My Daughter is a Stripper addicted to Plastic Surgery

Dear Chase Kelly,

Looking for some advice/ help discussing the potential dangers of cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery with my 22 year daughter working in ” the industry” My concern is her young age, addiction to procedures, permanent changes or damage to her face/ body and how to help her discontinue the practice of lip fillers ( I’m starting to notice the ” work done” look) etc that she’s been utilizing. 
Any advice on how to broach the subject, what to do or say would be very much appreciated. 

Love,
A very concerned mom

Hey Mom,

What a ripe and beautiful age twenty two is.  Your big girl is experiencing big changes that are being shaped by so many things.  Your voice, which used to be gospel to her, is fading into the background and being overshadowed by culture, media, her social circle, and the people she is interested in dating and being friends with.  If you want her to listen to you and come to you for advice, first she needs to know that no matter what, you respect her.  This means that you not only respect her choices, but you trust her to make them for herself.  

While there is a lot of shitty plastic surgery out there, none of it is SO bad that you need to stress about it and hurt your relationship with your daughter over it.  It’s just a physical thing.  The actual issue doesn’t seem to like your daughter is making decisions that will ruin her life forever, but that she’s making decisions that you don’t like.  If she was shopping for wedding dresses or Ivy League grad schools, you probably wouldn’t have an issue (or maybe you would, depending on where your desire for control in the relationship ends.)  You probably weren’t reading this site specifically because of her plastic surgery stuff, but because you want to know everything you can about her “lifestyle.”  You don’t need to know those things.  Prepare to read things you don’t like in this response, and trust that they will help you.  Lip fillers and the “work done” look are not hurting her, her future, or her relationships, and if they are, they will teach her valuable lessons.  The fillers will fade or she will have an actual issue, but it will be hers to deal with.  Changing her physical appearance isn’t changing who she is inside or making her someone different. To be fair, our physical bodies are transient no matter how you slice it.  Our appearance is not static, and playing with it can be undeniably freeing.

The best way to get your daughter to listen to you is to let go a little bit.  She is clearly craving change and freedom to define herself. Part of having adult children means to allow and encourage that independence.  You parented her already.  Twenty two isn’t that young.  She is a capable adult.  If you disagree, that really is your problem.  You can’t project a narrative onto a person you love that screams, “YOU SUCK AT DECISION MAKING.”  That’s awful.  The only way to actually solve your problem is to let go of micromanaging her decisions and learn to focus on yourself.

Maybe you’re saying, “A mother’s job is never done.” “She needs me!”  “She can’t possibly know what’s right for her!” “I’m obviously right that she needs to stop this nonsense, and she is just a stubborn girl.” You’ve been literally obsessed with the development of this human since conception.  You did all the jobs.  If you progressed in a healthy manner, it looked like this:

0-4 years: Parent caters to each need, teaches basic ‘yes/no’ ‘right/wrong’

5-11 years: Parent encourages forward thinking, individualism, self esteem, teaches advanced moral development, judgement and decision making

12-18 years: Parent encourages emotional health and ‘supervised’ independence.  Allows child to contemplate complex ethical issues and become an individual with own thoughts and values.

19-forever: Parent becomes a confidante, shares wisdom when asked, leads by example, and provides a safety net (but only when it’s healthy for both parties and does not come with a price tag.)

If you have a hangup somewhere you get stuck at one stage of the development process. Parents everywhere are relying on the techniques that once worked, but that aren’t healthy to enforce on an adult.  Sometimes, if you stayed in one phase of development, you’ll want to sit down and lecture or at least lament about the blanks you left, feeling sad, guilty, robbed, or authoritarian.  If you failed to move past one of the stages, it’s too late to try and get to the rest.  You can’t go back in time.  All you can do is move to where you’re supposed to be, and learn to lead by example.  This will inadvertently teach the lessons you want to teach.  You will have to learn to trust that your daughter is wise enough to make her own decisions, and that her lessons are hers to learn. From this point forward NOTHING SHE DOES IS A REFLECTION ON YOU, but a destination on her map towards self fulfillment.  If you refuse to recognize this, you are stuck in codependency, and no one grows.  You teach your daughter to be a rebellious jerk to everyone she loves.  Starting or continuing this cycle renders you and every involved incapable of having a healthy relationship.  This cycle gives everyone tiny martyr-like satisfactions from “wins” or the thrill of rebellion from “disobedience.”  Just enough satisfaction to keep you coming back, no matter how much it depletes your soul and energy.  Codepedency is an addiction in and of itself.  It looks like this:

You need to let go of your habitual desire to control your daughter. You might be surprised at how much she actually follows your lead if you let go.  Worst case scenario, if you focus on yourself instead of her, she will at least be led by example into learning RIGHT/WRONG, JUDGEMENT/DECISION MAKING, EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT, SELF ESTEEM, and all the other developmental things her inner child may be craving a role model for.

