Secret Hair Puller Rids Herself Of Wigs And Shame

For more information about Katie Bannon’s work visit her site. For more information about Trichotillomania go to the Trichotillomania Learning Center.

Katie Bannon has lived a double life, one that’s involved hiding her bald spots under a wig. When she got to college her freshman year, she shared a dorm room with two roommates. At night she’d sleep in her wig.

KATIE: Uh, and didn't sleep very well. Obviously they have metal, the ones I was wearing at the time have metal clips that you buckle into your existing hair. So they pull on your hair. 

Katie memorized their class schedules and woke up before them. 

KATIE: The wig would be a mess, all tangled. Sometimes it would be a skew or completely off my head. And I started the elaborate routine of showering, which involved me ducking through the entire shower because the shower walls were low enough where you could see people's heads. Wow. And so I would duck in the shower. I would wash the wig first and then I put it in this bag. This delicates bag that I used as my wig bag that I hung in the shower. And then I would crouch down and wash my actual scalp. I would run back to my room from the bathroom because when the wigs wet, you can see the netting. And would go and lock myself in the closet to dry it before my roommates woke up.

This is a story about what happens to our shame when we stop hiding. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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Growing up Katie Bannon was top of her class, laser focused on academics, but often felt anxious about her grades.

KATIE: I always told them I thought I had done a lot worse than I knew I did, uh, because I didn't want the bar to be set so high because the worst thing was to think of disappointing them. So I would tell them that I was anticipating a C when I knew I had an a, um, and that was something I got very used to and continued to struggle with is sort of trying to set the expectation low.

She was raised by overachieving parents north of Boston. Her mom was a nurse, her dad a business consultant. Katie says on the outside he appeared confident, but on the inside he struggled with low self esteem. 

He had high expectations of Katie and her brother in school. When report cards arrived in the mail, her dad would open them first.

KATIE: We worked really hard to impress my dad.

Her dad prepared her to apply to a prestigious private middle school.

KATIE: He coached me for hours and hours about my interview skills. And I still remember his ballpoint pen that he would use in laying out here are the three things you're going to bring up. And here's how you're gonna talk about yourself. And this is how you're gonna get into these schools…I felt like an adult at a very young age.

During one school break her parents drove them to Cape Cod on the coast of Massachusetts. Katie was eight years old.

KATIE: I had pulled out a pair of binoculars and looked through the wrong side of them. So not the front lenses, but the other side, which created a magnification of my own eyebrows. And it was the first time I saw my eyebrows up close and I was absolutely fascinated.

A few days later Katie came down with a bad head cold and stayed home from school.

KATIE: And I was lying on a couch. It was a green couch in our living room watching a TV show…it was called Caitlin's way on Nickelodeon. 

She started to think about her magnified eyebrows.

KATIE: And my hand sort of drifted towards my face. And I remember feeling a hair that seemed pricker than the others. It felt out of place. And I pulled it out And 30 minutes went by all of a sudden the show was over and I felt like it had been a minute. And I had very little awareness of what had happened. It was like being in a dreamlike state, Almost half conscious. 

She walked to the mirror by the front door of the house. 

KATIE: Knowing that something had changed. There was, I knew that the moment I stepped in front of that mirror, there was no turning back. And I saw that about three quarters of my eyebrow was gone In the course of the half hour that I had been watching the show.

LAUREL: Were you surprised when you saw it?

KATIE: I was stunned. Uh, I think I knew that something had happened. There was an intuition in my body And I felt it because my face was on fire. Uh, I felt like viscerally something in my body had shifted, But I was shocked to see that something that had felt almost like a dream actually had consequences.  And I kind of pressed my face to the glass really close And it didn't seem like I was looking at me. It seemed like I was looking at a stranger.

When her mom found her she thought it might be a side effect of some sort of illness.

KATIE: And we ended up spending almost an entire year of me going to doctor's appointments, starting with my pediatrician, where I, I was tested for many different medical conditions. 

All the while she was actively hiding the hair pulling from her parents.

One blood test showed an abnormal reading for lupus which would explain hair loss.

KATIE: My parents had to wait two weeks for the test, those are some of the weeks that I have the most haunting memories from, because my parents were convinced that I had lupus and that I was gonna die. And I remember my mom had panic attacks in the bathroom room, And that was sort of my indication that I had done something horribly wrong.

