Women from West Hills who need a safe, structured place to live after treatment can move into Sunshine Sober Living, a family-owned residence at 5650 Donna Avenue in Tarzana. Women aged 21 and older, including those managing co-occurring anxiety or trauma, live substance-free while rebuilding work, study and family life.
A woman deciding where to live after treatment is usually weighing things a brochure never mentions: who else is in the building, whether her belongings are safe, whether her children can visit, whether anyone will ask questions she is not ready to answer. Those questions deserve straight answers before anything else about womens sober living West Hills gets discussed.
Sunshine Sober Living is a family-owned house, not an institution. Wendy Goldberg, who directs admissions, takes the first call herself, and the conversation is confidential from the beginning. The rooms and the common areas can be seen before any commitment is made, because most women want to know what the place looks like before they know anything else.
Orcutt Ranch on Roscoe Boulevard and the noon Big Book study at Hole in the Sky on Sherman Way give West Hills women a daytime meeting and somewhere quiet to walk, both on the same side of the Valley as home.
Safety is made of small, unglamorous certainties. A door that locks. A house where everyone living there is sober and expected to stay that way. Housemates who know your name and your schedule. A program director who can be reached rather than a rota of strangers. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is what women describe missing when they try to do the first ninety days alone.
Privacy sits next to safety and is often confused with it. Living with other people in recovery means being known, which is the point, but it does not mean surrendering your history to a room. What a woman shares, and when, stays hers to decide. The house asks for honesty about what is happening now, not a full account of what happened before.
Hole in the Sky at 21520 Sherman Way in Canoga Park runs a noon Big Book study, which suits women whose evenings are already spoken for by children, shifts or family. It sits on the Sherman Way corridor, the main road east out of West Hills, and it is an easy stop between an appointment and the short drive over to Tarzana.
Just as important is somewhere to go that is not a meeting. Orcutt Ranch Horticultural Center and Community Garden at 23600 Roscoe Boulevard gives West Hills an open, quiet acreage with old citrus groves, and El Escorpion Park at Castle Peak opens onto the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve at the western edge of the neighborhood. Anxiety at four in the afternoon is easier to walk off than to talk down.
The womens sober living West Hills mothers are looking at is for adults aged 21 and older, so parenting during a stay happens on visits, phone calls and pick-ups rather than under the same roof. That is a hard sentence for a mother to read. It is also the arrangement that most often lets her arrive somewhere for real instead of leaving after two weeks because the logistics collapsed.
West Hills families run tight school schedules, with Chaminade College Preparatory and de Toledo High School both drawing from the neighborhood, and residents often keep a share of the driving. Metro Lines 164 and 165 cover Victory Boulevard and Vanowen Street for anyone without a car. Structure and family life compete for the same hours; the honest answer is that the first month gives more of them to structure, and the balance shifts after that, as the question of how long to stay tends to make clear.
Carefully, and within limits. Sunshine Sober Living is recovery housing, not a clinic, and nobody here treats post-traumatic stress or a mood disorder. What the house does is protect the conditions that let real treatment work: a stable address, sleep, a schedule, transport to appointments, and housemates who do not panic when someone has a bad week.
Residents keep their own therapists and psychiatrists, or are referred to licensed providers through admissions, which works with licensed California treatment facilities and Joint Commission-accredited programs. Where more clinical time is needed, an intensive outpatient program can run alongside the housing rather than replacing it. Living alone with untreated anxiety is the pattern this arrangement is designed to interrupt, and isolation after treatment is a risk in its own right.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published recovery housing guidance in 2023 built around ten best practices, among them being recovery-centerd, using social model principles and refusing patient brokering. It also cites research in which recovery housing residents showed substance use rates of 31.3 percent against 64.8 percent in a usual-care comparison group.
Social model is the phrase worth keeping. It means the recovery work is carried by the people living together rather than delivered to them by staff, which is exactly why the composition of a house matters more than its furniture. It is also why womens sober living West Hills residents choose is worth visiting in person before signing anything.
Step back from logistics, stay present as family. The most useful thing a mother, sister or partner can do in the first month is answer the phone and stop negotiating rules, because the house now holds that job. Families who make this switch early tend to have easier second months.
For families who are still trying to persuade someone to go at all, SAMHSA’s National Helpline on 1-800-662-HELP is free, confidential and open every hour of the day in English and Spanish. It is a reasonable place to think out loud at two in the morning. When the conversation is closer to a decision, what to do when someone refuses sober living covers the ground more fully, and a call to admissions is the practical next move.
The house is about 6 to 7 miles from West Hills, roughly 13-20 minutes in normal traffic. The full route, turn by turn, is on the directions page below.
Sunshine Sober LivingEnough to have a life. Living in shared recovery housing means housemates know your routine, but personal history is disclosed at your own pace and admissions conversations stay confidential. Phones, work, therapy and family relationships remain yours to manage. The expectation is honesty about what is happening in your recovery now, not a public account of everything that led up to it.
Yes. Continuity of care is treated as an asset, not a complication. Residents keep existing therapists, psychiatrists and outpatient programs, and the house routine is built to protect those appointments rather than compete with them. If a woman arrives without a provider, admissions can arrange referrals to licensed California treatment facilities and accredited programs so the clinical side is covered from the start.
No. It is structured recovery housing, and that distinction is important. Trauma treatment is clinical work delivered by licensed professionals, and Sunshine makes referrals for it rather than providing it. What the residence contributes is the stability that makes such treatment possible to attend consistently: a substance-free home, a predictable week, and people nearby who notice when someone is struggling.
Visits happen away from the residence, since it houses adults aged 21 and older. In practice that means park time, school events, meals at a grandparent’s house in West Hills, and regular calls. Mothers often find the arrangement painful at first and steadying later, because contact becomes something planned and reliable rather than something improvised around a crisis.
That is a common route into recovery housing. Someone discharged from UCLA West Valley Medical Center on Medical Center Drive, or from any hospital in the Valley, can move into structured housing once medically stable. Admissions will want to know what care is continuing, what medication is involved and which providers are already engaged, so the handover does not leave a gap in the first week.
Sunshine Sober Living provides structured recovery housing and transitional living. Medical detoxification, residential clinical treatment and other higher levels of care are provided by appropriately licensed treatment providers, and our admissions team can arrange a referral. Recovery is personal, and no sober living program can guarantee a particular outcome. 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 the woman reading this at midnight, or the person who loves her, the next step is small. Call 866-216-9789 and ask Wendy Goldberg the questions you have not said out loud yet, or use the insurance verification form to get the practical side started. Sunshine Sober Living has been part of the Valley recovery community since 2019, and one honest phone call is enough to begin.