Podcast Transcript

Renfrew Conference Mini-Series Episode 3: Our Hair, Our Heads, & Our Hearts: Hair Stories & Eating Disorder Recovery, Part 1

[Bouncy theme music plays.]

INTRO

Sam: Hey, I’m Sam.

Ashley: Hi, I’m Ashley and you’re listening to All Bodies. All Foods. presented by The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders. We want to create a space for all bodies to come together authentically and purposefully to discuss various areas that impact us on a cultural and relational level.

Sam: We believe that all bodies and all foods are welcome. We would love for you to join us on this journey. Let’s learn together.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EPISODE

Sam: Body image disturbance and body image dissatisfaction are well documented risk factors and hallmark features of most clinical eating disorders. So, of course, body image work is a crucial component in eating disorder treatment. But maybe there’s one part of our bodies that we’re not talking about enough in eating disorder treatment. Is hair the missing piece in body image work? Can hair be a way to access and explore complex inner experiences both conscious and unconscious? Can a hairstylist play an important role in the healing process? Does our hair tell a story? Well, Margo Maine and Charlie Bishop say that it absolutely does. And it’s time for us to see the connection between our hair, our heads, and our hearts. Our hair stories can reveal historical, cultural, social, spiritual, and political information about all of us. It can be a vehicle for personal transformation, a form of communication, a canvas for self-expression and even a powerful source of motivation and a reflection of progress and recovery. As mental health providers, how do we uncover these hair stories in our sessions and how do they help people heal? To find out these answers we sat down with our presenters Margo Maine and Charlie Bishop. Let’s learn more about their fascinating presentation titled, The Language of Hair: Multicultural Perspectives.

EPISODE

Ashley: Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of All Bodies. All Food. This is a very special episode. We are at the Renfrew Foundation Conference 2023!

Sam: In-person, finally!

Ashley: In-person!

Sam: After years of virtual.

Ashley: It’s so exciting! Tt really has been like three or four years since we’ve seen everybody. And it has been so refreshing, hasn’t it?

Sam: It’s been wonderful. I forgot the magic of being together. There’s just something so special about it. I got chills a few times being here. I’m like, oh, I don’t get this virtually, like the power of just being together. It’s incredible.

Ashey: It’s been really nice not only to see Renfrew staff, but to see our friends that we’re used to seeing at least once a year for so many years. And so, with that, I’m going to introduce our very first guest, Ms. Margo Maine, PhD, FAED, CEDS, the National Eating Disorders Association founder and founding fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders. She is the author of eight books, most recently, Hair Tells a Story: Hers, Yours and Ours. She is an international eating disorders expert, and she practices in Connecticut. Dr. Maine loves getting up early to celebrate the earth. I loved that line in your bio. (laughter)

Sam: I like that.

Margo: Yeah, you know, I included that in my bio a couple of years ago because a bio shouldn’t just be factual stuff. It should give you a flavor of the person. And I really do love the earth and I really celebrate every day. Also, I just want to comment about you talking about the conference for those of us who have come to every conference, I missed one. The first one. I didn’t know about it, if you can believe that. Yeah, I don’t know if I must have been on a different planet at the time anyway. I’ve been to it every year and presented most years and for many of us, this is a ritual every fall. And I hate when the summer begins to end, but we all say the same thing, then we have Renfrew to look forward to and you know, many of us have come year after year. It’s a celebratory time. We all are learning together, celebrating the field, the advances in the field. It comes right before Thanksgiving and the holidays. It’s kind of a very, very emotional time for all of us. So, I think everybody is really thrilled to be here this year. So, thank you to Renfrew and the staff for pulling off.

Ashely: Definitely, thank you so much. And, and right, you’ve been a longtime supporter of us. And how many of these conferences have you spoken at?

Margo: Only a couple I haven’t spoken at. I always have something like, you know, I wrote eight books, like there’s always something to talk about usually. And I’ve also done, you know, a few other things, collaborating with other people. Renfrew has been a place for me to come and share my viewpoints and you know what I’m excited about and to learn so much from other people as well. It’s been a really important part of my professional life, and you need to know that.

Sam: Thank you so much for saying so. You are speaking at this conference, The Language of Hair: Multicultural Perspectives. You believe that hair tells a story. The hair story… (laughter)

Margo: Yes!

Sam: And that clinicians can learn a lot from their clients and clients can learn about themselves by knowing their hair story. What is a hair story?

Margo: Well, first of all, you know, when people hear that, when I was writing about the book, the book about hair and that I did write a book about hair. The first response is “what a book about hair” as if like, that’s so stupid. And then within 30 seconds they’re telling me a story about their hair. Once you start thinking about it, rather obvious, you know, hair is like a symbol of ourselves, it’s the first thing people see when they look at us, when a baby is born, the first thing people talk about is what kind of hair the little kid had or if they’re still bald. So, it’s an entryway into life. And hair is used culturally, ethnically to represent certain things. We are always using our hair to show transitions in our lives. Lots of times if a woman is going through a divorce or separation or loses a partner, the first thing that changes is their hair. Hair is the way we can transform ourselves like that. And if it doesn’t work, we can re-transform ourselves. You know, I started work working on this book probably in the early days of the first Obama administration and then I wrote a couple of other books and got off task, but I was always still thinking about it. Then the pandemic came and without Renfrew to come to, I had more time, we all had more time. And also the other thing that happened during the pandemic is that many women had to face their hair in a different way. First of all, we were looking at ourselves on Zoom and other platforms all the time. Facetime and all that.

