Almost everyone has claims to their own appearance. What will get rid of them rather – the surgeon’s scalpel or an attempt to “amicably” come to terms with your body and, ultimately, with yourself?
One of the Eastern proverbs says: “The sand is not in the desert, the sand is in the head of the Bedouin.” The same can be said about the attitude to their own appearance and body. How do we perceive ourselves, how we want to see ourselves? This personal “self-portrait” we create from childhood, and it is he who guides us through life. Many things influence the attitude to one’s own appearance: the standards of beauty that society sets us or family upbringing dictates; admiring or critical glances of others; happy or not very close relationship experience; those inevitable corrections that the coming years bring to our appearance.
The head of the department of plastic surgery at the ROTHSCHILD Paris Hospital, Maurice Minun, tells who seeks the help of a plastic surgeon and what are the reasons for dissatisfaction with their own appearance.
Psychologies: What kind of people most often become your clients – those who for some reason do not like themselves at all, or those who seek to bring their already beautiful body to perfection?
Maurice Mimun: People are different and everyone has their own situation. Someone (there are more of them) does not like something specific, for example, strongly protruding ears. They come to solve a private problem, but this does not mean that they are not at all satisfied with their own appearance. Others, on the contrary, feel a general dissatisfaction with themselves, not related to specific traits, but strongly affecting their sense of self.
With or without wrinkles, the main thing is to live, accepting your changed image.
In fact, such people would like to have plastic surgery not on their face or body, but on their lives – it does not suit them. They want to change something, but they don’t know exactly what. Appearance is always in sight, every day in the morning in the mirror … At a lighter stage of such dissatisfaction with themselves, people just go to the hairdresser, and they feel better.
The reason is low self-esteem: we do not like the body because we evaluate it incorrectly. How do we see ourselves, how do we feel our life experience, how do we build relationships with other people? The unconscious also dictates a lot. Some patients transfer to their body and very different problems.
For example?
First of all, relationships with loved ones. One of my clients, a young girl, wanted to have surgery to get rid of a hump on her nose. It seemed to her that because of this “lack” her father did not love her, and she suffered, shifting the blame for her experiences to the ill-fated humpback. To operate on her nose would be to miss the real problem. You know, during a consultation with a surgeon, people often cry. Not because of the humpbacks and protruding ears, right?
There is a special category of regulars of aesthetic surgery clinics: after a facelift, they immediately sign up for liposuction – and so on ad infinitum. Do they have a chance to eventually become satisfied with themselves?
No. These patients have such a view of themselves: they notice the most insignificant shortcomings in themselves.
Why?
They, like a screen, hide behind their own body from the need to seek a solution to the true problem. Usually it is not connected with the body and only psychotherapy can understand it. These people do not accept the new in themselves. But life is a chain of continuous changes. They need to be accepted, sometimes giving up their own ideas about themselves. Simply because they are outdated. To come into agreement with the new image of themselves is possible for those who are ready to abandon the old image.
Chance of the ugly duckling
“Ugly neurosis” is one of the most common human problems. It begins in childhood, flourishes in adolescence, becomes chronic in adulthood and ossifies in old age,” says French psychotherapist Claude Olivenstein. It is difficult to overcome it – not everyone will be able to say to themselves: “Let me not be handsome, but this does not prevent me from living the way I like.” In order to develop such a sense of self, it is often necessary to wage a constant battle with oneself. But love for another person, adult or child, is better than fighting: according to Claude Olivenstein, it is this feeling “in its highest manifestation that can transform physical imperfection into beauty.”
Unfair nature endows some, and deprives others of beauty, but old age comes to everyone without exception. Why is it easier for some of us to accept it than for others?
We live in a society that requires us to appear young and therefore active in every way, professionally and personally. Most often, the problem is not how old a person is today, but that he will soon be ten years older. Sometimes they just say to me: “Doctor, I’m afraid to die.” Aging is frightening not because it deprives us of beauty, but because our image changes and ceases to correspond to what we had in our youth.
It happens that we are dissatisfied with our body just because we misjudge it.
But if you, a surgeon, change some features of your appearance, the new look again comes into conflict with the “old” one!
Not at all. The first thing a patient who does not want to grow old asks for is: “Doctor, do everything as it was!” And he is terribly pleased when none of his relatives even notice the results of the intervention. Although, of course, there are special cases when a person goes for plastic surgery as a suicide of his former self: “I erase myself.” But this already borders on pathology.
From your experience, can you say that it is better to accept physical defects than to try to eliminate them with a scalpel?
By and large, I don’t even know what physical defects are! You see, to some people their own features do not seem ideal at all, but they will not give up their face for anything in the world. Others are simply indifferent to how they look. Cosmetic surgery is a tool that allows us to become more free in relation to the appearance given from birth. But surgery should not become a way of standardizing people. Yes, today’s society attaches great and even excessive importance to external data. But the main thing here is the consent of a person with himself, his own authenticity, his own history and relationships with others.
I know people who were severely burned, disfigured, but at the same time categorically did not want to change their faces. Because it is part of their history. They accepted the change in their image as a sign of a change in fate.