If she is stripping, she is a body language expert.  Be careful not to let your tightening lips and tensing shoulders show her how harshly you’re judging her.  This cuts her self esteem and gives her an opportunity to exploit an angsty teenage (underdeveloped) desire for rebellion.  Every time you let your “small reactionary self” win, you lose an opportunity for real emotional development and connection.  Move forward to the part of your development you’re meant to be in, and you will give her permission to do the same.

You certainly shouldn’t fuel or encourage her addiction at all, but you shouldn’t punish her for it either.  If she is addicted to changing her appearance on the outside, I’d venture to say she is feeling small and invalid on the inside.  Do not take any opportunity at all to encourage her self-doubt.  REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE SITUATION.  Don’t judge her, don’t parent her, don’t tell her what to do, don’t do ANYTHING that says, “I know what’s best for you, listen to me instead of yourself, because I am more capable than you.”  If you love your daughter, don’t undermine her.  It’s making her hate herself.  Go to therapy.  Get better as an individual.  Detach, and allow her to learn to mother herself.  That is when a girl becomes a woman.  When she can trust her own voice.  That is when you’ve become a successful mother.  When she can make the right choices without your input.  If you want her to recover from her addiction, if you want her to love herself, you need to end your enmeshed type of smothering love and learn to love while encouraging FREEDOM.  You need to take the addiction out of your relationship.

You can’t tell her to stop getting work done, it isn’t your call, but you can tell her to upgrade.  Since you will be spending top dollar for your emotional upgrades in therapy, you may be able to use your wisdom and explain that self improvement is worth spending top dollar on.  If she is going to keep on going with it, ask her to see the best of the best.  Maybe you can help her come up with a plan to budget so that she doesn’t go broke on her quest for beauty.  Maybe you guys can get some facials together and just bond over wanting to feel pretty forever.  Maybe you will come to the realization that she is trying to make herself look and feel less like the family she comes from.  Maybe it will all hurt like hell, but maybe, you will all get to have healthy love if you face the music.  What bigger thing are you running from when you worry needlessly about things that don’t really matter?  If she is healthy and her soul is intact, a triple D and some botox really isn’t a problem.  If she is miserable and suicidal, her collagen addiction isn’t the source.  It’s a symptom.

Learn about addiction and what role you could be playing in hers.  Addiction doesn’t just involve the addict, it involves everyone, especially the one googling about the other person’s behavior.  You, Mom, are the codependent matriarch here. You learned this somewhere.  You need to get to that core and work on it.  Stop it.  The cycle can end here. 

By removing yourself from her scenario and focusing on your relationship with yourself, you become a better mother, friend, grandparent, partner, and human.  You become more proactive and are a better confidante.  You cannot love in a healthy way if you are codependent on someone else’s addiction.  Whether it is a phase or a true addiction that your adult daughter is going through, if you want to guide her, you need to be centered and healthy yourself.  You cannot control, only share yourself.  The only thing more beautiful than a chick in a nest is a bird flying free.

Let it be her idea to improve herself, Mom, and in the meantime, focus on you.  If she thinks that physical perfection will bring her happiness, it’s you who can show her inner happiness takes work, time, discomfort, and the ability to take responsibility for our internal shortcomings.  It means working on our weaknesses until we become strong in those areas instead.  How can you show her?  Start the process yourself.

Tips for a Smooth, Splotchless Butt

Ass pimples are just kind of par for the course for dancers.  The stage is dirty, the chairs are dirty, and men who never wash their jeans are dirty.  The friction of rubbing our butts on laps causes all kinds of little abrasions in the skin, which makes it super easy for bacteria to get in there and fester.  You can’t very well work with huge pimples on your ass, and although some people do it, I don’t recommend it.  Besides looking unappealing, zits are technically already infected, so exposing them to an environment that likely has MRSA on every surface.  Instead, it is best to avoid getting butt pimples in the first place.

