By Heather & Jenny | Soul Sister | Women’s Wellness
Key Takeaways
It was a Saturday morning at one of our women’s wellness retreats in Ontario. The room was full. Coffee was warm. And one woman — let’s call her Michelle — was sitting in the back corner with her arms crossed and a smile on her face that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
She’d driven three hours to be there. She’d told her family she was “fine.” She’d told herself she was “just tired.”
By mid-morning, she was in tears. Not because something dramatic had happened — but because someone had finally asked her how she was really doing. And she realised she didn’t have an answer. She’d been so busy keeping everything together that she’d completely lost touch with herself.
Michelle’s story isn’t unusual. In fact, across the hundreds of women we’ve sat with — at retreat centers in Ontario, through weekend wellness events, and in our online Soul Full Woman Collective — her story is closer to the rule than the exception.
The number one thing we see women have in common?
Hidden suffering. Quiet, private, relentless — and almost always invisible to everyone around them, including themselves.
When most people think of anxiety, they picture panic attacks, racing thoughts, an inability to function. And yes — anxiety can look like that.
But far more often, it looks like this:
This is what we call hidden suffering. And it’s extraordinarily common among women, especially women who are high-functioning, deeply responsible, and committed to caring for everyone else first.
Here’s something we’ve come to understand deeply through our work running health and wellness retreats for women: many of the women who need support the most are the last ones to ask for it.
Because on the outside, everything looks okay. The house is running. The kids are fed. The work is getting done.
But on the inside? There’s a kind of exhaustion that goes bone-deep. An emotional weight that’s been carried so long it just feels normal.
Part of what makes hidden anxiety so hard to identify is that it rarely announces itself clearly. Instead, it shows up as irritability. As perfectionism. As a creeping sense that no matter what you accomplish, it’s never quite enough.
It shows up as losing yourself — slowly, quietly, over years.
One of the most consistent things we observe at our retreats for women is this: the body is already telling the truth, long before the mind is ready to hear it.
Chronic tension in the shoulders and jaw. Trouble sleeping. Digestive issues that come and go. A constant low-grade fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest.
These aren’t just physical inconveniences. They’re your nervous system waving a flag.
Research consistently shows that chronic stress and unprocessed emotion don’t just live in the mind — they live in the body too. Unaddressed anxiety can affect sleep quality, immune function, digestion, and cardiovascular health over time.
Your body is not working against you. It’s asking to be listened to.
Back to Michelle. By the afternoon of that retreat, something had shifted.
She hadn’t solved anything. Her life was exactly the same as it had been that morning. But she had named what she was carrying. She had said it out loud, in a room full of women who nodded because they understood completely.
And that — that moment of being truly seen — was the beginning of something real.
This is what we see happen again and again at wellness retreats for women. Not a dramatic transformation in a single weekend, but a crack of light. A first breath. A woman remembering that she is allowed to take up space, to have needs, to stop performing “fine” for a world that rarely asks how she’s really doing.
Personal growth doesn’t begin with a plan or a programme. It begins with honesty.
You don’t have to attend a retreat to start paying attention. Here are some honest questions worth sitting with:
We want to be clear: we’re not suggesting that a wellness retreat is the answer to anxiety, or that a weekend away is a substitute for professional support. If you’re experiencing significant anxiety or depression, please reach out to a mental health professional.
What we can say — from years of witnessing women in this work — is that certain things consistently help:
Community. There is something uniquely powerful about being in a room full of women who are honest about their struggles. It breaks the isolation that hidden suffering depends on to survive.
Stillness. Not productivity. Not fixing. Just pausing long enough to feel what’s actually there. Even five minutes of genuine quiet can begin to reconnect you with yourself.
Permission. So many women are waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay to not be okay. To rest. To need something. Consider this that permission.
Naming it. There is real relief in simply saying: I have been struggling. I have been carrying something heavy. I am not as fine as I’ve been pretending to be.
You don’t have to fix it today. You just have to stop pretending it isn’t there.
Hidden anxiety is one of the most common threads we see running through the lives of the women we work with — at our wellness retreats in Ontario, at our women’s events, and through our online community across Canada and the US.
It doesn’t always look dramatic. It often looks like competence. Like resilience. Like a woman who has it all together.
But underneath that — so often — is someone who is deeply tired, quietly disconnected, and longing to feel like herself again.
If that’s you: you are not alone. And you are not beyond help.
The first step is simply this — telling the truth. To yourself, if no one else. That’s where everything begins. 💛
Do any of these signs resonate with you? Share in the comments — your honesty might be exactly what another woman needs to read today.
Jenny McKee and Heather DelRosario are the co-founders of Soul Full Events and passionate community builders and retreat facilitators who help women reconnect with their authentic selves beneath the noise of everyday life, with no fixing or pretending, first through their own journeys past burnout and now through the intentional wellness gatherings they create.
