Credibility, Trust, and Lived Experience: Why Sarah Bushbye MC Is the Right Leader for Women Combat Veterans’ Wellbeing

Women combat veterans in the United Kingdom occupy a strange position in public life: they exist, they have served, they have carried weapons and responsibility in environments defined by danger and moral complexity, and yet they often remain unseen. Their invisibility is not simply a matter of public ignorance; it is the product of overlapping cultural narratives, institutional habits, and social expectations that have historically framed combat as male, trauma as male, and veteranhood as male. Not surprisingly, when a population is consistently misrecognised, it is not only their story that is erased but also their needs, because the systems that deliver support tend to serve what they can easily see. The consequence is a persistent gap between women combat veterans and the health and mental wellbeing services meant to help them. In that context, the question of who is best positioned to design and deliver health and mental wellbeing projects for women combat veterans is not academic. It is a question of effectiveness, trust, safety, and genuine impact. Sarah Bushbye MC, a UK Afghanistan veteran and Women Combat Veterans Lead at Forward Assist, is in the best place to lead this work because her credibility, lived experience, leadership, and proximity to the community converge into a rare kind of authority: the authority that makes invisible people feel recognised, and therefore willing to engage.

The starting point of any compelling argument about designing health and mental wellbeing projects is that design cannot be separated from understanding. “Mental wellbeing” is not a generic condition that can be treated the same way for every group, and “veterans” are not a homogenous category. A project that works for one subset of the veteran community can miss the mark for another, sometimes in ways that are subtle and damaging. Women combat veterans often carry burdens that are similar to their male peers, exposure to violence, threat, loss, fear, and the long aftermath of hypervigilance. but they also carry burdens that are distinct. Many have had to work harder to be seen as legitimate. Many have had to manage not only the adversary outside the wire but the assumptions inside the institution. Many have learned that to be accepted they must minimise pain, mask uncertainty, and swallow a sense of difference. This does not simply create stress; it shapes identity. It teaches a person how to survive by becoming unreadable and when survival is built on invisibility, a person can leave service and discover that the same invisibility now blocks access to support.

This is why women combat veterans can remain an “invisible population” even when services exist on paper. Visibility is not only about statistics or public campaigns; it is about whether someone feels that a service was built with them in mind. If the waiting room looks like it was designed for someone else, if the language of the programme assumes a male experience, if the examples and case studies do not reflect a woman’s reality, if the staff appear unfamiliar with the specific cultural pressures women experience in combat roles, then a woman veteran can quickly conclude that she will not be understood and for someone who has spent years being misunderstood or having to justify her presence, that conclusion is not a minor inconvenience. It is a warning sign. It tells her that if she opens up, she may be judged, patronised, or disbelieved. In mental health work, the risk of feeling misrecognised is enough to keep people away.

Sarah Bushbye’s unique strength is that she begins from recognition rather than assumption and as a veteran of warfare in Afghanistan, she speaks from within the culture of combat service rather than about it. That matters because military experience is not only an event; it is a world. It has language, rituals, humour, hierarchies, codes of loyalty, and implicit rules about strength and vulnerability. People who have not lived it can learn facts about it, but facts do not produce the same kind of understanding as experience and when a woman combat veteran sits across from someone who has lived that world, there is often an immediate reduction in the burden of explanation. The veteran does not need to translate everything, soften it, or pre-empt misunderstandings. This changes the entire emotional cost of seeking help. It is not a small point. The greatest barrier to care is not always the lack of services; it is the belief that services will not truly see you.

The Military Cross attached to Sarah Bushbye’s name has significance beyond personal achievement. In military and veteran communities, credibility is often measured through the harsh currency of experience and respect. A decoration for gallantry signals that her service was not peripheral. It places her in a category of people whose courage and leadership were tested and evidenced under extreme conditions. While no medal can capture everything that someone endured, within the culture it can function as a shorthand that stops scepticism before it begins. Women veterans are especially likely to encounter scepticism, sometimes in overt ways and sometimes in quiet micro-assumptions: the insinuation that they were not really there, not really in it, not really exposed.

Sarah Bushbye‘s recognised service undercuts that suspicion. It gives her immediate standing in a space where women sometimes have to fight for standing even after they have fought in war.

Yet the reason she is best placed for this work goes far beyond the authority of a decoration. Designing and delivering health and mental wellbeing projects requires an understanding not only of trauma but of how trauma interacts with identity, belonging, and culture. Many women combat veterans experience a particular kind of dislocation in civilian life. They may leave the forces and find that the aspects of themselves that were sharpened and relied upon, competence under pressure, calmness amid chaos, fierce loyalty, direct communication, are misunderstood or devalued. They can feel simultaneously too much and not enough: too intense for civilian environments yet not “veteran enough” in public perception. Some do not even identify as veterans because the word has been coded so strongly as male, older, and uniformed in a particular way. This identity tension has mental health consequences. Depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress do not emerge in a vacuum; they grow in contexts where a person’s story is unstable and their sense of place is uncertain.

