Sophie Grégoire Trudeau on Life, Emotional Regulation and Midlife Reinventions
Show Snapshot:
Reaching midlife necessitates a series of reinventions. If you are lucky, you head into your middle years with a curious, ever-blooming spirit. In this episode, former First Lady of Canada, longtime mental health advocate, and perennial bloomer Sophie Grégoire Trudeau joins host me to explore the life’s work of building emotional wellness and her new book "Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other. " Learn practical tools for emotional regulation, the power of slowing down, and the "Catch, Pause, Repair" relationship framework that Sophie credits with transforming her own life. We get into mental health challenges, parenting teens, evolving romantic and platonic relationships, why self-knowledge is not a luxury but a human right.
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Sophie’s Book:
Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other
Quotable:
Life sat me down for many reasons—huge transformations, huge changes in my life. I decided to write the book as a point of culmination of my own life experiences—being a mom, having teenagers, transforming my marriage, evolving on my professional path, losing my dad recently, turning 50 this year.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty [00:00]:
Katie, welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. Beauties, if you've been hanging around the midlife space long enough, there's a good chance you are familiar with the work of Chip Conley. Chip is the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school. Chip defines a modern elder as somebody who is as curious as they are wise.
My guest today embodies that spirit of curiosity, wisdom, perennial growth and an ever-blooming life. Sophie Grégoire Trudeau is a mental health advocate, a mentor, a teacher, a seeker. She is also a writer, and she joins me today to explore the pages of her book "Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other," a book that invites readers on a journey of self-knowledge, acceptance, and empowerment. I am so excited to explore all of this with her. Sophie, thank you for being with me today.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [01:04]:
I'm so excited too, and you know, I think I'm gonna call you up when I feel off on a certain day. That intro was such a soul lifter! It's a lot, and by the way, it's so serendipitous that you're using Chip Conley's Modern Elder Academy, because I was there not too long ago.
Katie Fogarty [01:23]:
Lucky! Lucky you. I know it's definitely on my bucket list. I had the pleasure of interviewing Chip on my sister podcast, which is called The Midlife Book Club. He came on to talk about his book, and that was the week that the Modern Elder Academy had just been designated one of Time magazine's Top 100 places to visit in the world.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [01:43]:
Yeah, he's been a great supporter and a great friend to me, and the work that he does there is amazing. And I did a workshop on body wisdom, and it was just incredible. So, yeah, so marvelous.
Katie Fogarty [01:55]:
Well, we have that connection, and we have another because we are connected through a wonderful mutual friend, a phenomenal woman who's also been a guest on the podcast, Gina Pell, and she wears so many creative hats, but I think her superpower is her ability to create circles of connection and community. So I love that she was the spark that set this conversation in motion. "Closer Together" is part memoir, it's part signpost for the rest of us in navigating what is really essentially a life's work: self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-love, expansive love. What made you decide to sit down and write this book?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [02:31]:
Ah, that question. That question is... I would say that my answer is in the question, because life sat me down for many reasons: huge transformations, huge changes in my life, and I decided to write the book as a point of culmination of my own life experiences, of being a mom, of having teenagers, of transforming my marriage, of evolving on my professional path, losing my dad recently, turning 50 this year. Blah, blah, blah, you know, we think we're so unique on our path. I mean, we are. But truly, what really made me write this book, also as a 20-year mental health advocate, is the fact that with my own learnings and my own experience, I've really integrated the fact that suffering is part of life.
Trauma is different, and the difference between suffering and trauma is closing in. It's closed parts of ourselves. And I decided to write the book because I had been in touch with so many incredible professionals, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, on my path that I decided, why would I keep all this to myself? I want to share it with the world.
And what I noticed is that looking at the state of the world in our communities and our families and in our schools, in our homes, is that most people live in a dysregulated state, which means they don't really know why they act and react the way they do. They don't really know how to control and regulate their emotions and their nervous system. And honestly, because I've walked the co-political path, and I've seen life through very many different angles, I've noticed that the erosion of democracies and of communities is rooted in a misperception and lack of knowledge of who we are as human beings.
So with the book, it was a grand endeavor, but I hope that I succeeded, and now we're number one on Audible 2024 list, which is really cool, of really drawing the arc of human personality in simple ways, talking with the best experts so people can just simply and truly understand who they are and then move into the world and move into relationships with other people.
