Where I End and My Client Begins
finding our edges while holding space
Someone sent me a note recently that really resonated with me:
“I think there’s something really powerful about learning how to be there for those moments while still knowing where our edges are.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, especially as it relates to us.
Think about what we actually do all day. Someone sits in our chair and tells us about their divorce, their jobs, their kid and family. We listen. We stay steady. We keep cutting.
Most of us were never taught where we end and our client begins. We feel it so deeply, we often absorb it, appointment after appointment. It can really build in us.
I think this is a real piece of why we burn out. Not just the hours on our feet or the standing all day. It’s the emotional weight we take home without realizing we picked it up in the first place. We can lose the line between what’s theirs and what’s ours.
And I’ve noticed this doesn’t just happen in the salon. It is in our personal lives, too.
Recently I had a hard conversation with someone who got a little defensive. My old pattern would have been to match their energy, to let my own nervous system ramp up right along with theirs. But since reading that note, something shifted. I remembered I have my own edge. I could feel myself, in real time, coming back to my own center. And from there I could actually hold compassion, for them and for myself, instead of getting pulled into it.
I don’t have this fully figured out. I still absorb things I shouldn’t. But twenty five years in, all the work I’ve done on myself, all the tools I’ve picked up along the way, they showed up for me in that moment. I had enough awareness not to get swept into a fight of two elevated nervous systems.
Here’s the part I want us to sit with: when we practice this in our own lives, it becomes second nature behind the chair too. We start to know, almost instinctively, what belongs to us and what belongs to the person in our chair.
Holding space for our clients is one of the greatest honors of this work. It’s sacred, and most of us wouldn’t trade it.
But sacred work still requires a container.
aTake care of yours.