Every hour I go back into the dressing room for 5 minutes (if I can) to freshen up, wipe down, and drop my money off in my locker.  The very first thing I do is wipe down my butt and my thighs with witch hazel, $2.00 at the convenience store, and one of the most integral parts of your stripper kit.  The astringent dries up any active acne, and it is antibacterial, so it cleans up anything sitting on the top of the skin.

I also shower as SOON as I get home.  I use yellow liquid dial soap on my butt, chest, and legs to kill bacteria.  Do not sleep in your bed with the strip club still on you.  Bathe, it’s important.  In the day, you can wash your butt with any cheap salicylic (acne) face wash or plain soap, but avoid oils and things with fragrance.   I like salicylic wash because it is gentler than a washcloth or loofah as far as exfoliating goes, and you can apply with your fingers so you aren't rubbing any cloth that has had the opportunity to gather bacteria on your bum.  You can just apply it with your fingers and let it sit for 45 seconds to a few minutes.  You can gently rub it if it feels right.  

If you already have a butt break out, grab some diaper rash cream and slather it on before bed.  When you wake up you will be super smooth!  

Stripper Bodies: Strength vs. Flexibility

By Dre Dee

Image: Don Q Photography

The answer of course is that they are both important!  You can be flexible without being strong and you can be strong without being flexible, however, both of these scenarios will set you up to get injured.  It is important to find a balance of being flexible AND strong, especially in pole dance, which is one of the reasons I find it so challenging sometimes.

Honestly I feel a little weird writing this blog because as you can see in my pictures – I am not very flexible (yet)!  It’s something I have always struggled with – even when I did dance when I was young I was never able to do the splits.  As soon as I turned 18 I started doing strength training and cardio in gyms and have always been very strong.  The stretching I did was pretty minimal – obesity runs in both sides of my family so my priority was always to get my weight training and cardio in to maintain a healthy weight.  When I started doing yoga and then pole, I started realizing just how limited my flexibility is.  Unfortunately I have a full time job so it’s still hard to find time to add flexibility training in when I am already spending so much time doing interval training, yoga, and pole, but I am working on developing some flexibility programs and workouts (check out my Yoga Shoulder Stretching Sequence) and scheduling them into my weekly workout routine more.

A lot of my knowledge about flexibility and strength training actually comes from my training as a therapist and years of working with many different types of patients.  One of the areas I specialize in is strokes and brain injuries.  When a person has a stroke or brain injury, muscle tone is often affected – the person may have decreased muscle tone, which makes the arm and/or leg limp and flaccid, or he or she may have increased tone, making it difficult or impossible for the muscles to relax.  One of my many goals with this type of patient is to strengthen the arm if the muscle tone is weak or stretch the joint to increase range of motion if there is increased muscle tone.  In Cleo the Hurricane‘s Rockin’ Legs N Abs (which is a GREAT hip flexibility program – I mean have you seen that woman’s splits??), she talks about PNF stretches.  I was so excited when I heard her use this term because that’s a technique I’ve been using with my neurological patients for years.  For some reason it never occurred to me to use it on myself.

There are many additional techniques to use as well.  The more I learn and the different exercises I see, the more I realize that flexibility is just as much about strength as it is about stretching.  One key technique is to strengthen the opposing muscles to whatever area you are tight in.  For example, if your inner thighs are super tight in center splits, you want to strengthen the outer hip muscles as much as possible.  Fast, active range of motion or resistance exercises are most effective (for example, to increase range of motion in front splits , when all fours put an ankle weight on one ankle and squeeze that heel towards ceiling to strengthen your glutes.  This will help to increase flexibility in the hip flexor).

Here are some key points to remember when working flexibility.

1) Do not compare yourself to others.  Flexibility depends on sooo many factors – your age, your natural flexibility level, muscle tone, what types of exercises you have done in your lifetime, and many other things.  That being said, almost anyone can dramatically increase his or her flexibility level with proper training.  The down side – usually the more strong and tight your joints are, the longer it will take and the more work you will need to do.

2) Stay consistent.  Your muscle memory retains information from previous sessions and when you have too long in between sessions of working on that particular area, you can lose the hard earned progress that you have made.  You should stretch whatever area you are working at least once or twice a week to see progress.

3) Warm up!  It’s very important to be thoroughly warmed up in your joints before you try to stretch – especially if you tend to be pretty tight.  Properly warming up maximizes the benefits of stretches and prevents injuries.  You can check out my videos for warmup and stretching sequences for various body parts.