Katie Fogarty [04:47]:
You use the word dysregulated. I'm nodding so vigorously that my reading glasses are going to fall off my head, because I feel like we're living in such complicated times. A simple glance at the news headlines shows that the world is just in a state of upheaval and transformation. And my listeners are also in a phase of life where there is transformation, whether people are ready for it or not. Our health changes. Our parents age. Our children, if we have them, age as well, and we are being called to kind of transform how we live and interact in the world.
And I know that you've done so much work in this space. You have been a mental health advocate for two decades plus, you've also done a lot of work on yourself over the years. You're very candid about the fact that in your 30s, you spent a lot of time sort of in this period of self-examination. You obviously wrote this book and interviewed so many wonderful scientists and thinkers. So you have been in this state of looking for what you call emotional alignment, and that's a phrase that you used in the book that really spoke to me. So first, I would love for you to simply maybe define what emotional alignment is to you, and then ask you: can we achieve it, or is this a continual work in progress?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [06:09]:
I love the last part of the question, especially because, you know, self-knowledge shouldn't be a luxury. It's a human right, but we live in a society that keeps rewarding us for self-betrayal, right? Look a certain way. Don't age. We're obsessed with youth. Perform a certain way. Success should look like this. This is what schooling should look like. And the list goes on.
So we're being rewarded for not being our authentic self. So the message is really pervasive, because they tell you, "Oh, you know, be yourself. Go out there. Be yourself." But what does that mean to be authentic? And I'm gonna go back to emotional alignment and authenticity here, because they are part of the same, I would say, pit of life and pit of who we are, right? Like the pit of a fruit.
So authenticity is your capacity to actually express who you are without having to change your behavior, to please, adapt or conform. Hello! We all do it. We do it since childhood, to please our parents and to feel loved and seen and validated. And we do it as adults, with our co-workers, with our lovers, with our friends. We just do it.
And if we're not conscious of that process and we keep trying to fit into a mold, and that mold is getting narrower and narrower and narrower as we grow into this culture of fast-paced, uniformed looks, denying the natural cycles of who we are and aging and again, the list goes on, then we're really living from a place of innocent lack of authenticity, and also a place of lack of creativity. Because when we're not being our creative and authentic selves, we're in resistance mode.
And when you resist your true nature, your true cycles, you create inflammation in the body. There is inflammation created in the body. If you're a highly stressed person, there's inflammation in your body. And what's happening right now, Kate, to go back to the emotional alignment and the question about society and what's happening, well, if I were to come to you, you're going to imagine my Sophie face with neutral expressions today, but Kate, and if anybody listening, you were in your sympathetic nervous system before coming here. So you were stressed out. Something happened. You're in your fight flight freeze mode. You could interpret my neutral face as threatening or aggressive.
All right, now think about this: apparently, research shows that about 50% of the population are too often chronically stuck in their sympathetic nervous system, which means the fight, flight, freeze, and there's less titration and dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest.
So what is emotional alignment in all of this? I would say that emotional alignment is part of what we call integrity, coherence, authenticity. If one cannot know how to catch what's happening in the body—for instance, let's say I'm getting angry and my throat tightens up and my heart rate goes up, and there's a flush to my face—if I'm not even able to detect the sensory system, my own sensory system, and my own manifestation of my own body, and I don't know that anger is coming, and then I just react with the anger, without any kind of discernment or detachment. This is not to say that we shouldn't feel our emotions fully. We must feel our emotions fully, but if we don't know what's happening inside of us, then we can't align ourselves: brain, heart, gut, soul, body, mind. It's not possible. And when we don't do that, you know what happens? We become sick. We become sick mentally, and we become sick physically as well.
Katie Fogarty [10:06]:
Sometimes spiritually and mentally. And so when you're using the word coherence and integrity, I'm reminded of an interview I had with this wonderful memoirist, Laura Cathcart Robbins, who wrote a book about her secret pill addiction called "Stash," and she wrote about her long recovery process—her 13 years of sobriety when I had interviewed her—and when I asked her how she felt as she aged, she said, "I feel integrated." It landed like boom. And she shared that when she was younger, she felt the scaffolding of her addiction was the fact that she was presenting multiple false faces, trying to fit in as a black woman in a white world, trying to fit into the wealthy family she married into—the wealthy power family—and she didn't come from that world, and she had all of these facades, and when she finally chose to become sober and fought for that, she truly felt integrated. And I thought that was such a powerful word to describe oneself. It's like the goal.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [11:13]:
I have chills right now because it really is what it feels like, and I've been experiencing myself those parts coming back together. I think that in many ways, adulthood is about that—is about integrating all the parts of you, but knowing which ones you still need and which ones you don't anymore.