Sarah Bushbye is positioned to address this because she is not only a veteran but also a woman navigating the same cultural crossroads. That gives her a kind of interpretive power. She can recognise the difference between a woman who is struggling because she is “not coping” and a woman who is coping too well in the old way, by closing down, staying functional, remaining invisible. She can see how the habit of “pushing on” becomes a trap in civilian life, where endurance without connection turns into isolation. She can design projects that honour competence while creating safe channels for vulnerability, and she can do so without framing vulnerability as weakness. In other words, she can speak a language that women combat veterans trust: a language that respects strength while acknowledging that strength alone is not a treatment plan.

As Women Combat Veterans Lead at Forward Assist, Sarah is not operating from a distance. Proximity to a community is not a sentimental advantage; it is an operational one. Health and wellbeing projects succeed when they are built around real patterns of need rather than presumed needs. Women combat veterans may present differently than men in clinical settings. They may underreport symptoms. They may frame distress as irritability, exhaustion, or physical pain rather than sadness. They may avoid spaces dominated by men because those spaces unconsciously recreate the dynamics of scrutiny and exclusion they experienced in service. They may carry trauma that is intertwined with gendered experiences: the stress of being the only woman, the pressure to “fit,” the impact of discrimination or harassment, the fear of being labelled a problem if they speak up. A programme that does not account for these dynamics can inadvertently recreate harm.

Sarah’s role allows her to engage directly with these patterns. She can listen to women’s accounts without filtering them through a system that prefers tidy categories. She can notice what women are not saying as much as what they are saying. She can build initiatives that meet women where they are, not where a generic model predicts they should be and this is particularly important for an “invisible population,” because invisibility means you cannot rely on standard outreach to find people. You need someone who knows where and how women veterans actually live their lives, who understands the kinds of spaces they feel safe entering, and who can build bridges that feel respectful rather than extractive.

Trust, in this context, is not a soft concept; it is the foundation of engagement. Many mental wellbeing projects fail because they assume that once a service exists, people will use it. That assumption collapses among veterans, and especially among women combat veterans, because the cost of engagement can feel too high. To seek help is to risk being reduced to symptoms or stereotypes. It is to risk having one’s military identity questioned or one’s trauma sensationalised. It is to risk being viewed as fragile when one has spent years proving resilience. Trust is what reduces these risks, yet trust is not created by branding or slogans. It is created by evidence, relationships, and credibility.

Sarah Bushbye’s credibility is not merely personal; it is relational. Women combat veterans are more likely to speak openly to someone who has walked similar ground and who has demonstrated, through her own presence, that women belong in the story of combat. Her leadership communicates a truth many women have waited to hear: you are not an exception, you are not a footnote, and you do not have to earn the right to be supported. That message is powerful precisely because it comes from someone who cannot be dismissed as an outsider. When she designs a programme, the programme carries the imprint of that legitimacy. It does not feel like a service built for “veterans” with women added as a later thought; it feels like something built from the inside for women who have too often been left outside.

There is also a crucial difference between programmes that treat veterans as patients and programmes that treat them as peers. The former can sometimes be necessary, especially when clinical intervention is required, but it is not sufficient. Many veterans are tired of being approached as problems to be managed. They want to be treated as people with agency. For women, this is particularly important because their autonomy has sometimes been undermined in both military and civilian settings. A veteran-led approach, especially one led by a woman combat veteran, can create a different dynamic: mutual respect rather than assessment, shared language rather than interrogation, connection rather than extraction.

This is where Sarah’s leadership qualities matter. Combat leadership is a form of intense human management. It involves reading people quickly, maintaining morale, balancing risk, and making decisions that impact lives. It also involves emotional regulation under pressure—something directly relevant to mental wellbeing work, which can be emotionally heavy and unpredictable. The ability to stay calm, to be steady, to hold space for others without collapsing, is not a minor qualification. It is essential. Projects for trauma-affected populations require leadership that can withstand crisis moments, setbacks, and complex stories without becoming reactive or detached. Sarah has been shaped by environments where steadiness mattered. That steadiness becomes a resource for the women she supports. Another reason Sarah is in the best place to design and deliver these projects is that she understands the ethical landscape of trauma. Combat veterans often carry moral injury: the distress that arises when events violate one’s values, when one witnesses suffering one cannot prevent, or when one participates in actions that haunt the conscience. Moral injury is not simply fear-based trauma; it is shame, grief, and moral confusion. It is also often wrapped in silence, because moral injury can feel unspeakable. Women combat veterans may carry moral injury alongside additional layers of gendered judgement, including the fear that their emotional pain will be interpreted as proof that women “cannot handle” combat. That fear can intensify silence.

A leader like Sarah is uniquely placed to counter this. She can speak to moral complexity without turning it into a moral failing. She can normalise the idea that distress is a human response to inhuman circumstances, not a sign of weakness or incompetence and crucially, she can do so while refusing the narrative that women veterans must either be invulnerable heroes or broken victims. She can hold a more truthful middle: capable people who have been through extraordinary environments and deserve support that respects their competence.