4) Flexibility takes time.  Be patient with yourself. Don’t force it.  Trying to force flexibility is a quick way to get injured which can set you back months or years in your progress.  Not worth it!

5) Breathe.  Using your breath is the best way to achieve maximum benefits from static stretches.  Try to relax your muscles during the exhales.  Take a deep breath and hang in there – it’s worth it in the end!

Stripper Bodies: Common Pole Dance Injuries and What To Do About Them

by Dre Dee

No matter how carefully you warm up, or how much you stretch after you’re done with your pole dancing workout, you’re bound to injure yourself at some point while doing pole tricks. Although injury is inevitable, how you care for your injury can make all the difference in whether the injury heals or becomes an ongoing problem.

Here are some common issues strippers and pole dancers face when working the pole and how to care for them.*

1) Pulled Muscle (Muscle Strain)

Muscle strain is usually an acute injury (meaning the onset is sudden) and occurs when a muscle is torn. Strains are usually caused from stretching a muscle too far, but can also be caused by exerting the muscle too forcefully, such as lifting something too heavy or pulling too forcefully. In pole, commonly pulled muscles include muscles of the neck, upper back, and arms.

What it feels like: Pain from a muscle strain is usually present right after the injury occurs and is sharp. The severity of pain can range from mild to severe. In more severe strains, bruising and swelling can occur.

What to do:

– Rest the injured area for 1-5 days, depending on how badly the muscle was injured and pain level.

– Consider an anti-inflammatory to help reduce swelling and pain. Ibuprofen is a common anti-inflammatory and I’ve been told to take 600 mg in order to have an anti-inflammatory effect. Your dosage should be determined by your doctor as dosages can be different for different people. Generally, you should not take more than 2400 mg per day. Taking Ibuprofen with milk or food can avoid stomach issues that can occur.

– Avoid immobilizing the injury – gentle active range of motion and stretching with little to no pain is best. Be sure to move the injured area slowly and avoid movements that increase or cause pain.

2) Tendon or Ligament Strains

Tendon or ligament strains are generally more serious than muscle strains because ligaments and tendons take longer to heal. Tendons and ligaments connect muscle or bone to bone and have less blood flow to them than muscles do – this is why they take longer to heal. The length of time it takes for tendons or ligaments to heal obviously depends on how badly they were injured, where in the body they are located, and how much they are used during the healing process. Generally, it should take 4-6 weeks to heal if rested and stretched properly.

What to do:

The course of treatment for tendon or ligament strains can vary greatly. Generally, right after the injury RICE (Rest Ice Compression Elevation) is the best way to reduce initial inflammation. After inflammation subsides, alternating heat and cold, gentle stretching and active range of motion are best.

3) Wrist Pain

Wrist pain is very common in pole for obvious reasons, and is also a common symptom of floor work. To prevent wrist pain, remember to always warm up your wrists before doing any level of pole and stretch them afterwards.  Also try to distribute your weight evenly when placing your hands flat on the stage.

What to do:

Follow the RICE protocol as long as pain and/or inflammation is present (Rest Ice Compression Elevation). Depending on what is injured, it may take a couple days to a few weeks for pain to completely go away. An elastic wrist support is a good way to provide compression and reduce inflammation, especially if you have to continue using the wrist. Be careful not to leave a wrist support on for too long though.

One type of wrist injury is nerve compression. There are three nerves in the wrist – the ulnar, median, and radial nerves.

Compression of the ulnar nerve is common in the bottom hand in bracket or split grips. Tingling or numbness are usually signs of a nerve compression or issue. The best thing to do is to avoid movements that are going to cause further compression, follow RICE protocol, and give the nerve enough time to heal before attempting further activity.

Performing gentle wrist stretches and active range of motion may also help. It is important to have ongoing or persistent pain in the wrist looked at by a doctor.

For All Injuries:

Remember to take it slow as you return to activities and work on strengthening and stretching the affected area gradually. Once fully healed, it is important to continue to strengthen and stretch the injured area to avoid future injuries.

Do you have an injury you have a question about? E-mail me.

Also, don’t forget to check the site later as I add more info!

*Disclaimer: Always consult your doctor before taking any medications or following this or any medical advice. A doctor is the only one qualified to diagnose your injury and decide on treatment.