And by the way, when she talks about her addiction, pill or any type of addiction, if you're listening right now, I'm going to ask you this question: what is a habit that you have that provides you temporary relief when you do it, when that habit is alive, but in the long term, it's not super great for you or for people around you? So just think of one right now. I'm sure you can find one. And then do I have to confess? Sophie, yes, come on.
Katie Fogarty [11:59]:
Oh my god, you know what, I'm in the middle of a move, and I actually, like, it's not bad for other people around me, but I definitely have got like, a chocolate peanut butter ice cream habit going right now. That's like, okay, you know? So that's fine, right? Am I doing yoga? You know, when I do Bikram yoga, I get true relief from my stress, but when I sort of self-soothe with chocolate peanut butter ice cream because I'm too busy to get to yoga class, I don't feel great.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [12:23]:
Yeah, I know exactly what that feels like. I've been there too. So here's the thing, that question was the definition of an addiction. So it could be crack cocaine, heroin, it could be pot, it could be alcohol, it could be relationships, social media, over-buying, over-shopping, whatever. Find your micro-habit that gives you temporary relief, and in the long term, it's bad for you. And obviously there's a spectrum. There's a lineage from the little to the huge.
But still, we shouldn't be comparing our trauma, because two things: addictions are not about the addiction itself at all. And this is Gabor Mate's work, who backed me up when I wrote my book, and who's a great mentor. Addiction, you don't look at what is on top, like at the tip of the iceberg. It's not about the food for eating disorders. It's not about the body for the crack addict. It's not about the relationship for the serial dater or whatever. It's about the pain underlying the addiction.
So really, one of the greatest things I've ever heard is, when do you want your pain? Now or later? There is no choice. I mean, you could choose to deny your pain, but you're going to be in trouble, my friend, and I've tried to deny it. When I was suffering from eating disorders, I was using food, my drug of numbness, to numb my pain, until I realized that if I don't deal with the closed parts within me for all the reasons that they showed up there, I'm not going to get anywhere. I'm not going to evolve. I'm not going to find contentment.
We live in a society that really focuses on happiness, and happiness really has to do with the hormone called dopamine. It's kind of like an incentive reward. It gives you a high. Great, I want more of that! But contentment really focuses more on the release of calming hormones, and they've become boring to our brains and to teenagers, especially with how they're being raised on screens. So it's quite a pickle that we're in, because if our own relaxing hormones are boring to us, how exactly do we rest? Which is the only way the body can make sense of life. Without rest and proper reset, we're doomed for overwhelm, overstress, depression, and name it.
And by the way, when all your systems have been tried... Think about, do you flight? Do you fight, or do you freeze in your reactions, depending on how you were raised, how you attach to your caregiver as a little child, that all determines, up until your adult relationships, and I talk about this in the book, how you react to relationships and stressors. So when people are stuck in the fight or flight or freeze for too long, which happens a lot in our society, the body says, "You know what, I can't do this anymore. I'm gonna shut down as a survival mechanism." And people go into darkness and depression. That's how it happens.
And again, Gabor Mate talks about depression as a deep rest or as depressing something which means putting into a box, bringing it smaller when it's not meant to be small. It's meant to be felt. So going back to emotional alignment, if we don't allow ourselves to create safe spaces in our homes, in our couples, in our families, in our relationships, in our communities, in schools, in our organizations, well then we're going to repress what's meant to be expressed, and then there's no progress. So this is not the most complex, difficult, impossible work to do. That's the good news is that it's not out of reach at all.
Katie Fogarty [16:00]:
We're heading into a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about the structure of the book, what a reader is going to get when they interact with it, and walk our listeners through what they can expect from "Closer Together." We'll be back in just a minute.
[BREAK]
Katie Fogarty [16:00 continued]:
So we're back from the break. When we went into it, we were talking about sort of the power of deeply feeling, the fact that our emotions need to get addressed and handled in order for us to not become depressed, but to experience the deep rest that Gabor Mate talks about as something that could be available to us if we're willing to put the work in.