It went on like this for a year, and still Katie didn’t tell them. Her mom was having panic attacks that were so severe she went to see a cardiologist and went to a health retreat center. While she was there, she spoke to a psychologist. It was then she learned Katie had what’s called trichotillomania.

KATIE: It was that psychologist who said, do you know about Trichotillomania? And my mom Googled it. …she found out it affects mostly young females. I looked exactly like the pictures she was seeing, where there was redness. What everyone missed was that my fingers were swollen from pulling And she pieced it together. And once she got back home saw me pulling for the first time. 

Trichotillomania or TTM is one of several body-focused repetitive behaviors. It can be inherited. It can also be caused by temperament, environment, and family stress.

KATIE:  I remember the feeling that I had done something wrong. And now my mom knew. What had happened on the couch felt so private. And so dreamlike that the idea that my mom knew that it was in the world of it was now in the vicinity of my family and the world of grownups was mind boggling. It didn't feel like those two worlds could be part of, could be one. They felt so separate. And I think my feeling was that I had done something wrong and also that something was wrong with me. I was wrong.

Katie was able to stop herself from pulling for a few weeks, but then started back up again.

KATIE: My father was enraged. And I think it was fear. I think it was a misunderstanding that I had no control over the behavior, But he acted like I was intentionally doing this to the family. And I have really distinct memory of him coming into my bedroom one night when I could hear my mom howling with sobs in the bathroom. And he looked at me and said, you're killing your mom. PAUSE

I wanted to stop. And as much as I would've done literally anything to protect my parents. And in particular, my mom, that I knew that this was a compulsion that was beyond my control and I wasn't ever gonna be able to stop.

Katie had plucked her eyebrows completely off and attempted to draw eyebrows on with an eyebrow pencil every morning before school but sometimes they were jagged, uneven or made her look in a constant state of surprise. 

KATIE: My mom, I would say one of the biggest blessings is she is one of the least vain people you will ever meet Had always taught me that beauty is internal and never made me feel badly for how I looked, which most people with Trichotillomania do not grow up up with mothers like that. My father was terrified of me looking different and pled with my mother, begged my mother to help me once I started wearing makeup, which happened in middle school to help me put the eyebrow pencil on because I did a terrible job. And he didn't want me to be teased and to look different. I also think on top of that, he didn't want people to look at me and know there was something wrong with our family. 

Even with her mom’s help the boys at school teased Katie about it.

KATIE: Boys would put their fingers over their eyebrows in front of me. I was called gay, I think, because it was synonymous with being different. I was called a freak. 

When Katie was 11 she went to a psychologist but it didn’t help.

KATIE: And my mom fought tooth and nail to have me seen by an adult psychologist because I was so mature that she knew it wasn't gonna go well. I came across as articulate and precocious and the psychologist would tell my parents nothing's wrong with her. And that's how I learned to avoid having to talk about it, because that was worse than even having it was the moments when my mom tried to get me to talk about it… and I felt rage. The only way I can explain it is if, you know, a kid got caught with a pile of porn under his bed, and then the parent forced him to talk about it repeatedly. That's, that's the level of visceral shame.

Her parents researched trichotillomania and sought the help of doctors.

KATIE: They did everything they could, found out everything they could and were outstanding parents in that respect. And they were told that we had to nip it in the bud now, because it would only get harder as I became a teenager and a woman. And my parents' greatest fear was that this was gonna define my life, that I wasn't going to be able to accomplish what I wanted. I wasn’t gonna be able to find a partner. And ironically, it was not the hair pulling that made those things difficult. It was the dynamic that was created by their fear of that.

They were told the best treatment was cognitive therapy. That meant talking about it and tracking what triggers the behavior. Katie didn’t want to acknowledge it or even google it, let alone track it.

Within a couple years Katie began pulling hair from her head in addition to her eyebrows. 

It became a way to calm her anxiety and cure her boredom. She didn’t feel pain when she pulled. In fact she felt relief. There were also certain things that would trigger it like worrying about her mom.

KATIE: And we got into these cycles of the more I pulled, the more she worried about me and the more she worried, the more I pulled. That was maybe the hardest part of the entire disorder for me, to be honest. Because I would have thrown myself under any bus for her. 

