Veterans find healing, hobby with VA crochet group

Every Monday afternoon, a small but growing circle of Veterans settles into a room at the VA Southern Nevada Healthcare System’s Southwest VA clinic, hooks and yarn in hand. Some come with anxious fingers and busy minds. Some come carrying decades of grief, PTSD, and traumatic brain injuries that no prescription has fully touched. What they find is something they didn’t expect: peace.

The group is called Healing Hearts, and it meets every week to learn, crochet, and socialize. The man behind the group is Stephen Retta, a volunteer at the Southwest Clinic who also serves as a Veterans advocate with the Nevada Department of Veteran Services. He is not a Veteran himself, but he knows something about carrying invisible wounds.

At 34, Retta lost his wife to breast cancer. He didn’t process his grief for nearly two decades. “She passed away in 2003, and I didn’t get remarried till 2022,” he said. “I went years with a lot of grief, and I didn’t want to bring that into my new marriage.”

Before remarrying, Retta committed himself to healing. He went to a grief retreat through his church and there he first picked up a crochet hook. “I found that it gave me a lot of peace,” he said. “It helped me with my anxiety, my trauma.”

Word traveled through the volunteers about Retta’s new hobby and how it was helping him. Then VA Whole Health staff members asked if he would be willing to teach a class for Veterans.

The group launched in February, under what Retta originally called “Combat Crochet.” When it was noted that not all participants had been in combat, a new name emerged: Healing Hearts. 

Ethel Robinson, a former Army Transportation Officer, found the group after spending last month attending a series of Whole Health events at the clinic. A flyer caught her eye, and despite her lack of experience, she decided to attend a class. 

“I really didn’t want to learn how to be fancy, like other people,” she said, laughing. “I just wanted to do a stitch.”

But sitting down with the yarn surfaced something she hadn’t anticipated. “It started bringing up some past issues that I had,” she said. “I was getting really frustrated and just upset a lot.” 

She kept coming anyway. Now, about five sessions in, Robinson has moved beyond the simple chain stitch and is working on her own projects, what she laughingly calls “body parts.” More importantly, she keeps coming back.

“The interaction, the watching everybody else learn, talking, harassing Stephen, and just getting that support,” she said. “For me, it’s a lot about mental support.”

If Robinson’s story is one of tentative discovery, Brandon Thomas’s story is one of transformation.

Thomas, who retired from the Air Force in 2022 after 20 years as a fuel specialist, was introduced to the group by a VASNHS Whole Health coach. His grandmother and aunt had crocheted, and he’d always been curious but never learned. He signed up, but nearly quit after his first attempt at crocheting. “At first, I wanted to give up,” he said, “‘because I’m like, this is tough.” He didn’t. And what happened next surprised him.

“The first heart I actually completed took me about two hours to make,” he said. “Now I can make them under ten minutes.”

The skills he has developed is secondary to the other benefits Healing Hearts has brought to his life. Thomas came into the group carrying a heavy load: PTSD, a traumatic brain injury, chronic nightmares rooted in his wartime experiences. Thomas was haunted by memories of being attacked, of running over unexploded ordnance in theater. He had struggled to leave his house.

“I couldn’t even go to the grocery store without losing it,” he said.

He believes that crocheting has begun to shift things at a neurological level. “It has reduced my nightmares of war,” he said. “I’m dreaming a little more about other stuff, like crocheting, which is really nice.” He credits repetitive, focused motion with helping his TBI symptoms as well. “I’m trying to remember stuff, and it’s really helping with my memory.”

Thomas now makes hearts regularly. He estimates he’s completed around 30 and distributes them as gifts. His daughters hang them from their rearview mirrors. He’s currently working on an Afghan. He’s also become something of an ambassador for the group, countering what he sees as an outdated stigma.

“It’s normally viewed as a woman’s hobby,” he said. “But I looked it up. Ryan Reynolds — crochets, Kurt Cobain crocheted, a lot of football players too.” He now calls himself and Retta his “brochet,” a portmanteau he wears proudly. Their goal: to recruit more men into the fold.

Retta has a theory about why crochet works.

“We hold tension too much inside us,” he said. “When we hold that tension, it causes anxiety and frustration, and we get irritated and angry. But if we learn to sit and be still, and find those little patterns…”

The chain stitch, he explains, is the entry point. It’s simple enough to become meditative once mastered, complex enough to require focus. The key, he has learned from the women at his grief ministry, is to find a pattern that is, as he puts it, “brain dead.” Something repetitive and rhythmic. Something that lets the mind float free.

“It becomes meditative,” he said. “You can space out. You breathe. Everything starts calming down.”

The group currently draws around eight to ten regulars, roughly an even split between men and women. Some Mondays, newcomers filter in. Some veterans come once and can’t make it regularly. But those who keep coming, Retta says, are changed by it.

 “We show each other what we’re doing and learn from each other,” Thomas said. “It’s a nice network.”

Retta’s long-term hope is that Veterans who’ve come through the program might one day facilitate their own groups, carrying the healing outward.

“It doesn’t have to grow in numbers,” he said. “It has to grow in our own spirits. And in our healing.”

For now, the group meets Mondays at the Southwest VA clinic. Hooks and yarn are provided. No experience necessary. “Before you know it,” Thomas said, “you’re gonna be making hearts.”