In a minute, we're going to talk about your book, the structure. It's broken into three different parts, and it talks about sort of the foundations from your youth, transitions as you move through your adult lifehood, and then achieving sort of balance when you begin to really address these things. But as a starting point, I want to ask you about something that I wrote down from your book. You had said quote, "These days, I find we are encouraged to know how to belong to society before we are taught to belong to ourselves. Belonging to yourself, becoming yourself is an act of courage and rebellion." And because my listeners are in the middle third of their lives and they're focused on this phase, I want to ask you if you think it becomes easier to become courageous as we age?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [17:25]:
Wow, what a great question. I think it does if you choose to look at yourself and deal with how you were shaped and why you act and react the way you do. I think the sense of belonging has been hijacked by our culture, and I'll tell you why. A sense of belonging is something that a baby comes out into the world with. We all want to be seen by our caregiver, validated, loved, validated in our sense of reality as well.
When a parent looks at us and goes, "Aha, yes, yes, you understand, right?" I'm imitating the voice of a mom here, because I have three kids, but it's crucial that we have parental figures or mentors in our life that allow us to trust in our perception of reality, that allow us to go into the world with the sense that most people are good and that we can go out there and trust. When I interviewed one of the greatest psychologists in my book, who's been in practice for 40 years, she said, "The most unhappy human beings I've ever met in my life are the ones who cannot trust in others."
And what happens when you're fragile inside, when you're not emotionally aligned, when you're not even conscious of your own patterns? Well, you move from a place of fear, and the difference of the other is going to feel threatening to you. So again, think about the state of the world and how difference can be threatening for some people and for some it's not threatening at all. It's actually a richness. It's actually a rich diversity that makes us...
Katie Fogarty [18:55]:
It's beautiful and exciting and wonderful about the world, universally, but...
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [19:01]:
But it's not exciting if you're fearful of other human beings. You have to have been taught that somewhere. And actually in science, it's called epistemic trust. It's the type of trust that you developed as a young infant, pre-verbal years, where the person who took care of you—and in my book, you can go and take some attachment quizzes. It's kind of cool. It doesn't describe your whole human being as you are, but it gives you a kind of major cues of how you built your personality.
And people think that personality is who they are, like, "Oh, I'm an extrovert, oh, I'm an introvert, I'm this, I'm that." Great if you think that, but you're much more plastic, malleable, open, and less fixed than you let yourself be.
And when you said sense of belonging, what's happening in our culture right now is that solitude is a human right. Solitude is your capacity to be in silence, in nature, in connection with what is greater than us, and feeling good, not feeling overwhelmed. Feeling a sense of connection, but our right to solitude has been hijacked by isolation and loneliness, and we're not meant to be in isolation. We're meant to live in community. Human beings are meant to be connected to one another. We become sick. A mammal stops playing, they become sick, they're away from the tribe. We're the same. We're meant to be playful creatures in connection.
So when our loneliness is more present than our right to solitude, well, we develop what we call mental illnesses. And, you know, Kate, we pathologize a lot of conditions, and it's a good thing we have the DSM, which is the book of listed mental illnesses. And professionals work with that, but we have to be careful, because we're pathologizing a lot of lives and minds and bodies in a way that are doing exactly what they're supposed to do, living in abnormal circumstances.
Katie Fogarty [20:59]:
Like when you think about technology. I actually just interviewed a wonderful doctor, Dr. Judith Joseph, who's out with a new book in April called "High Functioning" and it's about high-functioning depression, basically, when you're operating on all cylinders, racking up resumes and achievements, but it's because you can't bear to be still and be with yourself. And so, you know, when you go to a doctor and you say, "I think I'm depressed," they're like, "Well, I don't see that because can you get out of bed? Can you hit it out of the park? Are you bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan and doing all the things?" But it's truly just like a race.
And I love that you mentioned that your mentor has this notion of deep rest. You talk a lot in the book about the importance of being slow. At one point, you asked one of your three children a wonderful question about falling in love and how you think it happens. And he shares that he thinks it happens slowly. And you were sort of knocked out by his wisdom and his perception at a very young age, but to slow down is something that is challenging in our culture. What did interviewing all these different experts and walking the walk through this book process yourself teach you about the power of slow?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [22:18]:
Well, if I can be more precise, when my 14-year-old at the time boy, when I asked him, it was, what was the rhythm of love? Not falling in love. Because, you know why, Kate? Because falling in love is fast, actually, fast, fast, fast, right? But love itself... For me, love is simply one word, presence, attunement and presence. If you allow that to develop through time, then you get to know what deep love is, and it takes patience.
