One of the insights I receive from many of my clients is that so many of us grew up with the message inside us “I am not enough”.

Putting aside when that message got ‘implanted’ and what caused it to become so ingrained in your psyche, there is another, equally important question – what have been the consequences of believing you’re not enough?

Perhaps you lost your confidence at school, a teacher told you that you were useless or hopeless…… and of course you believed them, because as children, we believe what adults tell us. We don’t have the skills to evaluate what’s true or not true.

Maybe you were bullied and it left you feeling vulnerable and not good enough.     

Or perhaps you’ve always struggled with your self esteem and confidence?

By the time you hit 45 and any time after that, you are under tremendous pressure to stay looking young, to have no wrinkles or lines and of course to keep your figure and look just as you did 20 years earlier. 

And so began the era of aesthetic medicine and cosmetic surgery. And with it, a boom in the number of women having procedures that they do not need.

Here’s why: women compare how they feel on the inside with how other women look on the outside.

You might want to read that again!

How much cosmetic surgery is carried out I wonder, to compensate for a deep, inner belief of not being good enough, smart enough, clever enough, pretty enough; not to mention the belief that many women have when they hit fifty, that they are ‘past it’.

I know women who become recluses, I know women who feel invisible, I know women who spiral into depression.

Will cosmetic surgery lift them out of depression or get them out of the house or transform how they feel emotionally?

Based on what I hear in my practice I don’t believe so.