Myrtle Street Sober Living

About Myrtle Street Sober Living

Myrtle Street Sober Living operates two sober living houses for men in Portland, Maine. Both sit in Cumberland County, in the peninsula neighborhoods of Maine's largest city, and the pair are run as complementary halves of one small organization rather than as branches of a chain. The founder's own account of why it exists is short and unsentimental: helping others is the essential part of his sobriety, and the new guy is the lifeline at Myrtle Street.

About Myrtle Street Sober Living

This is a founder-led operation. The organization was opened to provide a place where men of all ages could help each other and themselves stay sober and enjoy doing it, and that phrasing is a fair description of the culture it has built. The emphasis falls on the newcomer. A house organized around the newest arrival works differently from one organized around its longest-standing residents, because it gives every resident a job the day they have something to offer, which in twelve-step recovery arrives sooner than most people expect.

The organization keeps a live website of its own setting out its houses, its services and what it asks of residents, and it links out to the Maine Association of Recovery Residences. Both of those are modest signals, but in a sector where a good number of listings trail off into dead domains, an operator that maintains its own current information and points readers to the state certifying body is telling you something about how it runs.

Homes Operated by Myrtle Street Sober Living in Portland

There are two houses, both in Portland: Myrtle I on East Oxford Street and Myrtle II on Myrtle Street. Keeping both within the same city, rather than spreading across southern Maine, has a practical logic. Residents can move between the houses without losing their job, their sponsor, their meeting or their clinician, and the operator can hold a consistent culture across both. For a man who arrives needing more structure and later needs less of it, or the reverse, that internal flexibility is worth more than an extra bed somewhere further away.

The Approach: Work, Service and the Twelve Steps

The program is twelve-step based and built on the assumption that residents will be occupied. Residents are required to actively seek work and to take part in the resident programs the houses run. Alongside that sit life-skills coaching sessions, where residents talk through challenges, solutions, achievements and goals, and a weekly accountability group that meets on Sundays. Group events and outings round it out. That last item is easy to dismiss and should not be, because learning that a weekend can be enjoyable sober is one of the things a residence can teach that a treatment program usually cannot.

MARR Certification

Myrtle Street Sober Living is certified by the Maine Association of Recovery Residences, which lists the organization's Portland residences at Level 2. Level 2 in the national recovery-residence framework that MARR applies describes a monitored house: a residence with a house manager or senior resident, house rules, drug screening and a peer-based structure, distinct from both a purely democratic sober house and a clinically supervised setting. It is the level most Maine men's recovery residences operate at, and it is the right description of what these houses offer.

Sober Living in Portland and Cumberland County

Portland carries the densest concentration of recovery resources in Maine: the widest daily meeting schedule, the largest number of certified residences, outpatient providers, and an employment market that will take on someone rebuilding a work history. Cumberland County as a whole is where most people leaving treatment in southern Maine end up looking for housing, which also means demand for beds is real and openings move quickly. Anyone considering either of the Myrtle Street houses should ask about availability early and be specific about which of the two suits the level of structure they need at this point.