I was called "tornado" when I was young. I moved. I was very witty. I could do everything quickly and accomplish things quickly and I wanted to move fast. And my dad would always tell me, in great Quebecois, he would say, "Sophie, arrête de courir, tu recules." So in English, that would be, "Sophie, stop running, because you're just going backwards," right? And I would roll my eyes and go, "Yeah, yeah." He'd say, "You began where you started."
Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think that's kind of true, to be honest. Because when you think about stress, stress is simply a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. That's what stress is, because we keep projecting ourselves in another situation than the one we're in.
And then I heard an acronym for the word fear recently. Fear: F-E-A-R, False Events Appearing Real. There's no longer a saber-tooth tiger in the room, but we're so hijacked and stuck in our sympathetic nervous system of fight, flight, freeze, that anything that appears to be a threat, but it's not really a threat, is felt like a threat, and that is sending us into such deep, chronic stress that when we're deeply stressed in our sympathetic nervous system, just so you know, it's hard to feel compassion and empathy. Now, aren't compassion and empathy some of the most integral parts of love?
Katie Fogarty [24:17]:
Yes. Yes.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [24:21]:
So can we love if we're stressed out? Can we really? That's a big question I ask myself.
Katie Fogarty [24:27]:
I also wonder, when you're saying that compassion is something in kind, it feels in short supply in the modern world, but it feels very abundant in different areas of my life. You know, when I think about my children or my friends or my husband, you know, the people in my life, I feel a sense of abundance, but sometimes when I look, you know, when I read the newspaper or I see who's running my country, currently, you're in Canada, so you're looking at different people, but some of the leaders that are running... I feel a sense of just sort of dislocation and worry and fear, truthfully, about what might be coming down the pike. How do we balance the fear in our everyday life, where we sometimes might allow it to stop ourselves when we shouldn't, and then distinguish it from the real fear about what might be happening around the world that feels out of our control?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [25:15]:
Yeah, that's a big, big, big question, and you're asking somebody who's been close to the co-political path and to see how leverages of power and governance work around the world and who's in charge and all that. So it's very fascinating to me, because I truly think that the erosion of democracy lies on our capacity to understand our actions and emotions, our traumas and where we come from.
That being said, fear... when we feel fear, we're not in resting mode, obviously, right? So when I feel fearful, I will make time, whether it's five minutes, 10 minutes or 30 minutes, to actually go to my breathing exercises, my vagus nerve exercises, and I talk about them in the book. So there's many exercises that you can try. My yoga practice. I go for a walk in nature. I'll breathe in through my nose and sigh it out the mouth, and I'll shake my entire body. That can take up to 45 seconds when I'm just about to argue with a teenager or...
Katie Fogarty [26:15]:
I did that this morning. I was flipping through your book again, and I saw that exercise about exhaling quickly, but there's a phrase for it. I can't remember what you call it, but I was... there's cyclic sighing. There's a couple of exercises. I was cyclic sighing. I was practicing that very loudly this morning, and it was wonderful.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [26:33]:
So in the morning, I strongly suggest that you take deep breaths through the nose and then sigh it out and do it for seven to 10 times. And every time, do it louder and then shake out the whole body. Just try that. It's a minute and a half to two minutes in the morning, and see how you feel coming into your day. It's absolutely unbelievable.
We are not using our breath, which is our most potent nervous system regulating tool that we have within our own bodies. And you know why? It's not our fault. Who taught us how to? I don't know if I hadn't been on the yoga path, who would have taught me? Nobody, right?
Katie Fogarty [27:13]:
These are powerful tools. I think some schools are beginning to incorporate mindfulness and movement for younger kids. It's maybe not the norm, and it's not as available as it should be, but I think hopefully the word is beginning to get out, because even just experiencing that cyclic breathing or cyclic sighing this morning, because, as I said, I'm getting ready to move, and I was getting ready to have this conversation with you, and I wanted to bring my best self and my A game, and I was feeling a little bit like, "How am I balancing both of these things that are occurring in my life?" And I did the cyclic sighing, and I was like, this is incredible. I felt my shoulders drop. I felt a lot of the stress leaving my cheeks where they were, like my face was holding all this stress that I had no idea. And it was just a wonderful little gift. And the book is full of this.
And so I do want to take a minute to say that this book is broken into three different main areas. As I said, there are 10 chapters. It ranges from setting roots, talking about your childhood, your attachment style, sort of growing up as a teen, coming of age. It goes on to talk about how you sort of fumble towards purpose, as one of the phrases that you use, love, expanding your family, and then you get into some of the practice areas that you really love, movement, nutrition, sleep, the outdoors, navigating challenges. Because nobody gets to 20, 30, 40, without experiencing something that's challenging, that you need to move through. And then how to incorporate humor and fun.
