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The team that leads Warfighter Advance and instructs our warfighters at the ADVANCE 7-Day are post-deployment veterans and public safety professionals themselves. They have all had the experience of reintegration, and some have also endured the medicalized process and survived. All of them are heartbroken when they see their brothers and sisters deceived and drugged – believing that they have an illness that the drugs will treat and perhaps ultimately cure. The team is heartbroken by the day-in-and-day-out veteran suicides. We are driven to change this scenario, and to lead the way so that every warfighter has the information, tools, and support they need to successfully reintegrate. We are committed to giving warfighters the confidence and dignity required to be force multipliers – leading other warfighters in their communities to successful reintegration.

While The ADVANCE 7-Day™is the core program of WA, a range of other services are ready to deploy upon request. Warfighter Advance can provide special sessions on topics including, but not limited to, compassion fatigue, issues unique to military chaplains and their assistants, Vietnam veterans, military sexual assault, and trauma recovery without psychiatric medications. If you would like to schedule a program, workshop, or lecture for your group or at your location, please contact us at contact_us@warfighteradvance.org

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Programs are scheduled throughout the year. All program dates are published on our website. They also appear at the top of the registration form.

We invite and welcome warfighters who are struggling with what is typically known as “PTSD,” with or without a formal diagnosis. Other post-deployment “mental illness” labels or problems such as anxiety, depression, adjustment disorder, anger, substance abuse, and mTBI are also considered. All referrals are self-referrals. No paperwork documenting “mental illness” is required or accepted. Warfighters who have been treated by traditional psychiatric methods, as well as warfighters who have been struggling on their own to reintegrate or deal with their operational traumas are welcomed. We do not limit enrollment to OIF/OEF or any other conflict, operation, or specific set of dates. You do not need a combat action ribbon to attend.

Warfighter Advance raises 100% of participant costs so that warfighters can attend FREE OF CHARGE.

The ADVANCE 7-Day™ Training Ops are held at Elks Camp Barrett in Annapolis, Maryland, on acres of woodlands, creeks, and open spaces. Warfighters from every state attend our program at no cost to the participant.  We also accept participants from our territories and from our NATO allies.

For more information please contact us:

Email: contact_us@warfighteradvance.org

Phone: (202) 239-7395

The First tenet states that a warfighter must be allowed to determine his or her own successful outcome. At Warfighter Advance, we focus on functional outcomes. These could include, for example, meeting goals such as finding work, graduating from college, re-uniting with estranged family, running for public office, regaining physical health, or running a marathon. It appears to us as arrogant that we should determine for another person what a good outcome looks like, or that we should determine that another person’s suffering, bereavement, response to trauma, or reintegration is “abnormal” or “pathological”.

Second, warfighters [at Warfighter Advance] are educated on the tension between practitioner benevolence and patient autonomy, as well as ethical and legal parameters of fully informed consent, which, for the reader’s review, include, at a minimum: 1) to be informed of the risks and benefits of any proposed treatment or intervention, 2) to be informed of the alternative treatments or interventions and their risks and benefits, and 3) to be allowed to make the treatment decision without coercion.

Third, [Warfighter Advance] acknowledges that there is a direct cause and effect relationship, well-documented in the scientific literature, between the rates of post-deployment suffering and suicide, and the use of psychopharmaceuticals to treat a variety of psychiatric labels. To be clear, it is the treatment, and not an underlying clinical or medical condition, that is causing suffering and unprecedented rates of suicide (Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry 2019; FDA 2004).

Fourth, a careful review of the literature and analysis of scientific merit has led us (and many other scientists, including those at the National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH) to conclude that the categories of mental disorder as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM – 5TR are scientifically invalid and diagnostically unreliable (Jayson 2013), and, therefore, it is unethical for us to use them or to convince warfighters that they “have” them.

Finally, after a careful analysis of the science, the available literature, and the risk: benefit ratio, the fifth tenet states that WA rejects the use or usefulness of psychiatric medications and ECT in the process of warfighter reintegration or trauma response. We also acknowledge the devastating implications, and harmfulness of these treatments for traumatized individuals in general (Breggin and Cohen 2007; Jackson 2005, 2009; Kirsch 2010; Read, Kirsch, and McGrath 2019).

Warfighters are trained to function in high-tempo, high-risk situations, but are not trained in how to come home. Life at home is less clear, less purpose-driven and more complicated than military service, especially war. The absence of preparation for life at home can create a sense of isolation and distress, pushing warfighters away from the people who love them and could help them. Warfighter Advance trains our participants how to reintegrate into the civilian world successfully.

Warfighter Advance is a safe learning space where warfighters can begin the climb back into a functional life through knowledge. They learn first that they are not sick, broken, flawed or worthless. Their feelings are validated and explained by the lack of training to re-enter civilian life. They are taught the dangers of psychotropic drugs and shown a path to a healthy lifestyle through exercise and nutrition. They are taught how to deal with grief and anger, the basics of self-management, and the value of community.

Returning home after a tour of duty, warfighters can find themselves on shaky ground when it comes to trusting their own instincts in a world very different from the military. Civilians can seem harder to trust than their military family. But gradually warfighters can be challenged to trust. We teach both self-trust and trusting others at Warfighter Advance through team building and situational training, providing them the tools they need to trust their new environment appropriately.

Our community provides a safe space for the warfighters to be themselves. They
learn that they have all had similar experiences, both in service and at home. They talk together about their fears, their grief, and sorrow, along with the exhilaration and excitement of victories big and small. They discover new sisters and brothers. Every graduate is enrolled in our alumnae association through which they keep up with each other on a private social media page. They are contacted once a month by a mentor to make sure they are thriving. They call for help. They respond to other’s calls for help. The community is rebuilt. Nurturing happens. Successes are celebrated. Isolation is dispelled. This is what coming home was supposed to be.

They may have killed. Their brothers or sisters may have been killed. They may have experienced a moral injury. The military presents plenty of opportunities for grief to manifest. But grieving gets in the way of accomplishing the mission. Bottled up and unaddressed, grief is a force of destruction to the soul. At the Warfighter 7-Day Advance Program, we prepare the participants to face their grief. Then we give them opportunities to stare their grief in the eye and to embrace it, feel it, let the tears flow, often for the first time since deployment. Once they face their grief, it loses its control over them, and they no longer need to fear it.

Joy comes from the realization that they have changed. The armor has fallen off and they feel free from the isolation and failed expectations that were controlling them and holding them back before they experienced the Warfighter Advance training. They are now open to new experiences and new people. They are able to take charge of their lives. They now know they can do what they want to do and be what they want to be.