Learn to Live Recovery Men's Recovery House

About this Recovery House

Learn to Live Recovery is a men's sober living home in Hermann, Missouri, on State Highway H just outside town. Hermann is the seat of Gasconade County, on the south bank of the Missouri River in east-central Missouri.

A Men's Sober House in Hermann, Missouri

The residence serves men, and that restriction settles the household. One set of rules covers everyone living there, sleeping space and bathrooms are single-gender, and house meetings do not have to be written for two populations. The location is rural. State Highway H runs south out of Hermann into the hills above the river, which puts the house away from the corridors where most men in early recovery used, and puts the responsibility for transportation squarely on the resident and the program.

What Missouri Sober Living Accreditation Establishes

The house is accredited by the Missouri Coalition of Recovery Support Providers, the state's affiliate of the National Alliance for Recovery Residences. Missouri has no law requiring a recovery residence to hold accreditation and no state agency licenses standalone sober housing, so an operator that pursues it has volunteered for the only external standard available. An accredited residence commits to a published code of ethics, to giving an applicant its fees and house rules in writing before he signs, to a written policy covering relapse and discharge, and to a complaint process that is reviewed outside the house. In a town of a few thousand people, where a prospective resident cannot simply walk the block and compare four addresses, that record does a great deal of the work.

Gasconade County Recovery Housing and the River Towns

Hermann is both the county seat and the largest town in Gasconade County, so the courthouse, the hospital and the county offices are all in one place a resident can reach. The town sits on the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City, and the Missouri River wine country economy supplies seasonal hospitality, restaurant and cellar work. Highway 19 and Highway 100 connect it to Washington, Owensville and the wider I-44 and I-70 corridors. Men come into east-central Missouri recovery housing from those towns because Hermann is the closest place with a courthouse, a clinic and a bed under one roof.

What to Ask Before Moving Into This Recovery Residence

Applications go directly to the operator. The useful questions are the ones accreditation obliges an answer to: what the weekly fee covers and what it does not, whether a house manager lives on the property, how a resident without a car gets to work and to meetings from a rural highway address, whether medication for opioid use disorder is accepted, and what happens after a relapse. An accredited sober house has to put those answers in writing before anyone signs, and a man calling from a treatment center two hours away should ask for them on the first call.

Amenities