So there's so much wonderful stuff in this book, and I really so enjoy... it was one of these books, actually. And this happens to me sometimes, and it happened almost right away with yours, where, even when I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, "I can't wait to read this again," because it was one of those books. As I was absorbing it, I was like, "There are no amount of tabs in the world I can put on this book to make me come back and look at it," and I wanted to experience it again, because there's just a wealth of information and stuff. So could you share with our listeners some of the experts that you feature in the book that we should have on our radar?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [29:14]:
Yes, of course. And by the way, with all the book touring that I've been doing and meeting so many people who've read the book, the thing that touches me the most is obviously, when people come and confide in me and give me their trust and tell me what they've been through. But also when I look at the book and it's filled with Post-Its, it's like we want to go back to it. It's like a tool, and that just makes me feel... I don't even know how many copies I've sold. I don't look at that. I look at what's the impact, and how can it change people's lives.
From all the experts, I mean, Gabor Mate is in there. Alan Shore, Terry Real, there is Dan Livingstone Smith, who's an expert on dehumanization, and people who are experts on nutrition and exercise. But listen to this: when I interviewed David Livingstone Smith, not Dan, David Livingstone Smith, I learned that—and he's a specialist on dehumanization, and he meets with people who have committed crimes—we're not excusing any type of toxic, incredible bad behavior here, but hate stems from a deep need for connection that never took place.
So when we think about safety, and emotional safety is everything—like on Abraham Maslow's pyramid, if emotional safety is not there, it's game over. So safety is not just the absence of a threat in your life, in the room, in your heart, in your mind, but it's also the presence of connection. So when you asked me the question, Kate, about the political landscape and what's happening in the world right now... if we know that almost half of the people, especially in North America, live in dysregulated nervous systems, and they don't know how to come back home to themselves, then this shows in how they treat themselves, how they treat others, how they vote, how they eat, how they rest, how they move, how they sleep.
It's a wheel that if you take away one or two aspects of that wheel, the wheel won't be turning as it should anymore. So everything from a mental health perspective, is incredibly fascinating to understand that it's universal and that everything can kind of be explained. We're going to push away the crazy scenarios or really extreme behaviors here, isolated ones, but mostly human behavior can be explained by looking at how you were raised, how you were attached, what kind of food you put in your body and where you bring your attention to, because neurons that fire together, they wire together.
So when I interviewed Justin Brewer on habits in the book, I learned that in the brain, there's an area called the basal ganglia, and in there are, in that portion of the brain, is where we form habits. Now, the human brain doesn't really like to try new things, because our 200,000-year-old human brain wants to get away from danger and seek comfort. So this means that when you come back from work, you're depleted, you're tired, and you want your beer or your wine with your Netflix, your TV series or whatever. That's what your body wants to do from a natural evolution perspective.
So we have to work a little bit harder at changing our habits. But here's the trick: if we repeat new habits, baby steps, don't think huge leaps, baby steps, every day, 5, 10, 15 minutes, everything else will change in your brain and in your body. And it is fascinating, because think about all the signals that are sent between the gut. So what you put in your body and into your intestines and stomach and your organs, digestive organs, it sends signals to your brain. 75% of the signals come from the belly to the brain, not vice versa.
So we can no longer fragment the brain in the head from the brain in the heart. There's a nervous system around a set of nerves around the heart that have a capacity to predict negative events coming. So when you say, "I should have listened to my heart, to my intuition, more to my gut," well, it's a real thing.
And then the brain and the gut. So now we know that there are molecules of emotion in the lining of our intestines. So hundreds of years ago, when Leonardo da Vinci and friends were exploring the human body from an anatomical perspective, the church would give them the bodies and say "carte blanche," like, just do whatever you want, except there is one part that you can't touch when you study the human body. Do you know what that part is?
Katie Fogarty [27:13]:
No.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [27:15]:
The brain. It is new for us as a civilization to be able to study the brain with where we come from. Maybe other civilizations were doing it. But think about it—one of the greatest areas of research right now is the human brain. We're learning an incredible amount of information at exponential speed about how we function inside of our brains.
