The Version of Us Stress Reveals
The Chair Was My First Classroom
After almost forty years behind the chair, I’ve come to believe that a salon is one of the best places in the world to study human behavior. You see people at their happiest, their most vulnerable, and sometimes under an incredible amount of pressure. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that stress has a way of revealing the strategies we use to protect ourselves.
Which brings me to the time I mentally renamed an entire wedding party “Jurassic Park” by the time they left the salon.
Now, before anyone thinks that I’ve been secretly nicknaming clients for forty years…I haven’t. Well, not for forty.
Expectations
I started my career specializing in wedding makeup before eventually adding bridal hair, and for years weddings became one of my favorite parts of the job. There was always a different kind of energy in the salon. Music playing. Coffee brewing. Bridesmaids laughing while someone inevitably forgot their earring or spilled a mimosa. The bride would be smiling one minute and tearing up the next, surrounded by the people she loved most. It felt hopeful. Exciting. Like everyone was getting ready for something much bigger than just looking beautiful.
Most wedding mornings were exactly like that. This one was different. When I think back, it started the day of the bridal consultation.
The soon-to-be bride came to my salon about two weeks before her wedding for her hair and makeup consultation. She had a name I’d never seen before, and I remember practicing it over and over in my head before she arrived because I was determined not to mispronounce it.
Foreshadowing…I absolutely mispronounced it and forgot what her name was.
She had this natural, crunchy, earthy kind of energy. No fuss. No drama. She seemed genuinely relaxed and easy to be around. Everything she described came back to one word:
Natural-it was the entire concept of what she wanted.
She wanted her hair down in soft, flowing curls. She wanted makeup that looked like she wasn’t wearing any. More than anything, she wanted to look like herself—just a little more polished.
I explained that wedding makeup is always a balancing act. The camera has a way of washing people out, so the makeup almost always has to be a little more than what you would wear every day. I’m pretty sure she never wore makeup, so I had to be careful because any amount could feel like too much. The goal isn’t to make someone look completely different, unless that’s what they want. Usually, the goal is to enhance their natural beauty in photographs they’ll hopefully treasure for the rest of their lives.
No pressure at all.
We spent the morning doing a full trial. I created hairstyles and makeup exactly as she wanted, while taking notes and photographs along the way. Every curl, every product, every detail was documented so I could recreate it exactly on her wedding day.
I knew there would be five bridesmaids. Three were in my chair, two were with another stylist, and none of them were having makeup—just hair. It was a schedule we’d carefully planned during the consultation, and on paper it should have run like clockwork. I gave the bride one very important instruction for her bridesmaids: they needed to arrive with clean, dry hair, with a little styling product already in it. I explained why those three things mattered, and I remember emphasizing each one of them more than once.
So, two weeks later the wedding day arrived. I got to the salon an hour early, just like I always did. I set up a little goodie bar with bagels, croissants, orange juice, champagne, coffee, and water. I laid out my hair and makeup supplies, checked my notes and photos from the trial one last time, and made sure everything was in place.
The other stylist and I were organized and on schedule.
About thirty minutes after their scheduled arrival time— and two phone calls later— they walked in.
Somewhere in my head, David Attenborough quietly began narrating the scene.
At the time, I thought I was about to style a wedding party. I had no idea I was about to watch four completely different stress responses unfold in front of me— including my own.
Stress Doesn’t Look the Same on Everyone
The first bridesmaid sat down in my chair with soaking wet hair.
I blinked
I’d been very clear with the bride about how the bridesmaids needed to arrive, but there she was… and then I heard the narration:
Emerging from the moist undergrowth, the Damp Raptor appears. Seeking assistance in transforming her saturated curls into a smooth chignon.
Now let me be clear, my first thought was straight up judgment.
How do you show up to a wedding with soaking wet hair after being told exactly what to do? She had just put me 30 minutes behind before I finished blow-drying her hair, but I got it done and figured I could catch up on the next bridesmaid.
Looking back now, coaching has taught me something I didn’t understand then. When someone violates one of our expectations, our brains almost instantly start explaining who they are instead of wondering what happened.
While she might be operating from a completely different set of expectations, we tell ourselves a story that:
She’s irresponsible.
She doesn’t care.
She’s inconsiderate.
Maybe those things are true. Maybe they weren’t.
What I know now is that judgment closes the conversation, but curiosity opens it.
And as it turned out, the Damp Raptor was only the first reminder that people carry stress in very different ways.
____________________________________________________________________________________
When the second bridesmaid, the maid of honor, sat down, everything looked fine at first. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and I could see it had a natural curl to it.
Then I removed the elastic. Her hair exploded into a tangled, oily knot.
Imagine Bob Marley on a humid day. Maybe a little less. Maybe not.
I took a slow, shallow breath, picked up my comb, and started detangling as gently as I could. I’d made exactly one pass through one lock of hair when she suddenly bent forward, put her face in her hands, and stopped moving.
I couldn’t reach her hair any longer, so I waited a few seconds.
“Are you okay?”
Nothing.
I asked again.
Nothing.
I reached over and gently touched her shoulder.
Silence.
At this point, I couldn’t waste any more time, so I yelled out, “Bride!” because I obviously couldn’t remember her name anymore and couldn’t stop to look it up.
The bride knelt at face level to the maid of honor and asked softly, “What’s wrong?”
She slowly lifted her face from her hands.
With her eyes completely dry, she murmured with a straight face, “Nothing, she pulled my hair.”
Somewhere in the distance, Attenborough cleared his throat. “The Tear-a-dactyl has entered the ecosystem. What’s fascinating about this dino is that they have developed a survival strategy for emotional display with surprisingly little moisture”
The bride looked at me with reproach and asked me to be more gentle.
