When Rules Demand Perfection, People Learn to Hide

By Alex Shohet, CEO of Red Door Life, 501c3, nonprofit, Bel Air, CA

Not just furtive glances in a group or the accidental brush of knees during art therapy. No—this was something else entirely. I was in a drug and alcohol treatment center where clients were openly involved in what could only be described as full-blown romances. Hand-holding in the courtyard. Whispered jokes were made during the group. Legs draped over laps in the TV room. Some even spoke casually—brazenly—about their sexual relationships, as if intimacy were just another therapeutic tool.

For someone like me—a veteran of countless treatment centers between 1986 and 2004—it was disorienting. Never had I seen anything quite like it. The unspoken rule across rehabs had always been clear: no sex, no relationships, no exceptions. This place felt less like a clinical program and more like a co-ed summer camp with detox in the morning and dating in the afternoon.

I couldn’t believe the staff hadn’t noticed. Or worse—had they noticed and chosen to look the other way? At that moment, it felt like the inmates had taken over the asylum.

After months of stewing in my righteous indignation, I decided it was time to act. I was going to inform the Executive Director personally. I would turn in every couple I knew about, naming names. It was, I believed, a public service.

I walked into her office carrying the weight of moral urgency. I was calm on the outside, but inside I was fueled by judgment. These relationships, I believed, were sabotaging people’s recovery. They were distractions at best, and at worst, ticking time bombs of relapse and codependency.

Out of deference to her position—and perhaps her age—I tried to disguise my contempt as curiosity. I asked the question not as an accuser, but as a concerned citizen.

“I was wondering… why are you allowing clients here to have romantic relationships? Isn’t that against the rules?”

She smiled—not unkindly—and said something I’ll never forget.

She leaned forward slightly, her voice calm but firm.

“Do you think that if we had a rule against relationships, people would actually stop having them?”

I paused, caught off guard again. “Well… no,” I admitted. “They’d just hide it.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

Then she said something that reframed the entire issue for me.

“That’s why we take a different approach. If someone is going to form a relationship here—and let’s be honest, many will—we’d rather they feel safe enough to be honest about it. That way, if challenges come up—and they will—our clinical team can actually help. We can support them in learning what a healthy relationship looks like. Because pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t prepare them for life outside these walls. It just sets them up to repeat the same patterns, but with no support at all.”

It was, quite possibly, the first time I’d heard someone treat recovery as a real-world rehearsal—not a controlled performance.

I wasn’t expecting her answer.

For weeks, I’d convinced myself that the Executive Director was simply asleep at the wheel—neglectful, maybe even complicit. But when she spoke, it wasn’t with defensiveness or denial. It was with clarity. And something else I hadn’t anticipated: wisdom.

She offered a perspective I had never encountered—not in eighteen years of cycling through rehab programs, not in group therapy, not in late-night dormitory confessions. If this had been a cartoon, a lightbulb would’ve flickered on above my head.

What she said—quietly, plainly—turned something in me.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” she asked, “to help people learn how to have a relationship with support, while they’re here, instead of pretending it won’t happen—and waiting until they’re alone out there to figure it out?”

In that moment, I realized something I’d been missing all along: maybe the goal of treatment isn’t to mold people into who we think they should be—but to meet them as they are, and walk with them as they become who they might be.

The Illusion of Control

We like to think of recovery as a clean break. You check into treatment, surrender your substances, follow the rules, purge the past, and exit into the world reborn—no drugs, no bad decisions, no messy feelings.

That narrative sells. It’s neat. Clickable. Digestible in under 800 words with a black-and-white photo and a tidy headline like: “From Rock Bottom to Redemption: How Rehab Saved Me.”

But reality doesn’t cooperate with neatness. Not in mental health. Not in addiction. And certainly not in rehab.

The truth is, rehab—especially for people in early recovery—isn’t a monastery. It’s more like a microcosm of the outside world, compressed into a few acres of shared trauma and borrowed hope. And in that pressure cooker, people do what people do: they reach for connection.

And sometimes, that connection looks like romance.

The Rules vs. the Real

Most treatment centers outlaw relationships. It’s in the handbook, buried between policies about curfews and contraband.

But here’s the thing no one says out loud: these relationships still happen. Just in secret.

People sneak notes. They whisper across the hallway. They time their smokes to match. And before you know it, two people with barely enough emotional regulation to manage breakfast are in a full-blown codependent love story—completely unacknowledged by staff.

Is that safer?

We know relationships in early recovery can be dangerous. They can distract, destabilize, derail. But pretending they don’t exist doesn’t prevent them. It just drives them underground.

What if, instead, we took the Executive Director’s approach seriously?

What if we helped people learn how to be in a relationship—instead of pretending they shouldn’t be?

What if we made space for the conversation instead of slamming the door?

The Same Goes for Substances

It’s not just rehab romances we bury under silence.

When I first entered treatment, I told my counselor I was a heroin and cocaine addict, but that alcohol had never been a problem for me. I thought I was being honest. I thought I was asking for flexibility.

But they told me, without hesitation:

“Alcohol will lead you back to heroin and cocaine.”

I didn’t believe them.

So when I got out, I drank. Not recklessly, at first. Just socially. Just to take the edge off.

And before long, the alcohol did lead me back to heroin and cocaine.

They weren’t wrong. But here’s the question: was their certainty helpful?

Would it have made a difference if, instead of drawing a hard line, someone had helped me understand that line?

We love black-and-white rules in addiction treatment: No relationships. No substances. No exceptions.

But people in recovery aren’t machines; they’re humans learning how to feel, think, and choose all over again. Telling them what not to do is a poor substitute for teaching them how to do it better.

Complexity Doesn’t Go Viral

Clickbait doesn’t reward nuance. It rewards outrage. Rehab romances make for juicy headlines—salacious, scandalous, seductive. So does relapse. So do accusations of “unorthodox practices” by centers that dare to challenge the dominant abstinence-at-all-costs model.

But the truth?

The truth is quieter. Messier. And much harder to summarize in a headline.

The truth is that most people entering treatment do not get clean on Day 1. Some don’t get clean at all—at least not in the way we measure it. Some use while in treatment. Some relapse while in treatment. Some fall in love. Some fall apart. Some do both.

And some, like me, eventually find their way.

But the path there rarely fits inside the lines we draw.

The Real Risk

So here’s the question:

Is it more dangerous to let people explore relationships and relapse out in the open—with honesty and support—or to enforce rigid rules that everyone breaks in secret?

What’s the bigger risk: complexity… or denial?

Maybe the real failure in treatment isn’t when someone falls in love. Or even when they use again.

Maybe the real failure is in the system we’ve built—a system designed for ideal patients who never existed. A system that expects instant obedience from people who’ve spent their whole lives surviving on instinct, not structure.

People whose pain was never properly understood.

Whose trauma was never fully seen.

People who didn’t use drugs because they wanted to rebel—but because it was the only thing that made the chaos quiet down.

And yet, we’re surprised when they don’t fit neatly into our programs.

We blame them for being noncompliant.

But what if the problem isn’t them?

What if the problem is the rules we write—rules they were never meant to follow—and our unwillingness to tolerate the very process we claim to support?