So we are very, very lucky in this age of rapid information, bulldozing information coming our way constantly and sending us into fight, flight, freeze mode, because it's just too much at the same pace. Being able to learn about how our mind and bodies work is a gift, and we have to take that seriously without taking ourselves seriously. And yes, there's a chapter on humor and playfulness and mischief, because I'm all of that. And when we stop playing, we stop taking care of the kid inside of us, and we die micro deaths when that happens. And this is real. It really is real.
Katie Fogarty [34:41]:
The book offers so many wonderful tools. I know that our time is coming to a close, and I want to be respectful of your time, but I have two things that I would still love to ask you, if we have the time, and it looks like we do.
So you'd mentioned some of the experts that are in the book. Writer and Relationship Expert, Helen LaKelly Hunt, is somebody that you spend some time with in one of your chapters, and she said something that I wrote down because I thought it was fascinating. She said that people think that relationships are two people with a history, but she sees relationships as two people with a space between them. And that was really fascinating. I had to think deep and long about that. And in that chapter, she shares some ideas for navigating that space.
But my question for you is, how do we navigate evolving spaces? Because your marriage has ended, yet you're still in partnership, right? Your children are growing. Mine are almost grown. Spaces can ebb and flow. So I'm wondering, is there a tool or practice that you can offer that gives us flexibility and elasticity as we navigate the kind of push and pull and the evolution of a space?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [35:49]:
Can I start with a giggle? Do you know what people say when they've stayed together for a long, long time? They say, "Well, we never wanted to divorce at the same time."
Katie Fogarty [36:01]:
Yes. First of all, I've been married more than 30 years, and so I know the roller coaster, right?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [36:06]:
A couple of things here. This is a really important question, Kate, and I like that you ask it. We have been taught in our culture and our religion that longevity is the sign of a healthy relationship—false. We have to be very careful there. There are relationships that last five to 10 years, that are incredibly nourishing and that make you evolve, and that are peaceful and safe. There are relationships that are extremely insecure, unsafe and abusive, that last for a very long time, and then there's everything in between.
So first of all, we shouldn't equate longevity with success, because it's too much pressure to bear, and we've been kind of bathing and being brainwashed in that. Then I think that our language to use—transformation that is separation, divorce, everything—is so drastic and dramatic that we leave a legacy to our kids that we have to let that drama unfold to expose the truths of evolution, transformation, collaboration.
And here is the trouble: when you transform—and we call this now "middle-essence," for people who always refer to it as "middle-life crisis"—it's a transformation. It's the coming back together of all those lost parts that are the most important and that are the true you that come back together.
So in a couple, for example, not everybody evolves at the same rate. So that's the space that you were talking about. How do we adapt to different evolving spaces? It's a great question, because the relationship isn't just two people, it's the space in between. So I think that that is the ultimate tango. It's the ultimate dance between how much one has to wait for a moment for the other, then the other one is well-served in that moment, then the other one has to wait for another lapse of time for the other to catch up. It's quite a difficult dance, to be honest.
Katie Fogarty [38:00]:
For relationships... Relationships aren't simply romantic partnerships, too. And when you use the word dance, I love that idea, because the space between two people could be the space between a parent and a child, or the space, like I'm thinking of my own parents, where my mother requires more caregiving from me, like our dance has shifted. The Space Between Us requires me to be helping her instead of the other way around. And the dance between friends can evolve as well. And it's just so interesting to think about just relationships of any kind with this sort of space between and how you navigate and bridge it as it ebbs and flows.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [38:39]:
I couldn't agree more with you, Kate, on this topic. I think that what I've learned while writing this book is so many, so many things, but one of them in relationship is you can't regulate two nervous systems at the same time. So unless you're hugging for like a minute, yes, the heartbeat will slow down, the breath will slow down. But when somebody's in distress, when a partner is in distress, and this could be a friend, a lover, a co-worker, whatever—when a partner is in distress, one has to be deeply listening, no suggesting, no commenting, no interfering.
I'm not great at that, by the way. I'm still trying to work at that art of deep listening. Because we all want to save the people we love. That's not our role. We're not saviors. If we think we're saviors, we're narcissistic. So we have to be very careful.
So when we allow for another person to feel that the space between us is safe and is open and is listening unconditionally, then the other person will need about 5, 10, to 15 minutes to actually feel that in the body and in their body, from head to toe, and there's a relief that happens. And it's kind of like, you know, a sigh, or a baby that falls asleep in a mother's arms, or lovers exchanging an extremely deep connection, or whatever, and then it's the other person's turn to be regulated and to be repaired.
