Clare Crawley’s IG About Her Childhood Sexual Abuse Is Devastating
“Self love is the act of giving a voice to your truth.”
Clare Crawley opened up about a devastating piece of her past. In a heartfelt IG posted on July 28, Crawley revealed that she survived childhood sexual abuse, and it’s something that still impacts her today. In the caption, she wrote that this experience led to her decision to get breast implants, but now that she has “learned to love herself deeply on the inside,” she’s ready to get them removed.
Crawley posted a selfie on her feed with the candid caption. “Self love [sic] is the act of giving a voice to your truth. So here is mine,” she wrote. “As a child of sexual abuse, my young adult years were spent in unhealthy relationships feeling unworthy of the good ones. It was a vicious cycle, because the more I chose the wrong men who treated me poorly, the more I believed I wasn’t good enough. Enter the breast implants.”
The surgery gave Crawley a sense of validation, but that feeling did not last. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to get them, but the truth is it was money that would have been better spent on therapy to heal my wounded heart. I ended up spending the money on therapy anyway, 😌 cut to now,” she wrote. “A woman who has learned to love herself deeply on the inside, knows her worth, and will fight for herself no matter what.”
Not only has Crawley put in the work of internal healing, she’s also realized the external healing that still needed addressing — specifically, the health complications her implants have caused. On July 3, Crawley shared a video explaining how her body has been rejecting the implants recently. “My skin has been having really bad hives and rash all down my stomach, on my neck, on the sides of my neck, on my arms, and my whole body is just inflamed and itchy,” she explained.
According to BreastCancer.org, rashes and skin problems are just one sign of breast implant illness (BII). “BII is a cluster of symptoms that don’t fit into any other classic disease diagnosis,” says Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D., president of the National Center for Health Research and a researcher who studies breast implant safety issues, explained. “We believe that it eventually will be recognized as a medical condition, but that process will take time.” To date, there have been no published studies on how common BII is, but support groups for the condition have gained thousands of members — one even has over 100,000. One thing’s for sure: Crawley is not alone.
A few weeks later, in the July 28 Instagram, Crawley shared that she decided to have her implants surgically removed to (hopefully) remedy her condition. “I’ve learned the toxicity that these implants can cause on our bodies, as it has done to mine. So I am stepping away from something that no longer serves me… not my heart, and certainly not my health. Surgery is this week,” she wrote. “We are taking it back to Clare 1.0, who is lovable and worthy just the way she is.”
Agreed — here’s to Clare 1.0!
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.
Expert:
Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D., president of the National Center for Health Research
