Prince Harry says therapy gave him “permission to grieve” after Diana’s death
Prince Harry has said he did not cry when his mother died, nor for nearly 20 years afterwards.
He spoke about grief in a video conversation titled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss. It is part of MasterClass, the subscription platform that hosts video lessons from public figures and specialists. His guest was Dr Mary-Frances O'Connor, a professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona.
The conversation was filmed in California earlier this summer and published on Thursday, as reported by Hello. Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Harry was 12.
“I was a 12-year-old boy with no permission to fall apart and no roadmap for how to heal,” he said. He said therapy sessions later gave him “permission to grieve” and allowed him to work through his feelings.
He described the years that followed as numbness. For 15 to 20 years, he said, his answer when asked if he was all right was “I’m fine.” That phrase, he said, meant emotional shutdown.
He joined the British Army at 20. He said it was a distraction, and that he thought he could outrun his feelings. He went on to serve for a decade and rose to the rank of Captain.
Returning from Afghanistan in 2013 acted as a trigger, he said. It brought other traumas linked to his mother’s death to the surface. At one point he could not remember her laugh, or what she looked like.
He also spoke about guilt around happiness. Nobody told him, he said, that joy was still allowed and that it wasn’t betrayal.
What makes this stand out is the bluntness of the language. He does not describe grief as a single event. He describes it as something delayed, avoided and then confronted much later.
His uncle, Earl Spencer, has spoken separately about press scrutiny of the family. He described coverage of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan as a “cancerous influence in their life,” according to the BBC. He has also said he sees echoes of his sister’s treatment in the press in the way the couple are examined.
