Step by Step Recovery Men's Recovery Home

About this Recovery Home

Step by Step Recovery is a men's sober house on North Herring Street in Dothan, Alabama, the seat of Houston County. It is one of two recovery homes run by Herring Houses of Dothan, which keeps its men's and women's households on the same block in the Wiregrass region of southeast Alabama.

A Men's Sober House on North Herring Street

North Herring Street sits in the older residential grid just off downtown Dothan, which puts the house within walking distance of the county courthouse, the public library and a stretch of small employers along Main Street. For a man without a car in his first months back, that geography does most of the work. A probation appointment, a job interview and an evening meeting can all happen on foot in the same day.

What Certification Would Add to an Alabama Sober House

Alabama has no law requiring a recovery residence to be licensed or certified, and no state agency publishes a list of them. The only credential available is voluntary certification through the Alabama Alliance for Recovery Residences, the state's affiliate of the National Alliance for Recovery Residences. It binds a house to a written code of ethics, to disclosing fees and rules before move-in, to a written relapse and discharge policy, and to a complaint process someone outside the house reviews. Because the credential is optional, its absence from a listing says nothing about the house. It simply means the questions a certificate would answer have to be asked directly.

Recovery Housing in Dothan and the Wiregrass

Dothan anchors the Wiregrass, the farming region where Alabama, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle meet, and it functions as the service center for a much larger area than Houston County alone. Southeast Health, the county court system, the state's regional behavioral health provider and most of the area's hourly work sit inside the city. People finishing treatment in Henry, Geneva, Dale or Barbour County routinely end up looking for a Dothan sober house, because the nearest alternative is two counties away.

What to Ask This Dothan Recovery Home

Applications go through Herring Houses of Dothan. The questions to settle before moving in are the ordinary ones, and they should be answered in writing: the weekly fee and the deposit, whether utilities are included, whether a house manager lives on the property, the curfew, how drug screening works, how soon employment is expected, whether prescribed medication for opioid use disorder is accepted, and what a relapse triggers. Getting those in writing from an uncertified house is entirely reasonable to ask for.