THEOREN FLEURY
FINDING POWER IN VULNERABILITY By Marie Engel
T
HEOREN FLEURY WAS ONCE A HOUSEHOLD
it’s all that stuff, but to me it’s also a learned behaviour.
name in hockey, the hotheaded NHL star and gold
You grow up seeing your parents struggle with addiction,
medal winner who made headlines with his ag-
those are learned behaviours [you develop]. Then we be-
gression on the ice, and then with his drug and alcohol
come adults and we go through our own struggles. It’s a
problems in his personal life. When he came forward with
way of dealing with emotional pain.
the story of Graham James and the sexual abuse he suf-
So many people think that trauma lives in its own box
fered in his adolescence, he became a talking point for
and mental health lives in its own box and addiction
different reasons. Now when people speak about Fleury,
lives in its own box, but I think they all live in the same
they are most likely to be talking about his legacy as a
house. We experience trauma in our childhood that leads
bestselling author and advocate for the twin causes of ex-
us to emotional pain and suffering. And that’s what I call
panding therapy and destigmatizing abuse in Canada so
mental health. And how do you deal with that emotional
no one will have to go through what he did.
pain? You gravitate towards the dark side of life and you need something to cope with this pain that you’re expe-
What was your childhood like, and the first issues you
riencing. Because our brains aren’t fully developed until
dealt with as a young person?
we’re in our late 20s, we don’t have the tools to deal with
It was good and bad. Both my parents experienced a
what’s going on with us.
childhood trauma in their lives and they ended up coping with it through addictions of their own. So my life was
When you were young, did you realize that the things
very chaotic.
you were doing were ways to cope with pain? No, how could I know? There was no research. They diag-
Do you feel that contributed to the issues you had later
nosed me with ADHD is what they did, they gave me an-
in life?
other label—we love our labels. Especially pharmaceutical
There’s no question, absolutely. I really believe that all
companies, they love labels. They fill us full of more drugs.
the stuff on addiction, that it’s a disease, that it’s genetic,
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