Sam: That Zoom dysmorphia. It was a term in the media.

Margo: Yeah, we couldn’t avoid what we looked like and women’s hair appointments were interrupted. I had the last hair appointment with my stylist before we went off. And I’m not high maintenance with my hair, but I do have my hair colored, you know, generally once a month. And so we went a whole bunch of months without it being colored. And many women are much more dependent on their hair and their stylist and all that. For African American women who are usually getting their hair treated to get rid of the curl and to straighten it because there’s pressure on them to look different than their natural hair does. For a lot of women, it was really a critical time. Like, what am I going to do with this? And for some women, it was a growing time. They were able to make peace with their hair naturally. For other women, it was a horrible time. So, I think the pandemic alone brought up a lot of issues for women. I became interested in hair as I watched my patients with their struggles with hair, obviously, for our patients who restrict so much don’t keep good nutrition in their bodies. One of the first things that goes is the protein for your hair. You’re just not going to have it going there so your hair isn’t going to grow. So sooner or later it starts looking thin and straggly and unhealthy. For a number of my patients that has been like the deciding factor when they decide to kind of turn the corner and start to work on their recovery. I’ve had a number of hairstylists be key people in the early decisions to start working on recovery, which is really wild. I’ve also had patients who like, I’m thinking of a couple of them who as they were getting better, decided to get a new haircut because they want to celebrate getting better, but it didn’t come out right. I’ve had patients become suicidal about their hair. My hair has never been that important to me and I really didn’t understand that. So, I could see in my patients what it meant to them. But also, as I, you know, I’m somebody who watches women in general, like I see what happens for a lot of women, hair is a really, really important part of our lives. For a lot of women, they feel better about their hair than any other aspect of body image. A lot of women have told me that hair is the one thing where they don’t compete with other women. It’s kind of a safe thing. So, I just have found it fascinating and guess what nobody else has written about hair.

Sam: You even said you really feel like it’s the missing piece when we’re talking about body image.

Margo: Yeah. Look in any book, you know, Tom Cash wrote a lot of the books about body image. Any book about body image, look up hair and it’s not there.

Sam: Hair is so important, to so many people.

Ashley: I was going to say, I distinctly remember my sister and I were in middle school at the same time, I was in the fifth grade, and she was in the sixth and she decided she was going to cut bangs.

All: (gasps and laughter)

Ashley: I know. Mom did not know. I’m sure we’ve all been there, done that, right? But she cut them very short. And she really was depressed for like two weeks. I mean, my mom had to pull her out of bed to get her to go back to school. I mean that piece of our body image, we own our hair and, you’re right, we can change it and we can change it again but when we cut it, it does have to grow back.

Margo: And you know, you mentioned cutting bangs, that’s like a developmental milestone for a lot of little girls. It’s usually younger than 4, 5, or 6 and mom isn’t around, they go get the scissors and they do that. And it’s often a really horrible time for the mom, you know, parents like their kids to look good and all of a sudden this kid doesn’t look good and it’s kind of embarrassing and it’s a step towards autonomy. I mean, what your hair looks like is something you’re saying to the world.

Ashley: Yes. It’s your form of expression, I feel like we can own, like you said, better than typically anything else on our bodies.

Margo: Right. Absolutely. It’s quick and it’s easy. And of course, if we were living in a different culture, some of the mid-eastern cultures where you have to be, your hair has to be covered. And you know women have lost their lives because they didn’t have their hair covered. A year ago, Mahsa Amini was stopped by the morality police in Iran and ended up dying within a couple of days of custody because her hair had fallen out from underneath her scarf. And in the year since then, there have been tremendous protests realizing how women are oppressed because of their hair and those cultures. Iran made stricter rules about hair covering. And just a couple of weeks ago, another woman was killed by the police in Iran. So, we in the United States have so much freedom and we have to realize that. But hair is, I’ve become, you know, we were talking in sort of a light way about hair, but I also see it as a very serious feminist issue and a human rights issue. We should be able to decide what our hair looks like.

Ashley: Yeah. Well, and I’m thinking about, you know, honestly, people of color and marginalized communities who have been expected to present, like, um, I think I saw on the news recently, a teenager, a teenage boy in Texas got expelled because he was wearing braids.

Margo: And he got expelled one week after Texas passed the Crown Act that stands for creating respectful and open workplaces for people around natural hair. And it’s a national movement, 23 states have passed it. We have federal legislation pending. You know, it takes a while to get it through, but it’s about no one should be able to be fired because they don’t have their hair a certain way. But currently in 27 states in our country, you can be fired because your hair doesn’t look the way they want your hair to look. And that boy who was expelled from school, that happened after the state had passed the law. So, and it happens much less for boys than it does for girls. But it is an issue and it is a way in which we are expressing ourselves and we should have that right.

Ashley: Definitely. Well, Margo, thank you so much. It is really such a pleasure to connect with you and, and we can’t wait to hear your talk. At some point, we’d love to invite you back for a full episode if that sounds good.

Margo: I’m there.

Sam: Yes, because I have so many more questions.

Margo: I think we could have some fun with this.

Ashley: Thank you so much.

Margo: I just hope my hair looks okay.

Ashley: You and me both.

Margo: Thanks guys.

Sam/Ashley: Thank you.

OUTRO

Ashley: Thank you for listening with us today on All Bodies. All Foods. presented by The Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders.

Sam: We’re looking forward to you joining us next time as we continue these conversations.

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