Men Leave Treatment Because of Their Codependency!

     I am writing to propose some level of cooperation between professionals writing about and treating codependency and the professionals staffs of treatment centers in order to improve retention and ultimately long-term recovery for clients by providing some missing pieces for families whose lives are being ravaged by the co morbid diseases of addiction and codependency. Here is a quote taken directly from the back cover of our book written by Dr. Joseph Moons, C.P., Retreat Director, Holy Name Retreat Center , Houston, Texas;

“There is a need for this book for codependent men. In my association with the many men and women who attend 12-step retreats at Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center, the codependent men have the greatest fear and the least knowledge or understanding of their relationship with the addicted person in their life.  As the man in the family, they are supposed to have the answers and they don’t. This book begins to give some answers.”

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STARR is an acronym for Sobriety, Trust And Recovery Reputation. Each of the houses that joins soberlivingsearch.com (new site with the largest database of sober livings and halfway houses in the world)has a unique opportunity to participate in the STARR Sober Living Network of homes program. This is accomplished by making a public pledge to uphold certain basic standards of management that demonstrate honesty, trust, and organization within a sober living or halfway house environment.

The pledge demonstrates a genuine attempt on the house management’s behalf to operate their recovery house with their guests’ best interests in mind on a best efforts basis at all times. The STARR Logo is a status symbol of sorts for sober livings and halfway houses. It is a logo they can display proudly, much like a Good Housekeeping Seal . It says “I’m part of something much bigger than this one house, and I’m proud of it because it means I am a house that you can trust and depend on for your recovery”

While this may seem quite general or even trite to some, let us please examine this for a moment. 3 out of 4 sober livings or half way houses do not even have websites. It is our contention at Sober Living Halfway House Search that many of these homes have never made ANY public statement whatsoever that they can be held responsible for relative to how they run their houses. And while we cannot possibly police every house, and neither are we dictating how to run a house -- there will now at least be a mandatory Code of Conduct that guests receive upon intake for each house, and a written plan for what happens when somebody relapses, amongst other things. That alone is probably more than many of these homes operated with beforehand. This pledge will indeed help raise the overall standards of many houses when taken as a whole, however, because like it or not, to get their logo they have made a pledge which is very specific on many points and which now allows somebody to hold them to certain written standards where there was nothing before.

 Hopefully the general public will take notice and recognize that most recovery homes are in the business with the best of intentions and have fundamentally honest management. At worst, the STARR logo will be symbolic of those things. Enough zoning problems have arisen in some areas of the country to upset the whole industry, and a general pledge of honor where one can lose the house STARR “Patch” or Logo if formal legal complaints are made about a home-- and even be removed from this site if a home is viewed as possibly putting guests’ general safety in jeopardy – can only be seen as a positive effort  to raise the bar both in reality and in perception for all of us in the recovery industry.

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