A repurposed 100-year-old barn is the centerpiece of the property at Guardian Hills Veterans Healing Center near Kirksville. “The Welcome Center is where it all starts,” said Jo Slawski, vice president and co-founder. The barn offers a space for reflection, dining and community as the curriculum of the week progresses (Zoe Homan/Columbia Missourian).
Navy veteran Jennifer Badger enlisted in 2001, was deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2002 and came home with post-traumatic stress.
After years battling addiction and homelessness, she found a refuge at the recently opened Guardian Hills Veterans Healing Center north of Columbia.
She calls it “a different type of healing” where veterans can spend a week in a peaceful setting recovering from the physical and psychological damage of combat.
“Being in nature with the horses and with people who genuinely care about me offered an experience like no other,” Badger said. “I can’t speak highly enough about Guardian Hills.”
The retreat opened in May on 750 acres near Kirksville for those suffering post-traumatic stress and moral injury — a complex condition caused by exposure to events that contradict deep moral beliefs and can result in guilt, shame, disgust and anger.
Veterans stay in a three- to four-bedroom cabin on the property and spend their time in self-reflection and therapy surrounded by horses, hiking trails and fishing spots.
The center also includes a multipurpose area, a self-expression activity building and a renovated 100-year-old barn, the centerpiece of the property, which serves as a social and dining center.
Since May, the staff has been running pilot programs to prepare for a full-on program launch next year. There are two remaining pilot sessions this year, scheduled for Sept. 15-21 and Oct. 20-26. Each session accommodates six to eight veterans, in addition to staff and volunteers.
The origins
The nonprofit organization that runs Guardian Hills was founded by Columbia surgeon Daniel Slawski and his wife, Jo, in the aftermath of 9/11.
Slawski, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, was a practicing orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist at the University of Nebraska when he began to see young patients traumatized by war in the Middle East.
“Many of them went into the military for an education. When 9/11 came around, their world turned upside down,” Slawski said. “Suddenly now they were being called into active duty not just once, not just twice, but sometimes three and four deployments overseas.”
“I was seeing kids come back changed pretty remarkably, and (seeing) some of my patients not come back, or in body bags, which affected me,” he said.
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, nearly three in 10 veterans of the Global War on Terrorism will experience post-traumatic stress.
Slawski’s friend and founding board member Christopher Lozano had a similar experience working with young Marines.
“We got together and said, ‘What can we do to really make a difference?’” Slawski said. “What can we do to make an impact that’s not just a ‘thank you for your service’?”
The Slawskis donated land to build the center, and construction began in 2022. Since 2020, the Veterans United Foundation has provided Guardian Hills with over $1.5 million to continue its mission.
That and other donations have allowed Guardian Hills to offer the retreat to veterans for free.
The treatment
The program is based on the concept of post-traumatic growth, or PTG, introduced by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in the 1990s.
When researching the effects of trauma, they were looking to develop positive psychological transformation among those who had suffered this kind of stress. They had a theory that people could learn to process trauma in a way that spurs resilience to adverse challenges.
Tedeschi and Calhoun noticed that those who experienced the most post-traumatic growth reported positive responses in five areas: appreciation of life, personal strength, relationships, spiritual change and new possibilities.
“They began developing ways to incorporate that into treatment and non-traditional treatment — that’s where a lot of these retreat programs come from,” Slawski said.
Both national and regional experts were consulted to develop the Guardian Hills curriculum, which incorporates “immersive educational and therapeutic experiences” to promote post-traumatic growth.
During their stay, veterans discover their inner strengths while working through a traumatic past. The retreat’s nature-based approach helps them focus wholly on healing without outside stressors.
They can build connections in the program — including with mentors who have also experienced trauma and growth — that foster a sense of community, all important aspects of recovery.
“These shorter-term programs are very intensive and start to peel the layers off, have people understand what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it and give them coping and thriving mechanisms,” Slawski said.
All of the activities hold valuable lessons for veterans, Jo Slawski said. Skills are developed in stages to build self-awareness and provide the tools to regulate their emotions and behaviors.
“For example, with archery, if you keep your eye right on the tip of the arrow, you’re going to miss the target,” she explained. “You have to keep your eye on the target in order to get where you want to go.
“After that it’s, ‘Can you trust someone else to guide you? Let’s put a blindfold on.’ So, it’s can you rely on someone else because trust is one of the things destroyed,” she said.
After each weeklong session, the program will determine the levels of care and support veterans are going to need long term.
“Nobody is cured in a week,” Daniel Slawski said.
The future
Guardian Hills is now collaborating with MU’s statistics department to develop pre- and post-assessment surveys. The center is also working with students from MU and Truman State University who are interested in gaining experience both at the site and with research projects.
Allison Starke, an MU occupational therapy doctoral student, has been working on a research project to compile a database of state-based social and welfare resources for Guardian Hill’s website.
At Guardian Hills, Starke said she was able to observe how veterans found ways to share their experiences.
“When you get people moving with their hands, their minds open up in a way that they don’t really realize is happening, but then they can talk through things easier because they’re not sitting there just staring at someone talking,” Starke said.
“That was really interesting to see, the things that I had learned about in the past couple years actually come to life.”
In the future, the center wants to offer sessions that include family members and first responders, as well as programs tailored to those who experienced sexual trauma in the military.
During her stay at Guardian Hills, Badger said she learned things about herself she hadn’t discovered elsewhere.
“The archery, I would say, probably had the biggest impact on me,” she said. “Because it was the first time I realized that I didn’t have to try to impress anyone, that everyone was there to help and to be there, you know, to heal,” she said.
“I realized that it was OK to just be in the moment. It was OK to just be myself.”
Badger currently helps others who have gone through similar experiences, and she plans to mentor the veterans at Guardian Hills.
“When you wake up in the morning and you’ve got something to look forward to, it’s amazing,” she said. “I’m happy to be alive, and it’s people like Dan and Jo and programs like Guardian Hills that bring that out of me.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian . It can be republished in print or online.
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