Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is leaning into the unknown for her next chapter: 'I'm OK with the uncertainty'

By the time Sophie Grégoire Trudeau sat down to write her book Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other, she had already done quite a bit of work on her own emotional well-being. “Years ago when I was suffering from anxiety and eating disorders, it was only the tip of the iceberg of what was going on,” she tells Yahoo Canada. “It was really about a lack of self-esteem and a need to be nourished. I dealt with my pain through food but when I decided to heal, I changed my life path.”

As Grégoire Trudeau sits before me — wearing a cheerful print blouse that matches her sunny disposition — I sense that she’s someone who wears her heart on her sleeve. She also looks like someone, who, when she decides to do something, goes all in. “I’m a Taurus so I’m all about fire,” she informs me with a laugh.

For two decades, Grégoire Trudeau has fuelled that passion into mental health advocacy — something she was known for long before she became the unofficial “First Lady” of Canada in 2015, when her husband (now separated), Justin Trudeau, became Prime Minister. “Mental health is much more than a cause — it is a reality,” she tells me. “It’s also a common denominator. I’ve met enough people over the years with high titles—or no titles at all—to know that these are just an illusion. It’s a construct, and it’s empty. Deep down, it doesn’t serve us. Mental health reminds us that we are all just one trauma away from each other.”

The new book drives home this point more than once. “The homeless person you pass on the street, for example? That could be you or me after trauma,” she writes. “It takes just a single dramatic life event or a series of smaller traumas to affect our nervous system and brain. This is our shared truth.”

Grégoire Trudeau uses her own truth and personal experience as a launching pad for a collective conversation in the book about mental health, self-knowledge and empowerment. She interviews thought leaders such as physician and addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté, psychologist and writer Harville Hendrix, as well as people from all walks of life who have shared their own life-changing experiences, like Governor General Mary Simon, singer-songwriters Jewel and Chantal Kreviazuk, as well as Corporate Director and transgender advocate Katie Dudtschak, to name a few. “It was a labour of love and a team effort,” she emphasizes. “The lessons are so deep,” she says. “It was a journey of discovery.”

The book is also an amalgamation of what Grégoire has been through herself, coupled with the knowledge she has acquired over the years out of a curiosity to figure out her personal wiring. “[It’s about] why I act and react the way I do in relationships—not just romantic love—but with my kids, with my family, and even with the people that I have just met.”

Learning from the past

Since her early years growing up in Montreal, Grégoire Trudeau says that she has always sought connection — primarily because she spent a lot of time alone as an only child. Her loneliness made her attuned more to her parents’ emotions: she sensed a sadness in her mother and tried to be sympathetic, but at the same time she also tried to understand her father’s “complete emotional absence.” She would learn years later that her father was suffering in his own way from family trauma which included the aftermath of a boating accident that took place when he was a young adult. “There’s a generational trauma that gets passed down,” she relates. “That’s what sets the tone for us.”

Whining wasn’t something that was tolerated in her household, so Grégoire Trudeau learned to quickly shift from one emotional state to another. “Did I disassociate from my emotions?” she muses when I put the question to her. “I’m sure I learned to push my emotions away. I don’t particularly like conflict. It makes me emotional now when you ask me that,” she says. “Every child wants to please their parents. We want their love.”

Grégoire Trudeau can still relate to the little girl who would count the flowers on the wall-covering in her bedroom whenever her parents argued as a way to distract herself from the tension. “I’m aware of her and I do see her pop up,” she tells me. “Nobody’s childhood is completely behind them — this is what I learned in writing this book,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that we are childish or don’t evolve, but it means that the more aware we are of how the child within us is reacting; the more we can give ourselves the validation and nurturing we didn’t receive. It’s not a need that we invented, it’s what we actually need physiologically and neuro-biologically.”

Her parents seemed like they had enough to worry about between themselves, so Grégoire Trudeau was determined to be “the perfect daughter” during her teenage years. “I wanted to save my mother from her own insecurities and save my dad from his relationship with himself,” she writes in the book. “I guess that was a lot to carry. I didn’t know then that we can sustain quality relationships only according to our own level of self-awareness. But I thought my strong shoulders and big heart could bear the weight.”

The hunger for perfection

On the surface, Grégoire Trudeau’s life at the private all-girls’ school she attended looked ideal. She excelled in her studies and in sports, and she enjoyed the freedom, independence, and social life that came with it. Still, something was off. She wasn’t big into drinking at parties like a lot of her peers (she saw what over-drinking did to some extended family members and had no desire to go down that road), but her addiction to food as a way to numb her feelings was growing.

Then there was the irresistible pressure to be thin.

