Our Stories
Share the power of long-term recovery. If you are in recovery, a family member, friend or ally of someone in recovery, we want to hear your recovery story!
Learn more...
Faces & Voices of Recovery's book page
has information on many of the growing number of recovery-related publications. It’s a work in progress, so please let us know of other books that you think we should include. Check it out!
|
Recovery in the News
Summer in a Sober House: Avoiding the Undertow of Temptation
Sarah Maslin Nir
The New York Times
June 9, 2010
IN popular vacation spots like Fire Island and the
Not so for Christopher Peregrin, 31, an assistant for the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who, along with seven friends, shares both a summer house in the Pines community of
Mr. Peregrin has been sober for eight years; this will be his third year summering on the island. He pays $2,700 for his 10-week share in a house that is stocked with Diet Coke, Fresca and Smart Water.
The house of fellow nondrinkers provides a safe haven of sorts, but it is hardly designed to be a cloistered existence. On Fire Island each weekend, Mr. Peregrin said, he and some housemates hit “Middle Tea,” the early evening all-out gay dance party that takes place in and around the harbor-side Pavilion nightclub, with as much ferocity as those men who drink with whom they share the dance floor. “From 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. I dance like a madman and then go home,” he said. “I had my moment, I don’t need to go out and chase it again.”
These kinds of houses are dotted throughout the vacation communities on the East End of Long Island, from Montauk — where recovering alcoholics surf by day at the popular Ditch Plains beach and then hold their Alcoholics Anonymous meetings around the bonfire by night — to the tiny Saltaire community on Fire Island, where the St. Andrew’s Church has A.A. meetings each Sunday at 6:30 p.m., and the Old Whaler’s Presbyterian Church in Sag Harbor, where A.A. meetings take place on Saturdays at 8:30 a.m.
“A critically important component of recovery for people is a sense of community, not isolation," said Robert J. Lindsey, president and chief executive of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. In sober share houses, the people “are creating for themselves their own environment, and have the opportunity to be out in one of the most beautiful places in the country.”
“D,” who like many interviewed for this article wished to remain anonymous, citing long-held traditions of A.A., among other reasons, has organized a sober share house in Montauk for the last three years. The house is alcohol- and drug-free, and most of the renters were recruited from the city’s network of A.A. meetings. “I’ve seen the whole scene,” said D., 43, who in the years before he kicked his addictions, like many of his housemates, sampled stereotypical share-house summers in the
For some, like Patrick Stretch, 48, a talent representative from the Upper West Side who shares a
Before he became sober three years ago, heading out to the island meant that “I would be high on the train,” Mr. Stretch said. “As soon as we got to the ferry I’d have a drink or two, and there were many nights when it was about trying to score drugs on the island or drinking so much that you’d sort of pass out and sleep for sometimes a couple of days. The beach and the ocean and the friends were sort of transitory and kind of incidental to the experience.”
The sober share houses in Montauk, D. said, were born to resolve a Catch-22 that he and other recovering addicts with a yen to hit the beach faced: They couldn’t afford a seaside summer without pooling resources into a share house, yet a standard share house filled with drinkers wasn’t an option. More than five years ago, D. said, some recovering addicts established their own share houses in the
Once just a tenant, D. now acts as house manager, organizing a revolving cadre of around 28 people who buy varying amounts of time in a four-bedroom sober share house in Montauk that costs $40,000 for the summer season. Some, like Philip M., an architect who lives in
For D., who used to spend weekends battling hangovers by day and working up to them in clubs called Cain and Pink Elephant by night, the
“The feeling of being on the beach is the feeling that we have about sobriety all the time,” a 29-year-old nurse from
For Philip M., a moment surfing on the beach last year provided a breakthrough in his struggle toward sobriety, when he helped a housemate catch her first wave. “It was a beautiful moment,” he said, one of the first where he thought: “I’m truly useful to somebody else, a sense of satisfaction. It was just a different way of feeling good than doing drugs or drinking.”
Activities like Scrabble and barbecues as well as the ritual of a nightcap of ice cream at John’s Pancake House in town are paramount, D. said. So, too, are dance parties on the deck at their house and neighboring sober share houses. “Sober people love to dance,” he said. “You’re not dumbing down all night with drugs and alcohol so you’ve got to do something.”
But that raises a question: why vacation in a place rife with substances that once tormented them?
“The reality is that there are triggers for relapse everywhere people go,” says Mr. Lindsey, of the drug and alcoholism council. “The one difference here is that they are going geographically to a place where there is at that point in the summer a tremendous amount of parties going on. What they do though here in a sober house is create their own community of support to stay sober and have fun.”
Both D. in Montauk and Adam, an event planner who is part of the share in
Mr. Peregrin said: “I don’t think there’s any place on the planet that I can’t go. The idea of having limits of where I can and can’t go is kind of anti the whole point of being sober. The idea is to have a bigger, fuller life.”
Sober houses have to be extremely vigilant when it comes to selecting housemates, D. said. Occupants must be carefully screened; without the social lubricant of alcohol to smooth over rough spots, personalities seem to matter more. Many drank because of emotional issues or deep trauma, factors that can affect everyone’s experience of the collective living situation. It’s also not for those who still measure their sobriety in days, not months or years, several sober housemates said. Those with a tenuous hold on their sobriety, they say, may be challenged by spending a summer plunged in a party atmosphere.
Even with the backbone of the fellowship that a sober share house provides, sobriety can be a daily act of will. For some, that’s buttressed by daily A.A. meetings. Some are private — in Montauk they’re sometimes held bonfire-side on the beach. Others are public, like the nightly one at a firehouse on
For many, a summer in a sober share house is an act of reclaiming a life they believed their addiction made them forfeit. Even so, a summer by the sea is not a panacea. For Mr. Stretch on