Once again, my first reaction wasn’t curiosity. It was total annoyance. Are you kidding me?
I gently gathered all of her gnarled hair, pinned it up on her head in what could generously be described as a hairstyle, and never used a comb on her again.
Now I was only 15 minutes behind schedule.
Thinking about her now, I realize there was something I sensed even then, although I didn’t have the language for it yet.
After years of doing bridal hair and makeup, I’d noticed a pattern. There always seemed to be one person in the wedding party whose behavior, intentionally or not, pulled attention away from the bride. At the time, I probably would have called it jealousy.
But maybe it’s more complicated than that.
Major life transitions don’t just change the person getting married. They reorganize relationships. Weddings shift roles, expectations, and a person’s sense of where they belong. Someone who has always been the closest friend, the sister everyone depended on, or the person who felt most important in the bride’s life may suddenly find themselves in a different place. That shift can stir up emotions they don’t fully understand themselves.
Was that what was happening to her? I honestly don’t know.
But years later, I realized that the maid of honor never answered me. She only answered the bride.
Under stress, we often turn toward the people our nervous system experiences as safest. Whether that’s what was happening in the moment, I can’t say for certain. But it reminded me that the person someone responds to isn’t always the person speaking. Sometimes it’s the person who represents familiarity, comfort, or connection.
I don’t think her moment was really about the comb-I swear I didn’t pull her hair- I think she needed something I couldn’t give her.
At the time, I thought I’d solved the problem. Now I realize I only solved the hairstyle.
____________________________________________________________________________________
The last bridesmaid’s hair was clean, dry, and smooth. Hallelujah! For a brief moment, I thought maybe the universe was throwing me a lifeline.
I smiled and asked, “So how would you like to wear your hair for the day?”
Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear a single word. So I leaned in a little closer.
She answered again. Still nothing.
Somewhere in the distance, the narration returned.
The Whisper-saurus moves cautiously along the perimeter of the park. Communication is attempted, though rarely detected by the human ear.
She was like the boomboxing girl in the movie Pitch Perfect who ate her twin in the womb.
Eventually, through a combination of lip reading, pantomiming, and what I can only describe as hairstylist intuition, we managed to agree on a hairstyle.
In retrospect, it’s easy to notice the loud people in a room. The people who cry or argue.
The ones that demand attention. But stress has a quieter side too.
Some people shrink. Some stop speaking. And some become almost invisible
The Whisper-saurus reminded me that withdrawal is just as much a stress response as anger or tears.
But thankfully she wasn’t difficult, just very hard to hear.
Bridezilla and the Stories We Tell About Ourselves
Surviving the Damp Raptor, the Tear-a-dactyl, the Whisper-saurus, and only being 15 minutes behind schedule felt like a miracle.
I quickly set up my makeup and recreated what we did at the trial. The bride was pleased by it, but I could tell she was beginning to feel stressed as she kept looking at the time.
I then began to curl her hair, and she whipped her head around and asked me, “Why are you using that curling iron? You didn’t use it at the trial.”
I explained that it was the second iron I used because the first one was too big and her curls would fall out, halfway through her day.
Her calm, laid-back demeanor completely changed, and she started questioning me and complaining that nothing was the same as it was in her trial. I showed her the pictures but assured her that I could change whatever she wanted.
She was on the phone a lot; I get it—it’s a big day and a lot of people are vying for her attention—she kept getting up and getting something out of her bag on the couch. Asked me several times for more champagne while continuously moving her head while there’s a hot iron attached to her hair.
The third time she asked for more champagne, I just got the bottle and set it in front of her after refilling her glass.
I used a larger curling iron as she requested, no longer worrying about the curls not holding, while catching up to our original time frame.
Her demeanor changed. She became rude and started questioning everything I was doing, even though it looked even better than the trial. After almost spending three hours with this group, my stress response was increasing into anger.
I felt myself becoming more annoyed and knew I needed to walk away for a few minutes. So I excused myself, went into the backroom, and shut the door.
I stood there for about a minute and then began taking in slow breaths and releasing them even slower. I need to calm myself down. As I was breathing, I focused on objects in the room, became very present in my surroundings, body, and in my mind, which regulated my nervous system.
I went back out there, finished everything to her liking, and they finally left.
For weeks afterward, I kept thinking about how different she had seemed during the trial. I found myself wondering if the easygoing, laid-back woman I had met two weeks earlier had simply been pretending.
I don’t think that anymore.
Psychology has taught me that we all carry an identity- a story about who we believe ourselves to be.
My story was simple. I was prepared, organized; I paid attention to details. I knew what I was doing.
So when she questioned the curling iron, my nervous system didn’t hear a question about a tool. It heard a question about my competence.
That’s identity threat in plain English.
Our identities often feel stable—until they're threatened.
We all carry stories about who we are. "I'm easygoing." "I'm patient." "I'm not controlling." Most days, those stories fit. But stress has a way of testing whether they're descriptions...or aspirations.
The bride wasn’t the only one protecting her identity that morning. She was most likely trying to protect the image of the perfect wedding she’d spent months imagining, and I was protecting this image of myself that I was known for.
And that’s how our reactions often become bigger than the moment itself.
Closing
One of the biggest lessons I've learned, both behind the chair and through coaching, is that people usually make sense once you understand what they're trying to protect.
Sometimes it's their role.
Sometimes it's their relationships.
Sometimes it's their competence.
Sometimes it's simply their sense of belonging.
We may never know exactly what's happening inside another person.
But we can choose to become a little less certain...and a little more curious.
And maybe that's where our Original Self begins to show up—not when everything goes according to plan, but when the plan falls apart.
I hope something in this episode resonated with you. If you are interested in working with me, you can find all of my information in this episode’s notes.
Thanks so much for listening.
I'll see you next time, and have a great day.