She started wearing headbands, scarves over her dark brown hair and hats to cover the bald spots.

KATIE: I wore Sharpie black marker that I would color into the bald spots. And it got to the point where I clearly had hair loss. The makeup was so clearly put on. When I look at pictures, it's physically painful to look at it because I was so young, I didn't know what I was doing and I was doing it alone and I was getting a, before everyone else was to do it in secret.

It was her sixth grade year and while Katie was friendly, she didn’t have any close friends. She sat alone at lunch. Her parents had made the decision to pull Katie and her brother out of school to travel for a year. So a classmate told Katie she’d throw her a going away party.

KATIE: I felt excited until she said it was a pool party. And then my heart kind of sank.

It had been years since Katie had been in a pool with other kids.

KATIE: But I was also so flattered that there was gonna be a party for me because I had been such an outsider. And so I took extra care with my outfit that day and spent long time penciling in my eyebrow. It was by far my best job at hiding. And my mom drove me to the party and she knew exactly what I was afraid of, but didn't say anything. When I first got there, I could hear all the girls jumping in the pool. I immediately went to the bathroom, which I can still picture to check that my eyebrow makeup was still in place because it was a hot day. I'd been praying for there to be rain. So we would have to be inside.

It was a sunny day so all of the girls were playing in the pool, all of them except Katie. She sat beside the pool in a lawn chair watching all of them splash around.

KATIE:  I realized that I had been so afraid that I was going to have to somehow get out in the pool or was going to be pushed in. My first worst fear had not been realized, but something else had happened that hurt just as badly, which was that no one knew me. I had missed out on these opportunities to have connections with people because I was so afraid of what getting close to them would mean.

Before she left all of the girls gave Katie going away notes they had put in a binder.

KATIE: And all of them were just generic messages. No one had any memories with me except for one girl who I had taken a class with and was paired up with. She was extremely intimidating, very bright. She was sort of my competition. She wrote a note about a song that we had come up with together. I was so happy that one person had this personalized connection to me and this memory. Years later, I found out that she was anorexic and ended up leaving school and being institutionalized. I had never known. What was stunning to me was how I had felt all alone, that I alone held a secret and it never occurred to me that all those other girls had their own secrets. PAUSE

It wasn’t until Katie got to high school that she finally googled trichotillomania. She had felt too ashamed before. She didn’t want to look at it head on, but when she finally did look it up she saw others like her.  

KATIE: I thought, well, maybe other people pull, but they don't pull the way I do. And so I pull hairs, I look at the root, I press them between my teeth. I have a very specific ritual And I started Googling and no, I was not the only one who did these things. And it gave me this glimmer of hope that I didn't have to be defined by this that maybe people would be okay if I told them, which for years I, it didn't even occur to me to tell someone. I realized that I didn't judge these girls. I was seeing by being open and they were beautiful and wonderful and human. And so why couldn't I be one of those people? 

She caught a glimpse of what life might be like if she just accepted herself as a hair puller. Seeing these other girls on youtube gave her the confidence to tell her closest friends about it. And Katie says they responded beautifully with a lot of love and kindness. 

At the same time she’d pulled so much hair the entire top of her head was bald. She thought about getting a wig and the idea of hiding her TTM excited her.

So at 17 her mom took Katie to a nice salon in downtown Boston to pick out a wig.

KATIE: I was terrified because I didn't know if they were gonna make me take off my hat in front of all of these people who were having their hair straightened and colored and fretting about getting two inches off their hair…And uh, it turns out they had a whole separate section of the salon that was private. And I remember walking down the hall to get to this private section of the salon and there were photographs hanging on the wall, wedding pictures, And it didn't occur to me until later that all the women were wearing wigs.

Katie remembers feeling stunned because she didn’t know anyone with hair loss could get married. It was the first time it occurred to her that people like her could have partners.

The stylist helped Katie pull on her first wig that was a little darker than the natural color of her brown hair.

KATIE: The first thought was it's way too much hair. I remember that distinctly because I was not used to it, it, and also wigs by their nature because they have caps and, uh, sometimes netting built in, they have to be a little bulkier so that they hide that. I had had such high expectations going into it. And then when that first wig went on my head, I looked nothing like me. It felt like those books that kids have where you can match like the head of a zebra with the body of all lion. That's how I felt looking in the mirror. 

