Sunshine Sober Living offers womens sober living for Calabasas residents from a structured house in Tarzana, about nine miles east on US-101. Women aged 21 and older live in a substance-free home with a curfew, drug testing and house meetings, while keeping their own therapists, family contact, work and classes.
A woman deciding where to live after treatment is usually weighing two fears at once: going back to the house where the drinking happened, and going somewhere she has never seen. The middle answer is a residence with a locked front door, a schedule and housemates two weeks ahead of her. The house schedule takes a surprising amount of that weight off.
Sunshine Sober Living sits on Donna Avenue in Tarzana, in a quiet residential grid two blocks from a recreation center. From Calabasas it is a short freeway run, so a daughter, a job or a standing Thursday therapy appointment stays reachable. The house is family-owned, rated 4.7 out of 5 by local reviewers, and has taken residents aged twenty-one and older since 2019.
Neither of the two Calabasas-area meetings, the Tuesday group on Las Virgenes Road or the Friday beginners meeting on Mulholland Drive, is listed as a womens meeting, so a womens network usually gets built out from them across the Valley.
Safety is made of small, unglamorous specifics. Quiet hours that people keep. Clear rules about who comes to the door and when. A room she can close. Staff who are reachable at night. None of that is dramatic, and all of it is the difference between sleeping and lying awake listening.
The second piece is being believed. Women arriving from treatment often carry a history that has been minimized somewhere along the line. The house does not ask anyone to relive it in the living room, and it does not pretend to be a clinic; what it offers is an environment where nothing has to be managed alone at two in the morning.
Two meetings anchor the local week. The Calabasas Group gathers at Church in the Canyon, 4235 Las Virgenes Road, on Tuesday evenings, and the Motion Picture and Television Fund campus on Mulholland Drive, just over the city line, hosts a beginners discussion on Friday evenings. Both are listed by the San Fernando Valley AA Central Office, and both are open discussion meetings rather than womens groups.
Women who want a womens room build that part of the network out from these two, usually with help from housemates who already know the Valley rooms and which of them fill up fast. The beginners meeting on Friday is often the gentler first door for someone who has not been to a meeting since discharge.
Calabasas is a settled, family-oriented city: the median age runs around forty-five and roughly seventy percent of homes are owner-occupied. Distance gets treated here as something to manage, not to apologize for. Visits, school runs, court dates and standing calls are planned into the week the same way work shifts are, because womens sober living near Calabasas has to work around all of it.
Residents are adults twenty-one and older, so arrangements for children live outside the house and admissions will talk them through candidly on the first call rather than after a deposit. Many women find the nine miles useful in a way they did not expect: enough separation that a bad afternoon at home does not become a bad night, and a short enough drive, on a route that is mostly freeway, that Sunday still happens.
Residents living with co-occurring conditions are welcome, and the house is honest about what it is not. There is no therapist on the sofa and no treatment plan written here. What the residence provides is stability around the care a woman is already receiving: transport that works, a schedule that leaves room for appointments, medication kept as her prescriber directs, and people who notice a change in mood before it becomes a crisis.
That stability appears to matter clinically. In a study of 455 sober living residents, those who stayed at least six months had significantly fewer psychiatric and depression symptoms, more abstinent days, and lower odds of ongoing substance use problems than residents who left earlier. Where more clinical support is needed, admissions can arrange an intensive outpatient referral with licensed providers.
Longer than feels necessary at the four-week mark, which is usually when a resident feels well enough to leave and is least equipped to. NIDA puts relapse rates for substance use disorders at 40 to 60 percent, comparable to the 50 to 70 percent seen in asthma and hypertension, and frames a relapse as a sign that care needs to resume or change rather than as a personal failure.
Length of stay is a conversation, not a contract renewal, and it gets revisited as work, school and family circumstances change. How long people generally stay in sober living is a fair place to start, and the early warning signs worth watching for is the one to read with a family member.
Most calls about womens sober living in Calabasas start with a family member. Wendy Goldberg, Founder and Director of Admissions, takes them, and the conversation is confidential. She will ask what treatment has happened, what is prescribed, what the living situation looks like right now and what a workable week would need to include. Insurance details can be checked separately through the site’s verification form, without any promise about coverage.
Families in Calabasas frequently call before the woman herself does. That is normal and it is welcome, though the move works best when she is part of the conversation early. If the household is weighing options for a brother or a husband too, the men’s side of the house covers that ground.
The five questions that come up on almost every first call, answered plainly.
| What women ask about | How the house handles it | What it means day to day |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy | Quiet hours, clear guest rules, a room to close | Sleep that is actually possible |
| Safety | Testing for everyone, staff reachable at night | Nobody has to police a housemate alone |
| Children and family | Planned visits and calls, arrangements made outside | Sunday and school runs stay in the week |
| Therapy and medication | Schedule room for appointments, prescriptions kept as directed | Outside care continues uninterrupted |
| Work and school | Expected, planned around house obligations | A paycheck and a curfew can coexist |
Anything here a residence cannot answer specifically is worth asking twice.
The house is about 9 miles from Calabasas, roughly 15-22 minutes in normal traffic. The full route, turn by turn, is on the directions page below.
Sunshine Sober LivingYes, and keeping an established therapeutic relationship is usually better than starting over. Appointments are planned into the weekly schedule alongside work and meetings, and the drive back into the city is short enough that a standing weekly session rarely has to move.
Visits happen and they are planned rather than spontaneous, because a shared home means several people’s privacy is involved at once. Most families settle into a rhythm of visits at the house and outings away from it, which gives everyone a version of normal life to practice.
Residents keep taking what their prescriber has prescribed. The house does not prescribe, adjust or diagnose anything, and nobody here overrides a doctor. What a residence can do is provide a stable, substance-free environment where a medication routine is easy to keep.
Yes. Sunshine Sober Living accepts residents with co-occurring conditions who are committed to long-term recovery and able to live with others. The house works best when the clinical side is already in place, so admissions will ask who is providing that care and whether the current level is right.
By making the rest of the week predictable. Treatment days are built into the schedule, evenings hold a meeting or a house meeting instead of empty hours. Residents come home to a substance-free house after a demanding session rather than to an empty apartment, which is the part outpatient care cannot supply on its own.
What we run is recovery housing: a substance-free address with rules, accountability and peer support. Clinical treatment belongs with licensed providers, and admissions can arrange that referral. Nobody, including us, can guarantee how any individual recovery will go. If you or someone you love needs immediate help, the SAMHSA National Helpline is free and confidential on 1-800-662-4357, 24 hours a day.
If you are a woman in Calabasas trying to work out where to sleep after treatment ends, or a mother trying to work it out for a daughter, call 866-216-9789 and ask for a confidential assessment. The conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. The wider women’s program explains the rest of what living here asks and offers.