Designing effective projects also demands an understanding of practical barriers. Women veterans may have caring responsibilities, may face financial constraints, may be balancing employment, may be isolated geographically, and may have limited time or privacy for therapy. They may avoid mixed-gender spaces for reasons that range from simple discomfort to profound trauma histories. They may be wary of veteran spaces that feel like they belong to men. They may fear being judged by other women who did not serve or did not serve in similar roles and all of these realities influence whether a project works. It is because Sarah is leading within a veteran support organisation and focused specifically on women combat veterans, that she is ideally positioned to incorporate these barriers into design from the start. She can create delivery methods that do not require women to sacrifice dignity, safety, or family stability in order to participate. She can build programmes that are flexible, trauma-informed, and respectful of women’s time and boundaries and she can also ensure that women do not have to perform their trauma in public to be believed. Too many systems reward the most visible suffering. Women combat veterans often suffer quietly; therefore a successful project must reach quiet suffering, not just visible crisis.

There is also the matter of narrative repair. Mental wellbeing projects that focus only on symptom reduction can miss the deeper work of rebuilding identity and meaning as for many veterans, healing involves integrating their service into a coherent life story, finding ways to carry pride and pain together, and discovering a sense of purpose beyond the uniform. Women combat veterans may need this narrative repair in particularly strong ways because their service has been doubted or overlooked. They may struggle to claim pride without fear of being accused of exaggeration or seeking attention. They may minimise their own achievements because they have learned that visibility invites scrutiny. They may carry grief not only for what happened in war but for the loss of comradeship and the loss of a role in which they felt undeniably capable.

Sarah Bushbye’s position allows her to lead projects that do not simply manage distress but actively restore narrative agency and by existing visibly as a woman combat veteran and leader, she provides a model of integration: a person who does not hide her service but uses it as a foundation for service to others. This is not about turning every veteran into an advocate; it is about showing that there is a future in which one’s military identity is not erased or reduced, but woven into a broader life. That kind of model is rare, and it matters.

Moreover, because Sarah holds a leadership title focused on women combat veterans, she can ensure that women are not treated as a subgroup that must fit into pre-existing structures. She can advocate internally and externally for projects that are tailored rather than adapted. Adaptation can be valuable, but when it becomes the default, it communicates a subtle message: you are not the central user; you are a variation on the central user. Women have lived with that message for decades. A project designed from women’s experiences communicates the opposite: you are the central user, your needs shape the structure. That shift changes participation, trust, and outcomes.

It also changes data. If women combat veterans are invisible, it is partly because they are not captured in the same way. They may not register with veteran organisations, may not join traditional networks, and may not respond to outreach that does not speak to them. A leader like Sarah can improve visibility by improving participation so that when women engage, their needs become legible, which then allows further refinement and resourcing. In that way, her leadership is not only about direct support but about building the infrastructure of recognition: helping institutions finally see women combat veterans not as anomalies, but as a population with clear, consistent needs.

Another critical dimension is cultural safety. Cultural safety means more than not being harmed; it means being treated in a way that affirms identity and reduces the need for self-protection. For women combat veterans, cultural safety may involve being able to speak about their service without having to defend it, being able to express emotion without having it weaponised against their gender, and being able to connect with peers without sexualised judgement or condescension. It may also involve being able to discuss issues such as sexism, harassment, or isolation without being told those topics are divisive or irrelevant.

Sarah is in the best place to create this safety because she has the legitimacy to name uncomfortable truths. She can address gendered dynamics without being dismissed as an outsider importing civilian politics into veteran spaces. She can frame these issues as matters of wellbeing, cohesion, and dignity rather than ideology. That framing matters because it keeps the focus on outcomes: reducing harm, increasing engagement, and improving health. It also ensures that women do not have to choose between being a “good veteran” and being honest about their experience.

Finally, Sarah Bushbye’s best qualification may be the rare combination of compassion and command presence and post service academic study in psychology and post traumatic growth. Effective wellbeing projects require warmth, empathy, and patience, but they also require structure, clarity, and follow-through. Trauma can make people ambivalent about help; it can create avoidance, distrust, and inconsistency. A leader who can offer both understanding and steady expectation is more likely to help people stay engaged long enough for real change to occur. Sarah’s military background supports disciplined delivery, while her woman veteran identity supports empathetic connection. This combination is not common, and it is precisely what invisible populations need: someone who can reach them gently but also build reliable pathways that do not collapse under complexity.

In summary, Sarah Bushbye MC is in the best place to design and deliver health and mental wellbeing projects for women combat veterans in the UK because she stands at the intersection of lived experience, earned credibility, cultural fluency, leadership capacity, and community proximity. She understands the world women came from, the pressures that shaped their silence, and the barriers that keep them from support. She can build projects that feel authentic rather than imposed, safe rather than scrutinising, and empowering rather than clinical. In a country where women combat veterans have too often been rendered invisible, her leadership does something more than provide services. It restores recognition and recognition is not a decorative gesture. It is the first step toward health and healing because people do not seek help from systems that cannot see them.

Tony Wright