There’s a question I think about a lot when it comes to the way women relate to their bodies…

Are we changing ourselves because we love who we are – or because we’re trying to escape who we believe we are?

It’s a question that doesn’t always have a clean answer. And honestly, I think most of us have lived in both places at different points in our lives. I know I have. I’ve made choices about my body from a grounded, loving place – and I’ve also made choices from a place of wanting to feel like enough. The difference between those two spaces might look invisible from the outside, but inside, you can feel it. Your body can feel it.

And that’s exactly what this week’s conversation opened up for me.

When the body becomes the battlefield

So many of us learn at a very young age that our worth is conditional.

We learn it through the way love is given and withheld. Through the things people say about our bodies. Through the unspoken rules about what makes us acceptable, lovable, and enough.

And when those lessons take root early enough, they don’t just live in our minds – they live in our nervous systems. They shape the way we move through the world, the way we relate to our own reflection, and eventually, the choices we make about our physical bodies in an attempt to feel okay inside our own skin.

What struck me so deeply about this week’s conversation is how clearly I could see that pattern playing out – not just in my guest’s story, but in the stories of so many women I’ve spoken with over the years.

The body becomes the thing we try to fix because we don’t yet know how to fix the wound underneath.

A story that goes all the way back

Brianne Roberge joined me this week for an incredibly deep and vulnerable conversation about body healing.

Brianne’s journey with her body didn’t start with breast implants. It started in childhood – with experiences that taught her very early on that she wasn’t enough just as she was. That love had to be earned. That her body existed for other people’s purposes before it ever belonged to her.

Those early experiences created a deep wound of unworthiness that followed her into adulthood and quietly influenced every major decision she made about her appearance, her identity, and her sense of self. By the time she decided to get breast implants in her early twenties, the decision felt like it made perfect sense on the surface. She wanted to feel more feminine, more confident, more connected to herself.

But as she shared so beautifully in our conversation, the intention underneath that choice wasn’t rooted in self-love. It was rooted in not-enoughness. And that distinction – between changing your body because you love it and changing your body because you can’t stand it – became the thread that ran through her entire decade-long journey.

Eight surgeries and a body that kept saying no

What followed Brianne’s initial surgery was a cascade of complications that most people would never expect.

An infection from a hospital superbug. Emergency surgery to remove the implants just weeks after they were placed. A devastating recovery. Then the decision to get them put back in – followed by years of reconstructive surgeries, pain, and a body that kept signaling that something wasn’t right.

Brain fog. Joint pain. Insomnia. Hair loss. Cystic acne. A mysterious rash that no doctor could explain.

And through all of it, she was met with dismissal. Doctor after doctor told her that her implants couldn’t possibly be the cause. She was gaslit, turned away, and made to feel like she was imagining things – which, as she described it, made her feel like she couldn’t trust herself all over again.

I think this is one of the most important parts of her story for other women to hear. Because so many of us have been in that position – where our body is communicating something loud and clear, and the people we trust to help us are telling us we’re wrong. It’s a particular kind of loneliness that can make you question everything you know to be true about yourself.

The pebbles and the boulders

One of the things Brianne said that really landed in my body was her description of pebbles and boulders.

She talked about how the early warning signs – her husband gently trying to talk her out of the surgery, the initial complications, her own quiet knowing – were like pebbles being thrown. Small signals. Easy to brush off. And when she didn’t listen to the pebbles, life threw boulders.

I see this pattern everywhere – in my own life, in the lives of the women I work with, and in the way healing tends to unfold. We get the whisper first. Then the tap on the shoulder. Then the earthquake. And the invitation is always the same… will you listen to what your body is trying to tell you?

What I find so beautiful about the way Brianne tells her story is that there’s no self-blame in it. There’s no harsh judgment toward her younger self. There’s just this deep, compassionate understanding that she was doing the best she could with the level of awareness she had at the time. And I think that grace is what ultimately allowed her to heal.

Coming home – from the inside out

The turning point in Brianne’s story was quietly powerful.

She was sitting by the ocean, looking down at her chest, and she felt this deep craving to just be in her natural body again. And a voice inside of her – clear and calm – simply said, “It’s time.”

She didn’t rush to remove the implants from a place of hating them. She made a conscious choice to come into a loving relationship with her body as it was – implants and all – before she made the decision to let them go. Because she knew that if the original decision was made from self-rejection, removing them from that same energy would only continue the cycle.

That rewrite happened through deep inner child work. She sat with the youngest version of herself – the little girl who was taught she wasn’t worthy – and the version of herself who chose to get the implants. She brought them into a healing circle together. She reparented those parts of herself and reconnected with the truth that had been there all along…

She was always enough. She was always worthy. There was nothing she needed to add or remove to make that true.

When she finally went in for her explant surgery – her eighth operation – she described having a meditative experience on the table where all of those versions of herself were there, holding hands, ready to let go together.

I got full-body chills hearing her describe that moment.

The body doesn’t lie

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was what happened after the implants came out.

The relief was immediate. Within hours, her eyes were clearer, her skin was glowing, and a fog she had been living in for ten years just… lifted. In the weeks that followed, every single symptom she had been battling – the brain fog, the joint pain, the insomnia, the skin issues – resolved completely.

And yet for years, doctor after doctor told her the implants couldn’t be the problem.

I think there’s a bigger conversation here about how women are conditioned to override their own knowing. We’re taught to defer to external authority. We’re told that if the tests come back normal, we must be fine. But the body doesn’t lie. It’s always communicating. And sometimes the most radical thing we can do is listen to it – even when everyone around us is saying we’re wrong.

The question underneath every choice we make about our bodies

Something I shared during our conversation that I want to leave here too…

I always look for the healing metaphors in things. And what I see in Brianne’s story is something so many of us are living in our own way. When we’ve been disconnected from our bodies through early experiences – whether that’s trauma, conditioning, or simply never being taught to trust ourselves – we come to these moments in adulthood that are perfectly designed to bring up all the same emotional responses so we can finally rewrite that pattern.

The body creates the scenario. The healing asks us to choose differently this time.

For Brianne, that looked like choosing to love her body before changing it. It looked like trusting her inner knowing over the opinions of every expert who dismissed her. And it looked like doing the deep inner work that allowed the external transformation to actually hold.

We cannot manifest a life we love when the internal relationship between self and body is built on rejection.

That’s the medicine of this conversation. And I think it’s medicine so many of us need right now.

What you might take with you

If there’s one thing I hope you carry from this episode, it’s this – before you change anything about your body, sit with the intention behind it. Not to judge yourself. Not to stop yourself. But to make sure the choice is coming from a place that will actually lead you somewhere good.

Because as Brianne said so perfectly… if the intention is rooted in “I hate” or “I’m not enough,” there might be deeper work waiting for you first. And that work – the inner child healing, the reconnection to your own worth, the quiet reclamation of your body as yours – is what changes everything.

Not just how you look. But how you live.

This episode airs on April 7th, and I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Xoxo, Lauren