They spent four hours in the salon cutting the thick wig down and thinning it out to be a bit more comfortable. As they were leaving the salon Katie recalls getting in an elevator with a group of strangers.

KATIE: And I felt this sense of thrill that they thought I was a normal girl with a pixie style haircut. It was the first time I felt like people may not be looking at me and I might pass as normal. 

When she got home her dad complimented her on how nice she looked but later Katie overheard her parents talking about it. Her dad told her mom it was too dark that people would know. 

KATIE: And his words cut right through me because immediately it made me feel I wasn’t pulling off the deception and I hadn’t satisfied my dad, which was my worse fear and filled me with the worst shame. 

Even though it was easier to not have to wear makeup and hats, what was harder was Katie constantly feared the wig falling off or someone brushing up against her and being exposed. 

But that wig became the first of many.

KATIE: And each one had a different personality that I could wear like a costume.

It was around this time her mom discovered a national group called the Trichotillomania Learning Center. It was holding a conference at a hotel in Boston. Katie did not want to confront her hair pulling but her mom signed her up. Katie walked into a room with hundreds of people who had the same disorder and felt exposed and wanted to run the opposite direction. The conference lasted for three days but Katie left after one day and decided not to come back. 

KATIE: The only significant thing from that other than the total overwhelm was I got to go to some, a research session where they discovered they can induce hair pulling in mice by manipulating their genome. There are clear genetic elements. My dad picked me up. I always remember that and he did not ask anything about the conference, but I remember I said, did you know that mice can do it? I think he gave sort of a short response and then that was it. But to me, him knowing that it was scientific and genetic was very important, because I think there was part of him that felt like it was my fault and under my control. 

During her senior year of high school when she found out she got into college, she got a new wig – Katie says this one would be the fun party girl wig. Initially she saw college as a fresh start  – no one has to know.

But the next few years were this chaotic blur – during her first semester, something happened that would vaporize the vision Katie had for herself in college. She was sexually assaulted and wound up transferring to a different school and seeing a therapist. This therapist knew how to get through to Katie and didn’t give her any option to back out.

KATIE: It was the first time I was talking about being a hair puller in my family and how traumatic that experience was for me as a child.

At 21 she decided to go to another trichotillomania conference. This one in Chicago. 

KATIE: And I remember on the shuttle from the airport to the hotel where the conference was held, I saw a girl who was probably 10 or 11 without eyebrows. And even if she had not had bare eyebrows, I would've known she was a hair puller <laugh>. This is one of the, weirder parts is I can spot a hair pull from a mile away <laugh> by their demeanor. There's a quality that I think it takes one to know one. Um, and she was not making eye contact with anyone on the shuttle. I just felt it. 

This time when Katie went to the conference she was open to the idea of accepting this part of herself. 

KATIE: We all talked about, uh, there were mirrors in the hotel rooms, you know, the ones that are magnified mm-hmm , which is a hair puller's nightmare <laugh>.And normally I would check myself into hotels, see something like that and think it and never speak of it. Of course. And now there's a room of 500 people, all laughing about the same thing that they found in their hotel room. And that was the most cathartic laughter I could have experienced. 

She saw other people much more comfortable with their TTM. She sat across from a charismatic young woman who went without a wig or hat, actually drew smiley faces on her bald spots with a sharpie. 

KATIE: She, uh, had a boyfriend at the time that had her make dragonflies out of origami paper. Every time she had an urge to pull. I just thought she was so cool.

Katie’s therapist had sent her with an assignment to try a day without the wig. So the following morning, Katie got dressed, brushed her teeth, and left her wig in her room.

KATIE: The most terrifying part was stepping outta the hotel room and encountering a maid who was in the hallway. It just felt like I had stepped into one of my nightmares. Almost felt like I was in fight or flight …The second I went down the elevator and I walked into the group of other hair pulls. It was like, I was a rock star. It was people all came up to me and were hugging me. 

LAUREL: Everyone, they knew this was a big deal for you.

