A woman describes getting breast implants after sexual assault left her disconnected from her body, then spending years processing trauma before deciding to have them removed. She loved her small breasts before surgery but felt pressure to change; explanting came after having children and recognizing the implants as foreign objects causing problems.
Welcome to the show. It's been a while to get you scheduled, but I'm glad we were able to get you. Yeah, it has. But I'm so happy to be watching all of the standards of what's considered beautiful and starting to look at myself and going, okay, how do I compare to this as a woman? You know? And granted, I was a young girl at the time, but I'm looking at these older figures, and it just becomes inundated in the culture, and it becomes normalized of, like, okay, women, if you're. If you want to look beautiful, you're supposed to look like this. And that was kind of in the background. Being said, I loved my body, loved my small boobs pre surgery. And I had, right before my surgery, have been getting pressured, quite a pushing. This is what the standard of beauty is. And all the girls I worked with had implants. I was at the time using, like, the little chicken cutlets in my bra to make it look like I fit the mold. And prior to getting the surgery, because I was kind of like, no, I'm good. I'll just stick with the cutlets. I'll stick with the cutlets. Prior to getting my surgery, I had gone through a pretty severe sexual assault. And that made me d. Me. I didn't have that resolve anymore. I didn't have that connection to my body anymore. And so for me, I remember it was like, maybe even three to four months after that assault where I was like, you know what? Maybe I'll get it. Because I was so disconnected from my body. So, like, not even thinking about the severity of surgery, explant surgery, they often think, like, oh, I'm. I'm really sad about my new body. I've got to get used to this new body. And I loved my boobs, and I love what they look like. You know, most girls get implants, and then they're showing them off, and they wear, like, the bikinis and the dresses. And I dressed very conservative. I was always wearing things that, like, hid them because I had so much shame around it. And I think it just never felt in alignment with who I was. And yet I didn't heal that sexual trauma for about six or seven years. So I, for six, do the work of healing that trauma and reconnecting to my body. I started to love my body again and really started to get the gravity of, oh, my gosh, I've got foreign objects in my body that are causing havoc, and what do I do about that now? And at the time, I was working a lot I was on a television show and traveling a lot, so it was never a good time to get them explanted. And truthfully, explanting wasn't really a thing back then. And then when it started to become a thing, that's when I started having babies. And that was really. It was almost like this huge graduation to come and do my explant with you. It's like I have graduated from.