Because in the book, I sit down with experts on relationships. John Gottman, who's exceptional, you know, who uses the CPR expression, and this is not like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which I studied when I did my bronze medallion course as a teenager. It's catch, pause, repair. Can I catch what's happening in my body? I don't know, I'm about to cry out and I feel my throat tightening and my jaw starting to tremble, or my hands. Can I catch what's happening? Can I pause? I take my deep breaths. I let the tears come out. I feel fully what I'm supposed to feel, and then I breathe again, and then I go back to the argument, or I go back to my pain, and I go back to the relationship, and I repair what needs to be repaired with deep listening and presence.
Now this takes maturity, it takes patience and it takes time, something that we have very little of in our society and how our lives are paced. So this is why slowing down and resting again, whether it's 15 minutes in your day, five minutes, two minutes, micro-moments of presence will have a cumulative effect in your lifetime.
And if I were to leave you with one of the most—and it's going to make me emotional—heart-lifting, soul-churning lessons, I wrote this in the book. It says, and it comes from me, I wrote it: "Your emotional biography sets the musical scale of your life, but your unwounded soul writes the ultimate symphony."
My fellow humans, we are not broken, brothers, sisters. We have only gone through suffering and trauma and stories, but universally, we are the same. We are from one common core, and we're not broken. We're just learning how to love ourselves again. And yes, that is an act of pure rebellion, absolutely and defiance, wise defiance, I would say.
Katie Fogarty [42:23]:
I love that. Wise defiance. Sophie, that's such a beautiful image in my mind, and also very useful acronym that you had shared earlier from the expert—the CPR. I'll be thinking about that in my own life.
My final question before we say goodbye: at the end of the book, you share a quote from Elizabeth Lesser, who I believe is the founder of the Omega Institute.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [42:48]:
She is, yeah, she's a dear friend.
Katie Fogarty [42:49]:
I Googled her, and I'm like, I hope it's the right Elizabeth. But the quote reads, "When we try to protect ourselves from the inevitability of change, we are not listening to the soul. To listen to our soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty and to wait."
You have embraced change, you have slowed down, you have worked on yourself and are seeing more clearly. So now it is the time to wait. What is it that you're waiting for, Sophie?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [43:17]:
I'm not sure I'm waiting, Kate. I've had to choose my authenticity over my attachment, and I'm still as a human being, as a mom, as a woman, as a friend, I'm still navigating through the fog, and some days are foggy, some days are bright, and I don't expect and wait for the sun to rise. I expect for myself to do the work and to be disciplined enough to respect myself and to show up for myself and to tell the parts of me that have been there to protect me for many years: "I am a grown adult now, and I'm doing the work and I don't need you anymore. Thank you for what you've done to protect me, but it's over now, I'm holding the reins."
So it's a gift of a lifetime. It comes with a lot of sadness and a lot of tears, of transformation and letting go, lessons of how to let go, whether it's from relationships or my own children, because they're growing. It hurts, right, as parents to do that. It's difficult, but the liberation and the unconditional love that is the parent to all of this has no price. It's limitless, boundless and priceless.
Katie Fogarty [44:30]:
What a beautiful note to end on. Sophie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about "Closer Together," to share some of the lessons from the book, to share yourself and your stories. I have so enjoyed spending time with you and spending time with your wonderful book. Thank you for being with me today.
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [44:48]:
Same here, and don't forget, Kate, when you try the CPR from the book, it's not blowing air through your husband's mouth, okay?
Katie Fogarty [44:57]:
He wishes, right?
Sophie Grégoire Trudeau [44:59]:
Ah! Ah! Maybe it could end with that. Love! Okay.
Katie Fogarty [45:02]:
I love it. All right. Thank you again. Bye-bye.
This wraps A Certain Age. What a phenomenal conversation. I pinch myself every week that I get to hang out with such incredible women. This show is no exception. Sophie is so generous with her stories, her wisdom, her perspective, her point of view, her lived experience. This was such a phenomenal day for me. I thank you for hanging around to the end and listening to the show with me. Being in conversation with incredible women, having you as listeners and being a part of the conversation, the community truly lights me up. Thank you for being a part of it.
I am going to be giving away a copy of this fantastic book. You can win a copy of "Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other" over on the podcast Instagram, so hop on over to @acertainagepod to learn how the book is being given away and to enter to win. Thanks again for sticking around. If you enjoyed the show, if you took something away from it, we would love, as always, your Apple Podcast or Spotify review, because reviews help other women find the show. I think this one deserves all the stars. I hope you do too.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.