KATIE: They knew this was a big deal. And, it was not something that a lot of people did even at the conferences. Um, even among other hair pullers they're still, we're so locked into shame. So I was one of the few people not wearing a wig. And um, so I attracted a lot of attention. Um, and it was, it was strange to be so known for something that I had thought was gonna make me rejected my whole life.

LAUREL: Strange in a good way.

KATIE: Yeah. I actually felt almost instant relief. I mean this metaphor is overused of feeling like a weight is lifted off of you, but it's the most I've ever felt that where I, I physically did feel lighter and um, I felt like my face was all of a sudden responding normally. I was smiling when I was happy and I was laughing when I actually found something funny and I realized how forced my expressions had been for so long. …it felt like I was naked, but not in a way where I felt ashamed <affirmative>. Um, which is how I so often felt when I was a kid, especially when the doctors who were trying to figure out what was wrong, had the flashlights right up to my eyebrow, where it was just exposure.

Without her wig Katie felt like she was meeting herself for the first time, but when it was time to fly back to Boston, she put her wig back on. She saw her friends from the conference at the airport and they walked right by her without recognizing her.

KATIE: I felt like a fraud when I was the wearing the wig and I felt different…

Still Katie wasn’t ready to give up the wig entirely so continued to live a double life. When she returned home her therapist had a new assignment. She wanted Katie to try dating, so told her she had to go on five dates.

KATIE: I had to join match.com and I had to go on five, which was terrifying, uh, between the assaults and me having resisted dating my entire life to the point where I felt furious, even hearing about dating or hearing about sex because it so scared me that I couldn't even listen to it.

After dating one guy for about a month she told him why she wore a wig.

KATIE: He said that it didn't matter to him, which I was relieved at first. And then later realized that it does matter and I needed it to matter. It was part of me. So actually didn't want him to ignore it and pretend it didn't exist.

Years passed. Katie graduated from college with a degree in English.  She was beginning to ask herself, who am I keeping my TTM a secret for and decided to publish an essay about it.

She was also going out with men she met through a dating site. That’s how she met Chris Bannon.

KATIE: We had a first date in a bar in Boston, where I wore a wig and did all of the things I used to do in those wigs. I was twirling my hair to flirt and I in full costume and he did not seem to buy it. <laugh>...And he asked me questions about my family. He asked me questions about my writing.

Chris wanted to get to know the real Katie. After about a month of dating Chris, she was still sleeping in her wig and keeping it on when she combed it out. Katie was sure he knew she was wearing a wig. But for the first few weeks she did not tell him.

KATIE: I had been spending most nights at his house. ... And at one point I was combing out the wig in front of him and getting out all the tangles and he looked at me and said, doesn't that hurt? And I was able to truthfully say no <laugh>. Um, but I felt like there's no way he doesn't know. Um, and I was very cautious about anyone touching the wig. So he would, when we were kissing or something would, you know, put his hands in my hair. And I would say, I have a weird thing where I don't like my hair touched.

Katie really liked Chris and his quiet confidence.

KATIE: He knew exactly who he was, but didn't need everyone to know it. And that was the opposite of my dad.

Telling the men she dated about her TTM had become a sort of test. She didn’t want to waste her time with someone who couldn’t accept this part of her. She had accepted her hair pulling as a compulsion, a way to self soothe, just like shopping or drinking for other people.

KATIE: I was terrified to tell him, because I think I knew on some level that he was different and this was gonna matter more.

One night when she and Chris had gone to a Celtics game Katie decided she was going to tell him. He had just invited her to an adult prom some friends of his were throwing. On the train ride back to his apartment she went into panic mode…

KATIE: …which of course makes me wanna pull. So I spent the whole, uh, train ride to his apartment, fantasizing about pulling from his bathroom when I got back, which I did. And, um, we were lying in bed and I said, I have to tell you something. I have a condition that I've had since I was eight. And it makes me pull out my own hair. I've been writing articles and essays about it. And I wanted you to know, you might already know I wear a wig, but I wanted you to tell why to tell you why. And he looked at me and said, so I'm dating a celebrity. It's the first thing out of his mouth.  It was not a line. It was absolutely what he was thinking. <laugh> and I told him about my childhood and, um, I told him a lot about the shame I'd felt. And by the end, I decided to take my wig off in front of him. And he still talks about how he had gotten up to go to the bathroom and come back to bed. And he saw the back of my head without the wig and how Beautiful it was and how happy it made him. Um, and he's also talked about that as the moment he knew that we were gonna get married.

