As it seems, Holly Madison was not almost as joyful as she gave the impression to be whereas residing within the Playboy Mansion — irrespective of what number of huge smiles she flashed on digital camera.
The 43-year-old former Playboy star has been reflecting on what it was prefer to stay as one in every of Hugh Hefner‘s girlfriends at the iconic estate in the Holmby Hills section of El Lay. And with Holly living there from 2001 all the way through 2008, there’s little doubt a LOT to mirror on.
Related: Holly & Bridget Marquardt Talk Hugh’s Strangest Habit In Emotional Convo With His Son!
Speaking to People about it this week, Madison — who was simply 21 years previous when she moved in — opened up about a problem we by no means anticipated from her. She believes that the pressures of residing within the Playboy Mansion triggered extreme physique dysmorphia inside her. Thinking again to Hugh’s very particular magnificence requirements on the time, Holly mentioned:
“I would definitely say that living in the mansion created a body dysmorphia for me because I was always kind of wondering what’s wrong with me. [Hefner] had a way of making me feel like I wasn’t pretty enough, and I would look around to everybody else and constantly be wondering, what’s so different about them and why are they so much better?”
Of course, physique dysmorphia is excess of simply “I don’t like the way I look today.” Per Johns Hopkins University, physique dysmorphic dysfunction (BDD) is a psychological well being dysfunction through which worries about one’s physique “interfere with your ability to function normally” to the purpose of “extreme measures” being taken, like “repeated cosmetic surgical procedures to correct the perceived flaw.” It’s a severe situation!
For Holly, who has been very open prior to now about getting each a nostril job and a boob job, that feeling hit house whereas residing at Hef’s place:
“It was constantly like, what can I do? What can I do? What can I change? How can I look better?”
She defined:
“When I look at what the typical Playboy bunny looks like with the blonde hair and big boobs, I always wanted to look like that. That was just something I would see and it would resonate with me, and it wasn’t to impress any certain person. I just wanted to look like that, and that’s what attracted me to the Playboy brand in the first place.”
Wow. So stunning to listen to coming from Holly. If something, she’s at all times appeared to us to be that archetypal Playmate. And even she felt this manner…
Even although Holly admits she went beneath the knife to have cosmetic surgery executed “for myself” at first, residing on the mansion shortly pushed upon her a really unfavorable view of her physique — irrespective of how a lot she had executed. Holly mentioned:
“I could be looking like a plastic surgery nightmare right now! Because it was just constantly me wondering, what’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?”
Leaving the mansion in 2008 was additionally extraordinarily troublesome for her. Fleeing to enter “survival” mode whereas feeling “traumatized” by seven demanding years of residing with Hef left Holly a shell of herself:
“I was just in this fight or flight state for about four months, just trying to get my feet off the ground because I knew I had to. It was like, build a career for yourself right now before people forget you were on a show. So I did that, and then I was just working my ass off for three years straight.”
She even is aware of the precise second she found out simply how sad she’d been:
“I remember I was looking through this Girls Next Door coffee table book that we put out when the show was still on because I was looking for a certain outfit I wore for a throwback photo on Instagram, and I was looking at pictures of myself and I was like, ‘holy s**t, I’m fake smiling in all these pictures.’ Nobody else would be able to tell that. They’d just be like, ‘Oh, you’re smiling.’ But I know myself, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I was so miserable.’ I remembered how miserable I was every day, and then that just all came crashing down.”
Wow…
Thankfully, it now looks like Holly has gotten previous these points. The former playmate — who shares kids Rainbow Aurora, 10, and Forest Leonardo, 7 together with her ex-husband Pasquale Rotella — selected to finish the interview on a excessive observe:
“I feel like I’m on the other side of it. It definitely took me a couple years to kind of get deprogrammed and get out of the Playboy fog and realize what that relationship was really all about and quit trying to glorify it or justify it to other people. I’m kind of hyper independent now, but I’ve been in a relationship for four years on and off. I’m happy.”
That’s fairly a hopeful ending, for positive.
Thoughts, Perezcious readers??
[Image via MEGA/WENN]
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