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Los Angeles, California—January 20, 2008
When sober living owner Larry Luttrell speaks, his residents usually listen. Luttrell is the owner and founder of the Liberty House, a twenty four-person residence in Century City dedicated to providing a drug and alcohol free environment for his occupants.
Luttrell is a believer in what he calls “tough love”, offering a structured living environment for his residents. Whether it’s attending meetings, following programs, or helping around the house, Luttrell’s goal is to keep recovering addicts singularly focused on the arduous task of long-term sobriety.
“A lot of recovery homes and rehab centers have turned into luxury resorts,” notes Luttrell. “They go for the spa treatments and reflexology and sober up for thirty days, but guess what, they’re right back where they started because they never focused on the cause of the behavior that got them in trouble to begin with.”
It was more than six months ago that Luttrell surprised his residents with an unusual request: to blog about overcoming addiction. What Luttrell got were highly personal stories about family problems, drug addiction, and the sometimes-devastating aftermath.
One blog contributor frequently discusses the life that brought him to recovery. “Ryan”, a veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, discusses becoming addicted to drugs upon his return to the United States.
“My first experiences with drugs lead to good times and wild parties. But the more I did them the more I loved them. And before I knew it my world evolved around them. It went from a good time party thing to something I had to have. I did drugs for a while and all it did was get worse. I did many kinds of drugs that almost made my world come crashing down. I got to the point where I hated doing drugs, but did them anyway because I had to have them. Finally it came to a point where I hit my knees and pleaded with God to show me the path for help,” writes Ryan, who writes several times a week.
The idea of using writing as a form of therapy is not completely new, notes psychologist Louise Sundararajan of the Rochester Psychiatric Center in New York in an interview with ABC News.
"One component is when you write, you spell things out. You say how much you hate it, or love it, and you use all the feeling words you can think of," Sundararajan says.
"But there's another kind of processing, and the two have to go hand in hand. You restructure the whole thing. You take a step back, you look at it, you reflect on the whole thing. That's very important. That's a psychological distance you have to keep.
"You need to do both."
“We had two major goals in creating the blogs. We felt writing would give our residents an additional level of introspection in helping them understand their addiction. Writing forces you to think in ways you might not normally. We also thought the blogs would be a great way to reach out to addicts who haven’t gotten help. We thought our residents could relate to struggling addicts in a way that maybe trained professionals couldn’t,” says Luttrell, who has been working in sober living for over twenty years.
One resident, known as “Cooper”, is a frequent contributor to the blog. “Blogging is a way that I can be of service and share my experience strength and hope with whomever out there needs help. I think it helps alcoholics who are reading it because they can see the difference in the mindset that we are in and the quality [of life] we have today rather than the wreckage they are still going through. In the end I feel like it gives them faith that there is something out there that works.”
The Liberty House is a sober living home located in Century City. If you suffer from alcohol or drug addiction, please contact a representative.
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