CHRIS: I do remember seeing the back of her head for the first time when I see that I still think about that day that night for whatever reason I thought she was going to be the one I was going to marry which isnt something you’d think about a month in

Two weeks later they went to the adult prom. Katie decided to wear her wig. She wasn’t quite ready to go without it in public. They were dancing to a slow song.  

KATIE: ​​I sort of looked at him and, and said, the first thing outta my mouth was, what are you most afraid of right now? And he said, I'm terrified of getting crushed. And it stunned me because it was the first time I realized that he had the, he had skin in the game too. <laugh> It wasn't just me who was vulnerable. And the assumption had always been for me that, of course the guy's gonna leave me <laugh> I pull out my hair and he was terrified that I was gonna leave him. And so we had an equal stake in the relationship and the first time I had ever felt that way.

Slowly in different areas of her life around friends, family, even at work, Katie left the wig at home. It’s been three years now that Katie has gone wig free. 

CHRIS: When she put it on she got serious more stoic when she came home after work and took it off much more of the goofy personality came out 

LAUREL: So you noticed a difference? 

CHRIS: Big time. She seemed to be more confident she kinda rocked it she was more comfortable being herself 

In August 2019 after dating for four years Katie and Chris got married. In the days leading up to the wedding Katie and her mom had some intense conversations. Katie had held onto guilt about what she put her mom through.

KATIE: ​​ And she has never blamed me for any of this. And, um, she has held on to guilt for years and years about how she handled it and how the family did. I think, I really think everyone did their best. 

So the sight of Katie coming down the aisle without a wig was particularly emotional for her mom.

KATIE: I think for my dad, there was actually a moment when he walked me down the aisle. And, uh, when we were walking to the side of the ceremony, there was a big breeze. It windy day. And I reached up instinctively, I think, because I was nervous. I said something to him like, oh, it's nice. I don't have to do that anymore. And he said nothing. And I felt like <affirmative>, it was a missed opportunity, but also knew that the journey has been different for him. And I don't know that he's processed it and he has not gone to therapy. And I think he, …is genuinely proud of me and doesn't feel ashamed of me. Uh, but I think who I am terrifies him in some ways. It challenges a lot of beliefs he has about the world. And, um, I think it's always gonna be a disconnect between us and I ultimately had to make a decision that I could either be his daughter or I could be myself and I chose myself and that's, I have to grieve that as a loss, but I don't regret the choice.

KATIE: it wasn't until really I met Chris where I recognize there is this possibility of me being my whole self and being partnered and being love, not in spite of my hair and my trichotillomania but in part, because of it. That was part of me that was going to be loved too…

CHRIS: I’m really proud of her how far she’s come.

KATIE: It's just this idea of partnership and friendship and connection that I have validation every day. And I have someone who can combat the voices in my head that still tell me I'm all wrong. And I'm a terrible person which happens. It's the soundtrack of my life still in some ways. And, and here's this person who can give me a different narrative.

LAUREL: I'm wondering if you're still pulling.

KATIE: Yes. I have gone through periods of time where it's gotten a lot better. I would say overall in the last three or four years, it's been better ever since I started buzzing my head, so that it's harder to pull as soon as it gets about the length that is now maybe a little longer I can pull and I start immediately. When I pull I'm eight years old again, oh, that's, It's triggering. Even though I think I have learned not to be ashamed of the behavior in and of itself, there's still something in my body that triggers that emotion. I don't really have dreams anymore to never pull again. That was always the, the thing. If only I could stop pulling, if only I had a full head of hair, everything would be perfect and that's not the narrative in my head anymore. 

Research into a cure has a long way to go but today we know trichotillomania affects 2 percent of the population. The condition is more common than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. 

KATIE: The biggest problem is that people think they're the only one. And I've heard of people who go 30, 40 years thinking they're the only one. And to me, that's the biggest issue. And that was the source of 99% of my suffering was thinking I was alone. And that what I did made me shameful. And once I was over that, that was, I was gonna be able to live with this. 

Katie learned just how powerful shame can be. It’s one of the most driving human emotions. It can shape our relationships and change the course of our lives, if we let it. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.