Planning a breast lift for my sagging breasts: Does it address body image issues?

“Will I or won’t I get a breast lift for my sagging breasts?

This was the jingle on constant replay in my mind throughout my thirties and early forties – a theme many women may relate to due to the current societal obsession with the size, shape (and direction!) of breasts.

This obsession is constantly reinforced with the body images we are bombarded with in the media and by simply walking down the street.

I have noticed we currently live in a culture where we have very few depictions of the many variations in breasts and the changes they undergo as we age.

Due to this and not surprisingly, we now also have a booming industry of breast augmentation and reduction. It’s actually become hard not to entertain the idea of ‘just a little bit’ of cosmetic surgery to improve what society tells us is one of our ‘best assets’.

But is this really the answer and is there more going on behind our desire to improve our breasts and our general obsession with body image? When I considered it, my own quest for the ‘perfect breast’ was just an attempt to address how I felt about myself as a woman.

Prior to this I would daydream about when the right time would come to have the surgery to fix my sagging breasts, and if the procedure could be rebated through the public health system, as I believed I should be compensated.

Why? I wasn’t being ‘vain’ like other women who wanted them enlarged: I simply wanted them returned to their rightful place on my body. After all, I’d only ended up with sagging breasts because I’d breastfed seven children – society owed me! This line of thinking was of course blown out of water when I later realised that the breasts of women who have never had children also move further south as they age.

The truth was I had always been critical of how my breasts looked and after breastfeeding I felt I was simply no longer attractive as a woman.

This belief played out by me not ever wanting my husband to see them as I felt he would be repulsed... but in fact that was never the case, just my own projection of how I felt about them. There is no doubt that this is how many women feel about their breasts and other parts of their bodies, even if the reasons why may be different.

For me, I realised that I lacked self-worth and that I had made how I felt about myself everything to do with what was on the outside. This meant that I thought lifting my sagging breasts would be the one thing that would make me feel better about myself which is impossible because how we feel about ourselves is an inside job.

So instead of booking my breast lift to address my body image issues, I made a booking to lift my own self-worth.

In this commitment to lifting my own self-worth I:

Challenged any thoughts that I had allowed to enter my head that criticised by breasts and I do mean allowed, as I have come to understand we have a choice in what thoughts we allow.
Got honest about any false pictures, ideals or beliefs that I had taken on around what the perfect breast should look like which saw me not being lured in by images of the perky so called sexy breast.
Began to appreciate my innate qualities of dedication, playfulness, honesty and my deep care for people that used to play down and even dismiss.
Committed to having regular Esoteric Breast Massages that supported me to connect to a deeper part of myself that revealed an inner beauty and love that I had no idea I possessed.

From my dedication (and I do mean dedication, as my old way of being was quite strong) to all the above, to my surprise, as I built on this new approach to life, the endless loop in my head changed from “My breasts are repulsive” to “They aren’t so bad” then “Hey, they’re actually quite lovely!”

What’s more, none of this required the breast lift I ‘thought’ I needed.

In fact, learning to love and appreciate my breasts just as they were – and they were technically still the same, sagging breasts – started with how I felt about me and appreciating the woman I am, which had absolutely nothing to do with a certain body image.

And as I delved deeper I discovered an incredibly lovely, fragile and delicate woman that I’d long forgotten. As I did this, it became obvious cosmetic surgery ‘on the outside’ for my sagging breasts was never going to give me what I now feel inside which is held within each and every woman.