“My mom was very obsessed with her physical appearance,” she tells me. “She was—she is—a very beautiful woman. She was very petite. I had integrated concepts of external beauty: the magazines I was looking at; the magazines my mother was buying. We’re all kind of sucked in by the machine, right?”

But because having the “perfect” body could not coexist with eating to excess, it created the perfect storm for a full-blown eating disorder. “I got lots of positive reinforcement when I kept my weight on the low side,” she writes. “So I internalized that concept and the pressure that accompanied it. I hid from the outside world, and bathrooms became a twisted safe haven.”

By the time she was in her late teens, she said that nobody knew about this secret life — save for one best friend who couldn’t really help her because she was going through body struggles of her own. A turning point came one night during her second year of junior college. She was at home and had purged too long and too hard and was left shaken by the ordeal. “I was in my bedroom and I called my mom,” she tells me. “It started so intimately inside of me where I saw myself suffering. I think I parented myself at that moment. I talked to ‘Little Sophie,’ and I said: ‘Hey love, it’s enough. You don’t have to do this to yourself. You gotta get out.’”

Grégoire Trudeau says the validating response she received from her mother was perhaps her greatest gift of all. Her father showed his love by launching into action and getting her the help she needed. “I never doubted his love,” she says emphatically. “I just needed him to express it more. The intrinsic quality of love is presence. You can’t replace that. That was his way of saying, ‘I got you. I got you, baby, you know?’”

The path to healing

Grégoire started going to Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal and began to see a therapist. “I started wanting to change my situation. I’m a quick learner,” she says with a laugh. “And I think that I was kind of curious and adventurous enough to go inside.”

When she was a young radio and television host, Grégoire Trudeau decided to go public about her past struggles with an eating disorder. This was 20 years ago — a time when people weren’t really talking about mental health, let alone eating disorders. “That’s when my friend who I went to school with asked me if I wanted to get involved with BACA [an eating disorder treatment centre in Montreal] which she founded. I said I would help out and she asked me if I would tell my story. I sat with it, but I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Therapy has guided her along many intersections of her life—including when she was dating the now-prime minister. She wanted to get counselling to unearth the deeper worries and emotional patterns that made her feel stuck in the relationship. “I don’t believe any relationship is perfect,” she says. “I would be very surprised to hear of a relationship that never had any kind of conflict. Let me know the secret!” she says with a hearty laugh. “But I was always curious. Because I started therapy when I was quite young, I didn’t lose that curiosity and I wanted to understand why I was struggling inside in different ways.”

Grégoire Trudeau tells me that she didn’t “choose her father” in a life partner, so she didn’t relive that dynamic. “But I did choose a human being with qualities and flaws; [someone] who is willing to look within — who actually did years of psychotherapy to become more aware of his inner experiences.”

She began experiencing panic attacks a few months before she married Trudeau. Not because she was anxious about getting married — but because her parents announced they were ending their marriage. She writes that she lost the anchor of her original family just before she was about to begin a new one.

Grégoire Trudeau’s symptoms were typical of what many people who suffer from panic attacks feel. “All of the sudden I felt very overwhelmed; I felt weak, and had a very dry mouth. I also had a very fast heartbeat: it was a tachycardia issue,” she tells me. “I had to get checked up and everything, but now I know how to look for the signs.”

Although she hasn’t had any “episodes” since then, she is very mindful of when she is feeling stressed or anxious. “I’ll slow down and practice conscious breathing,” she says. She also meditates and avidly practices yoga (she’s a certified yoga teacher). “I wouldn’t be sitting here in front of you with so much ease if I wasn’t practicing,” she says.

Into the unknown

Gregoire Trudeau's separation from her husband of 18 years has allowed her to understand herself on a whole new level. “I have never been more attuned and caring of my mental health than through this whole process,” she tells me. “I have been pushed to dig into my authenticity and to put my attachment issues aside. But just because you restructure a relationship, it doesn’t mean you have to kill it. We are still bound by love.”

That doesn’t mean she’s past the pain. “It hurts,” she adds, her eyes filling up with tears. “But when you have love and respect for real, you learn that at some point, you have to set them free. But it’s hard. It’s hard. But still full of love.”

The book comes out just in time for Grégoire Trudeau’s 49th birthday. As she looks at life on the cusp of a new decade, she feels there is a maturity in accepting the uncertainty of it. “I’m not fully enlightened, okay?” she quips. “But I know that life comes in chapters. I’m OK with the uncertainty.”

As a fellow Taurus, I joke that not knowing what’s next has got to be her biggest pet peeve. “I don’t love it,” she acknowledges with amusement. “But I’m OK.”

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