Sophie Grégoire Trudeau on mental health and motherhood

I’ll always remember the minute I shared the fact that I was suffering from bulimia — I was working in television and radio — and I thought, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen tomorrow? Am I going to wake up and the whole industry is going to ignore me?”

I was taking a leap, taking a risk by sharing it, but it felt like the right thing to do — and it changed the rest of my life. It showed me the way, how I could give to life and to others. I never regret telling my story. And that’s what I do today: I encourage people to tell their story and to change a culture of shame into a culture of celebration of who we are with our differences.

Something I say very often is “We are all one trauma away from one another.” The person who [suffers from mental illness] that you don’t understand? Rethink your life because it takes one traumatic event or one big change for your mental health to be deeply affected. When we meet somebody who is suffering or hear about somebody who is suffering, we have to be very careful about thinking we’re so different from that person because we’re not. Nobody is invincible to mental health issues.

Right now in this pandemic, more than 40 per cent of Canadians have confided that their mental health has been on the decline in the past year. We’re in a crisis. In the past months, I’ve had the chance to speak with a lot of people who suffer from mental health issues and a lot of isolated moms. [Motherhood this past year] has been a journey of solidarity for me, to be honest. We live in a safe home and we have food on our table, and I remind the kids of that at every single meal. But it’s important to acknowledge our own emotions, to talk about our struggles as a family unit.

Mothers are paying a high price and are disproportionately affected by the consequences of the pandemic and we are very aware of that — not only me as an individual and fellow mom, but the federal government. There are a lot of funds being injected into services for women and children, which is extremely important.

Mothers are still the nucleus of the family. We recognize your work, we recognize your efforts, but we also recognize your depletion. And you shouldn’t find yourself in this position. I try to do as much as I can to reach out to people and let them know that they’re not alone. That would be my message to moms right now: You are never alone. Ever. There is help out there.

I think as parents, we have the responsibility to tame our own fears because as adults we have greater tools with experience, one would hope, to deal with our emotions, and then children will feed off that. If you tell your children everything’s going to be all right — and yes it’s true, we are going to come out of this stronger — but you’re not doing the work of calming your mind down, exercising, watching your sleep and taking care of yourself, then it’s very difficult for children to feel that there is integrity and truth. If you’re smiling and you’re still dancing in the kitchen between three homework assignments and two meals, there is a way to lighten the mood in your heart and in your mind so that children can feel that.

We also need to make sure that kids are able to express everything that they’re feeling and to validate their feelings. To say it’s normal for you to feel this way, but your emotion is not a monster, your emotion is normal, and you’re going to learn to tame it. Our notion of emotional intelligence or emotional literacy is extremely important because it’s at the core of a society of repressed or expressed emotion. And if you have repressed emotions, you can’t progress.

[If I could share a message with my younger self] I would say: Perfection is boring; celebrate your uniqueness. And break open so you can shine your light with everything that you have but also share your darkest parts because they’re part of humanity. The other one is: Slow down. There is a sense of urgency and I still feel it today. I want to bring change and I want it now, not tomorrow. But when we slow down, something happens. It’s like you feel life a little bit more.

There’s no better time sometimes than in a crisis to actually re-evaluate what makes us sad. Mental health was already an issue before this pandemic and now it’s just deepened. We need to look closely at why we’re suffering and how our daily actions can change that. I think the big lesson of why it’s important to foster better mental health is that when we do foster it, we become healthier, more balanced and ready to attain our full potential. That’s the real journey of what it means to be human and everybody should have that right. — as told to Katherine Lalancette

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Katherine Lalancette is the beauty director of The Kit, based in Toronto. She writes about beauty and trends. Reach her on email at kl@thekit.ca or follow her on Twitter: @kik_tweets



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