The Last House, we’re in the business of combating these negative stereotypes with a few positive ones of our own. Our facilities foster brotherhood, companionship, discipline, self-worth independence, and accountability. We make the perfect gentlemen out of men that otherwise may have had trouble finding their way after treatment. The work we do in shedding these stereotypes as a sober living facility allows the men that we work with to leave our program as viable, contributing members of society, and gentlemen that anyone would love to be around.
How do you shed the stereotypes of addiction?
The Big Book is very clear on the power of positive thought in addiction treatment, and that’s one of the primary ways we as a sober living facility slowly shed the stereotypes portrayed by our clients. As men who have escaped the cycle of addiction, the power of thought goes a lot further for us than for others who never had to wrestle with losing the ability to rationalize, make good decisions, and control their wants and needs. Chapter three of The Big Book hits the nail on the head: “The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, must be smashed.” While this particular passage refers to action we should take while addicted, it makes it very clear that those that have gone through addiction are not like other people in many ways, which couldn’t be more right. One of these is the power of thought.
The power of thought begins with the understanding that the sober living facility is not a place for men to come and relax. It is a place of work, and a place to be only if you are committed to bettering yourself and working to help better your brothers who stand beside you. If this is not your ultimatum, we urge you to leave and pursue another avenue, or to try your hand at returning to the real world where you may or may not excel, depending on how prepared you are upon entering. We champion the power of thought by reinforcing positives, and refusing to overlook negatives. Land a job interview? Heaps of praise from our staff and your brothers. Come late to one meeting out of ten? There’s a consequence– no matter the other nine perfect attendances. Thought processes start to shift when it is realized that every action has a reaction, and that even the slightest deviation from rules, no matter how much good you’ve done, invokes some sort of punishment. We take this strategy from The Big Book itself, and its keen focus on accepting consequences as a means of growing in recovery (“We know that little good can come to any alcoholic who joins A.A. unless he has first accepted his devastating weakness and all its consequences.”) Over time, a changing thought process drastically changes stereotypes concerning ego and attitude. Our clients learn very quickly that thinking things will go their way, and that they do not have to follow the rules of the house will land them in trouble with not just the staff, but with the brothers they have come to know, love, and hold accountable as well.
We also shed stereotypes by encouraging the men of our program to work to not only return to society without issue, but to return to society as gentlemen, and as better men than they were before they even got involved with substances. As individuals that have already battled through addiction and come out on the right side of treatment, our men already have clearer heads and a better sense of self worth than many of their peers who never went through an ordeal with addiction. We use that heightened self-awareness and self worth to encourage our men that now is as good a time as any to conquer those dreams, slay those dragons, and prove to the world that recovery is not just about quitting drugs. It’s about coming out better, stronger, and more powerful than ever before.
At The Last House of West Los Angeles, we offer premier sober living care for men that are ready to get more out of their lives, and to make an impact on their communities when they return home. To get started, call us right now at 1-866-677-0090. We can’t wait to meet you!
Sober Living, in Theory
Everyone knows what addiction is. It’s a vile disease that takes over the brain, renders our will useless, and ultimately wreaks havoc on our entire body while driving us away from family members, friends, loved ones, and those who care about us. Thanks to the movement to generate more information about addiction, we also now know what addiction treatment is. We understand just how powerful looking deep inside of ourselves to fix our problems can be, and we realize that therapy can be a wonderful way of getting to the root of the issues that cause us to rely on substances in the first place.
Sober living, however, is a concept that hasn’t quite caught up to the mainstream as fast as other aspects of the addiction recovery process have. While many people credit addiction treatment with ridding them of their addiction, they forget the powerful impact sober living can make when it comes to transitioning from treatment to life on their own.
As Dr. Drew said during our radio interview on his eponymous show, addiction treatment has changed. In the generation of millennials, addiction treatment has become more about coddling and less about learning the skills to excel in life after treatment. In some cases, there is a severe disconnect between the behavior men display, and the actions they feel entitled to receive from others.
At a facility like The Last House, we connect the disconnect.
Our sober living facility focuses on making men the very best they can be by championing their independence, confidence, and self-sufficiency, and encouraging them to build bonds with brothers that will last a lifetime. The Big Book couldn’t say it any better: “it became clear that if we ever were to feel emotionally secure among grown-up people, we would have to put our lives on a give-and-take basis; we would have to develop the sense of being in partnership or brotherhood with all those around us.” In our eyes, brotherhood is key to a successful transition to life after treatment. Having a tribe that will hold you accountable, force you to keep your word, take responsibility for your actions, and put the well-being of the group before yourself is an invaluable part in learning the skills necessary to make the most out of life after treatment.
Sober living, in theory, is designed to make you more than just a better person after treatment. It’s designed to give you the tools you need to become a contributing member of your community, and a champion of the recovery process for others that may need your guidance. At The Last House, we follow the Big Book’s assertion that being able to help others that are suffering through the same things we suffered through before treatment both keeps us on the straight and narrow, and allows us to give back. In fact, The Big Book couldn’t be any clearer about how important being able to help others is, especially in saying that “helping others is the foundation stone of our recovery.”
The core values of sober living
At The Last House, there are three concepts we preach more than anything: the concept of unity, the power of peer support, and the importance of life skills. Understanding these key values is the key to success for our clients.
Unity is a powerful tool in the transition from treatment to life on your own afterwards. Addiction treatment is not a one-man process, and the extension of treatment afterwards shouldn’t be either. Unity means knowing that your brothers have your back through thick and thin, and reassuring them that you have theirs. It’s what gives you the confidence to better yourself, and to step out of your comfort zone. The wonderful thing about sober living is that, although we operate in a very structured environment, it isn’t the same as treatment. Clients have the freedom to go out, work, engage with others, and live their lives. This is where the power of unity shows through the most. The brothers in our sober living homes are never forced to form bonds and relationships– their shared environment, triumphs, and failures causes them to form organically. These bonds are hard to break, and they last for years after graduation from our sober living program.
Peer support is next, and ties directly into our unity concept. In sober living, your brother is your best friend, your confidant, and your biggest fan. Whether it’s cooking meals for each other, taking turns cleaning up recreation areas, or enjoying a group outing together, sober living provides an environment brimming with opportunities for clients to give and receive help to and from each other. We find this so important, because the same practice of helping each other in the sober living community becomes a learned practice that clients replicate after graduation. As The Big Book says, one of the best ways to stay sober is to surround yourselves with others who are working on the same goal. Two are much stronger than one, and a group focused on the same thing is virtually unstoppable.
Finally, at The Last House and most other sober living communities, life skills are created, developed, and strengthened every day. In every aspect of what we do, we incorporate concepts that tie in with something greater– being the best person you can be, and a viable contributing member of your community after recovery.
Sober living is an awesome way to build the skills you need to transition into life after treatment with ease. The Last House is Los Angeles’ leading sober living community for men looking for guidance, support, and strength from other brothers. Call us today at
1-866-677-0090 to see how we can help you!