By Christine Zimmerly
Peer-to-Career Director
We have never had more knowledge, technology, or specialized care in our healthcare system. And yet, many people still leave appointments feeling unheard, disconnected, and overwhelmed.
Providers are burned out, and communities continue to face barriers to care and unequal health outcomes. Maybe what’s missing is not another program, but something we have known all along: healing happens in relationships. It happens through connection. That is where peer support comes in.
Peer support is built on a simple idea: people who have walked a similar path can walk alongside someone else. Whether the journey involves substance use, mental health, chronic illness, criminal legal system involvement, caregiving, housing instability, trauma, or another life challenge, lived experience creates trust in ways professional expertise alone often cannot.
Peer support is something different: hope shared between people. It is mutuality, connection, and the belief that recovery, wellness, and growth are possible. As healthcare continues to evolve, peer support is no longer on the margins. It is becoming an essential part of the future.
Healthcare Needs More Than Treatment
Healthcare is great at treating illness. It saves lives every day. But healing does not happen only in hospitals or clinics. Much of it happens before treatment, during decision-making, and afterward.
People need help navigating complicated systems. They need someone to answer the questions they do not know how to ask. They need hope when the future feels uncertain, and they need someone who can walk beside them.
I learned this in a way I never expected: not as a peer specialist, but as a cancer patient.
Shortly after my colorectal cancer diagnosis, I met with a social worker at the oncology clinic. He smiled and said, “I know exactly what you’re going through, and I’m here to support you.”
For a moment, I felt relief. I thought, He’s been through this. So, I asked, “You had colorectal cancer too? I’m so sorry.”
He said no. He explained that he had worked with many people who had cancer, so he understood what I was experiencing. But he did not. Not really.
He had never waited for biopsy results, stared at a chemotherapy chair wondering what was about to happen, lived with a port in his chest, or felt the kind of exhaustion that makes getting out of bed feel impossible. He had never wondered if he would live long enough to watch his children grow up.
He wanted to help. I believe that. At that moment though, I did not need someone who had studied cancer. I needed someone who had survived it, someone who could honestly say, “I’ve been where you are.”
Looking back, I did not need more information. I needed connection. Even a list of people willing to take a phone call would have made a difference. When I asked where the peer supports were, I was given a list of websites and the number of a social worker.
During chemotherapy, I was the youngest person in my infusion group by decades. Throughout the process, I found myself wondering whether most people my age with this kind of cancer survived. Most of the others were in their 70s and living with other types of cancer.
It did not matter. They understood the fear, the nausea, the exhaustion, and the uncertainty. They did not have to explain it, and neither did I.
That is the difference lived experience makes. Peer specialists do not replace doctors, nurses, therapists, or social workers. They offer something different: a bridge between treatment and everyday life. They remind people they are not alone, and sometimes that is exactly what is needed to keep moving forward.
Lived Experience Is an Asset
For too long, healthcare has viewed lived experience through the lens of a diagnosis.
Of deficits. Of problems to be solved.
Peer support changes that. Lived experience becomes expertise. And recovery becomes evidence that change is possible.
The challenges people have overcome become knowledge that can help someone else find their own way forward. I know this because someone did it for me. For years, I tried to stop using substances to numb emotional pain. I wanted to stop. But I just didn’t know how.
Then I met a woman who said, “I used to live like that too.”
She didn’t judge me. She didn’t tell me what I should do.
She didn’t try to fix me. She just walked beside me. She shared what had worked for her. And she listened while I figured out what would work for me. For 18 months, she believed in me until I learned to believe in myself. And guess what? Eventually, I didn’t need her to walk beside me every day.I had found my own footing.
Before I left treatment, she asked me to come back and share my story with the next group. I had 93 days in recovery. And I remember thinking, “What could I possibly have to offer?” She smiled and said something I’ll never forget. “Your story has value.” She was right.
Because hope is most powerful when it comes from someone who has been there.
That’s what peer support does. It transforms pain into purpose.
Recovery Principles Benefit Everyone
What made that relationship so powerful was not a specific technique or intervention. It was a set of principles that sit at the heart of peer support.
- Hope
- Connection
- Shared power
- Strengths-based practice
- Self-determination
- Recovery-Oriented support
- Trauma-informed practice
- Dignity of Risk
- Voluntary engagement
- Person-centered support
- Relationship-focused practice
The relevance of these principles extends beyond behavioral health. They help people navigate chronic illness, major life transitions, caregiving responsibilities, and countless other challenges that require more than clinical expertise alone.
Peer support reflects a simple but often overlooked truth: people are more than diagnoses, conditions, or service encounters.
The woman who helped me was doing what peer specialists have done for generations: turning lived experience into a source of hope, connection, and support for others.
Increasingly, healthcare organizations are recognizing what recovery communities have known for decades: people with lived experience bring perspectives that strengthen engagement, improve services, and help systems better understand the communities they serve.
Healthcare Must Move Beyond Control
One of the most powerful things peer support brings to healthcare is a different understanding of what helps people grow.
Too often, systems are built around managing risk, directing decisions, and telling people what they should do. Peer support starts from a different belief: people are the experts in their own lives.
Peer support is voluntary. It is built on trust, collaboration, and self-determination. Rather than taking control, peer specialists walk alongside people as they discover what recovery, wellness, and a meaningful life look like for them.
That approach requires something healthcare does not always make room for: the dignity of risk. Growth requires the freedom to make choices, learn from experience, and find one’s own way forward.
At its heart, peer support is an act of trust. It is the belief that people are capable, that their voices matter, and that lasting change happens with people, not to them.
People heal most effectively in relationships where they feel respected, heard, and empowered to make decisions about their own lives.
We often talk about the future of healthcare in terms of technology, innovation, and new models of care. But the future is also human.
It is built through trust, connection, and the belief that people can help one another heal, grow, and thrive.
That is the promise of peer support.
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