The Moment Peer Support Stops Being a Program
A Look Inside Our 2026 Leadership Retreat
Thirty-nine degrees. Most of us waded to our ankles, yelped, and called it a win. One of our facilitators walked in like it was nothing, because it turns out she cold plunges regularly and the rest of us had no idea. That is the kind of thing you learn when you finally slow down enough to share a few days together.
Last weekend, our Be At Ease, Woman Veteran™ leadership team gathered for a facilitator retreat. This was not an open community event. It was specifically designed for the women who hold the peer support space for other women veterans every single week.
Not every facilitator could make it, so the day after we arrived home, care packages went out to the women who couldn’t be there: a handmade candle with a beautiful veteran label honoring their service, a handwritten card, slippers, a spa treatment, and a healthy snack. The goal was to send a piece of the room to the women who weren’t in it.
You can’t schedule that kind of thinking. It either lives in your community’s bones or it doesn’t. In Be At Ease, Woman Veteran™, it does. Last weekend showed exactly why.
The thing that shifts something for a woman veteran is rarely what she receives from the person at the front of the room. It’s what happens when she turns to the woman next to her and recognizes something.
Women veterans are told a lot about peer support. We’re told it exists, that it helps, that we should seek it out. What we hear far less often is what it looks like when it’s working. When it’s something more than a program you attend and leave.
Most peer support is structured as a delivery system. Someone is positioned at the front. Others receive. There’s a start time, an end time, a facilitator who holds the thread. That structure serves a purpose. It is, however, incomplete. The thing that shifts something for a woman veteran is rarely what she receives from the person at the front of the room. It’s what happens when she turns to the woman next to her and recognizes something.
Two-thirds of our team made it to the retreat. Three branches of the military. A full range of political opinions, spiritual backgrounds, physical and mental health realities, cultural experiences. Some have been building trust in this community since 2019. For others, the role is six months old.
They arrived at a cedar-scented chalet near the shores of Torch Lake, Michigan, known as the Caribbean of the North for water so clear and blue it stops you mid-sentence. The Michigan spring air was crisp enough to feel like a perfect fall day. Wet leaves in the morning. A fire at night.
Nobody had to cook, except for one evening when a veteran with a life full of Middle Eastern travels volunteered to make an authentic curry from scratch that filled the whole space with something warm and specific and shared. The beds were so comfortable that three attendees looked up the exact make and model before the weekend was over and ordered them for home that same week.
That is a very woman veteran thing to do: identify what works, acquire it, move on.
The agenda had training in it. It also had a hot tub, a campfire, nature walks, adult coloring, and open time. Nobody was told how to use that time. What happened in it was theirs.
One more thing the agenda included that most veteran gatherings don't: no alcohol, no recreational substances. That is a deliberate standard in this community, and it matters more than it might sound. Too many veteran spaces center around drinking, and with that comes the quiet math of who feels comfortable, who overindulges, who gets unsafe, and who leaves early. We wanted none of that math in the room. What we wanted was everyone present, fully, for the whole weekend.
The goal of peer support, when it’s working, is never for everyone to gravitate toward the leader. The goal is the person to your left and your right.
Whether our facilitators chose to share what they’re personally carrying with each other this weekend is their business. I know what most of them are navigating. That gets held carefully. Watching a woman choose to say something real to the woman sitting next to her at the campfire, without a prompt, without a structure requiring it: that is the room doing what it was built to do.
Two women on a nature walk through crisp morning air, wet leaves underfoot, a conversation that started because they were both heading the same direction and kept going longer than the trail required. A hot tub at night, cold air on the walk back to the balcony, and whatever got said in between that didn’t need to be repeated anywhere else.
The women who facilitate Be At Ease, Woman Veteran™ are not standing outside this community, handing it over. They are inside it, navigating the same terrain as every woman who walks through a gathering door. The community does not stop at the edge of the room. A garden tends past its borders. The care packages are proof of that.
Holding that space for a team of women who are also juggling full-time jobs, families, loved ones in their care, and military orders does not happen by accident. It requires a decision and a commitment behind it. This retreat exists because funding was secured specifically to make it possible for the next five years. Not as a perk. As a promise.
If we do not make the space for these connections to grow, they won’t. A garden left untended does not wait for you. It simply stops producing blooms. We cannot let that happen to the women who show up every week to tend someone else’s.
Women veterans were not trained to receive care from each other. We were trained to deliver, to hold the line, to operate through discomfort. Choosing to be known by the woman next to you, asking her something real and waiting for the real answer: that takes something the training manual never covered. The women in that room this weekend did that for each other. That is what makes this work worth building.
We know what platonic female friendship can hold. We know it because we have lived it, because we have felt what it does to a woman who had stopped expecting it. Keeping that to ourselves would be selfish.
Enjoying healthy female friendship feels like freedom.
Be At Ease, Woman Veteran™ is us living out what we encourage every woman in this community to do. One foot planted toward what matters. Attention sustained.
Peace is not what waits on the other side of this work. Peace is the posture we bring to it, right now, together.
If you are a woman veteran, or currently serving in uniform, and you are ready for a room like this one: this door is open to you. Connect with our peer support program at www.womanveteranstrong.org. Complementary for women veterans and women currently serving, thanks to our program funding partners and sponsors.
The room is real. Come to love yourself deeper, and to find your person to the left and right.
And if you currently have a fellow woman veteran that makes you feel seen and appreciated, now is a really good time to send her a message of gratitude :)
“We were trained to deliver, to hold the line, to operate through discomfort.” This, right here. Operating through discomfort. I find that very difficult to navigate away from, to take time for myself, to make room for ME as I am, right here, right now.