“I felt free while eating,” says Michel Charette. The actor confided in the podcast open your game by Marie-Claude Barrette on her conflicted relationship with her father which led to her developing weight issues and anxiety disorders.
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When asked how he responded to authority, the actor, known for his roles on ‘Happiness’ and the defunct series ‘District 31,’ responded at length by returning to his troubled relationship with his late father .
“To me, authority is not healthy. I had an extremely tough and strict father. He decided everything we did, where we went […] You had to be the best at hockey, the best in school. We were under a lot of pressure. We lived in a stressful world,” he says.
Food: the fight of his life
The 53-year-old actor said eating was the fight of his life. As a child, food was the only thing he could master; he therefore turned to her to make up for his inner emptiness.
“I felt free while eating. It was my addiction, the only place my father couldn’t control. It was the time I did “F*ck you”. It calmed me down,” says the actor. Only he in the family has developed weight problems.
For Michel Charette, every meal is a battle against yourself.
The artist is not afraid to say: therapy and sport saved his life. It was thanks to the support of his lover and mother of his two children, Marie-Claude, that he began a long collaboration with a psychologist. He can count on her to “kick his ass” to surpass himself; whether it’s to write your own projects, lose weight, or go to a doctor’s office.
live with fear
Michel Charette’s father was raised in a poor home by a father who beat him and also raped his wife. Although he never physically touched his family – the actor has a brother – he did abuse them psychologically.
All this pressure caused him to develop great fears, especially regarding his performance. The artist has already experienced moments of fear lasting 24 hours a day for several months.
“It’s haunting me today. When there is conflict or someone raises their voice to me, I tend to crush myself. And I always feel like I owe someone something. It’s been 12-13 years since he died but I can still hear him talking to me,” says the actor, who made peace with his father on his hospital bed.
Michel Charette humbly wants to draw the public’s attention to what fear is – “the problem of the century” – although he doesn’t claim to know everything about the subject. His best advice for people around an anxious person? “Listen! Even if you don’t know what to say, even if you don’t understand everything, listen.”