In 1989, Dr. Brown and Dr. Virginia Lewis began The Family Recovery Project at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto to study comprehensively the processes and impact of recovery on families. For over ten years, the project reviewed couples and families who were together for at least five years during active drinking and were still intact in recovery (length of total abstinence ranging from 79 days to over 18 years). They examined the process of change by length of sobriety within three domains: the environment, the system and the individuals within.