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'UAE diversity has an impact on mental health': Sophie Trudeau

Passionate mental health advocate Sophie Gregoire Trudeau on the need to put emotional literacy at the centre of mental health conversations

In her teens, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau was called a tornado. That might have had something to do with the energy she exuded. “I wish I’d slowed down. I was an intrepid sportswoman. I loved being outdoors and was mischievous,” says Trudeau, right after her session at the coveted Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi.

As an only child of parents who had been just as loving as anyone else but had also been struggling, Sophie had another tornado brewing inside her, one that led to eating disorders. “I internalised all that pain and pressure, and did not feel I was good enough. Food became an escape, I felt I couldn’t exercise control over it, it became an addiction.”

When she began to read extensively about it, Sophie learnt that she had been suffering from eating disorders. She decided to seek medical help, which served its purpose, but looking back, Sophie says, it was not just one thing that helped her. “Patience, maturity, exercise, good nutrition, good sleep, social connection, feeling a sense of purpose — all these things helped.”

Today, the former television host is no longer just a name associated with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It is a name that wields its own power in the conversation around mental health. She is an advocate, an empath raising awareness on the urgency of addressing the crisis of the mind on a global stage.

Within that space, she has been espousing for emotional literacy, the need to understand and regulate one’s emotions and address the pain points. Outside of that textbook definition, emotional literacy is about understanding what triggers us and why, what prevents us from expressing ourselves; in a nutshell, what hurts us and what heals.

Sophie says she wasn’t drawn to the subject, rather she lived it, owing to the eating disorders she suffered from in her formative years. “I learnt so much about addiction and trauma. The latter is not just about what happened to you that was bad, it’s about what should have happened and didn’t,” she says.

“We come into the world as equals. Till we are two years old, there is a dance between your caregiver or parent and you. There is an exchange happening between your right side of the brain and theirs, which reinforces a sense of nurturing. The way you were nourished emotionally during this time accompanies you for the rest of your life. It defines all your relationships and the way you perceive yourself as well. Addiction stems from trauma and this lack of emotional nourishment.”

Today, most experts on emotional intelligence and parenting coaches are emphasising on trauma also being rooted in our formative years, arguing how we view our relationships and circumstances could well be a response to our childhood. This, in many ways, puts emotional literacy right at the centre of mental health conversations because in the absence of truly knowing and understanding what has happened to you, you will not be able to process what you are going through.

“For me, mental health and emotional literacy are our greatest common denominators as human beings. We cannot refute that because we share the same brain as our hard wiring, but are nourished by our experiences. We have to get up and fall, we have to learn our lessons. But we cannot do it alone.”

Our minds are conditioned to fear failure, even though it ends up teaching us more life lessons than success does. Then why is it that we are not completely at ease with our success either? Sophie says that’s because the brain isn’t wired to be happy all the time. “And that’s okay,” insists the author of Closer Together, a book for which Sophie has spoken to eminent thought leaders and psychologists from around the world and drawn from her own experiences to understand how emotional literacy can be achieved.

“We need to teach ourselves and our children how to sit with the pain and suffering, knowing that it will pass. Life comes in phases. But we are not taught these emotional literacy tools. As a mental health advocate for the past 20 years, I have seen how the concept of well-being has changed. But even then women are pushed into a corner to believe how they should act, behave and never age. Boys are not spared either. They are trapped in a concept of masculinity that is very insulting to their intelligence. So we both have to rebel and be defiant. Human beings have two basic needs — attachment and authenticity. When we look at the state of the world today, we notice that women are being denied basic rights. They face emotional literacy crisis because they are expected to carry the emotional load of their families. That being said, there are some incredibly wise, discerning men who are our allies.”

Can emotional literacy come naturally to men, especially when they are taught to be invulnerable and inexpressive? When you hide your pain, do you also lose language for it? “Some years ago, I was criticised because I spoke about involving men in conversations related to women’s equality. Men are caught between this very narrow definition of what it means to be a man. By the way, boys are more emotionally fragile in their childhood than girls. They deserve to be nourished adequately by their fathers and mothers who allow them to express their emotions that are legitimate. If you look at male leaders around the world, I wonder what kind of childhood they may have had because you see the insecurities in them playing out in various ways. Whether you are a man or a woman, at some point, if you do not accept your flaws and see yourself with discernment, you cannot see anyone else or any situation with discernment.”

Vulnerability, says Sophie, allows us to truly be ourselves. But the reason we find ourselves reluctant to be so is because we don’t feel safe enough to be weak. “Science says it is possible to come out of the trappings of a difficult or traumatic childhood. It is possible to rewire. We just need to build societal structures that make people feel they are cared for. Look at Maslow’s Pyramid; if safety is not on the checklist, game is over. Human beings need to feel safe emotionally to live up to their true potential.”

That safety is not just based on external factors. It also comes from within. It comes from facing inconvenient truths about ourselves. But in the age of social media, these truths have acquired a different meaning for the young who tend to draw their sense of selves from social media validation, failing which they sink into a dark space.

“I think it was Gloria Steinem who said that the truth will set you free, but first it will p*** you off,” recalls Sophie. “I truly think young people today are feeling a sense of powerlessness, they are not sure how to contribute to society, or how to make things better in their own lives. They are living in a culture of comparison, unattainable beauty standards and of ageing as an insult. If we keep them there, we keep them in a state of emotional immaturity. Emotional maturity is to accept who we are as human beings and to sit with that truth, even if it hurts.”

This also demands that we get out of our way. In Closer Together, Yale psychology professor Laurie R. Santos tells Sophie that many people are actively working towards sabotaging their own happiness.

“She explains that we are not even wired to be happy. For example, when we come back from work, we want to sit on a couch and rest. Whereas coming out of this comfort zone helps us achieve our true potential. We never get to test ourselves when we do not step out of our comfort zone. The brain needs nourishment that can only come from a different experience. Be it physical activity or good sleep, the wheel is not that complicated. In that sense, phone addiction is a major problem because it puts our brain in an isolation mode. It dilutes our energy levels and focus on presence and connection with other people.”

Globally, mental health at workplace has become a talking point, and for a good reason. A workplace is where people from different backgrounds and context come together — people we may or may not identify with. Add to that the pressure we exert on ourselves to outperform others in order to climb the career ladder. All this can feel a little overwhelming. In such a scenario, what can workplaces do to address those who already have a mental health condition but nurture the ambition to rise? Sophie points to the economic impact of not paying attention to the crisis.

“Mental health is one of the main reasons for absenteeism at work. So, there is an economic impact of that. The necessity to have well-regulated people in an organisation is key to advancement. The first step is to invest ourselves in understanding mental health. And we need to educate ourselves because we will never know what the employee is going through when we don’t know enough about their condition. There is no capital without mental wealth. When entrepreneurs realise that this is critical for growth, they will hold the reins that could be profitable as well as enriching.”

Throughout our conversation, Sophie emphasises on the need for social connection. That is further enriched when you live in a multicultural society like the UAE. The day we met was incidentally the day when she had visited the temple, church and mosque, and was visibly excited at the kind of diversity that the UAE has to offer. “In my book, philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith talks at length about the fact that hate stems from a deep longing for connection. So, when you say the UAE celebrates multiculturalism, it is incredible because it has a mental health component to it,” she says. “Nobody is meant to be at the centre of the world, but everybody is meant to hold the world in the centre.”

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