Prince Harry has probably done a “first” for the royal family: he sat down for a lengthy podcast interview. And it’s about mental health! Harry chatted with The Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon’s Mad World inaugural podcast specifically to discuss mental health. In an effort to destigmatize therapy and seeking mental health support, Harry went in-depth about his grief over his mother’s death and how it took him years to really work through that grief. You can hear the podcast here at the Telegraph. Some highlights:
Losing his mom at the age of 12: “I can safely say that losing my mom at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well. I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle.”
Whether he’s ever seen a shrink: “I’ve done that a couple of times, more than a couple of times, but it’s great.”
He took up boxing to work through his anger issues: “During those years I took up boxing, because everyone was saying boxing is good for you and it’s a really good way of letting out aggression. And that really saved me because I was on the verge of punching someone, so being able to punch someone who had pads was certainly easier.”
His brother and other people suggested he seek help: They said, “Look, you really need to deal with this. It is not normal to think that nothing has affected you.”
Prince Harry said of his loss: “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help? [I thought] it’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back. So from an emotional side, I was like ‘right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything’. So I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going ‘life is great’, or ‘life is fine’ and that was exactly it. And then [I] started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the
forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.”
Dealing with fight-or-flight reactions: Even at royal engagements, he said, he had found himself battling a “flight or fight” reaction without properly
understanding why. Once he started opening up to friends, he added, he found those same friends felt able to “unravel their own issues”.
He wasn’t struggling with mental health issues because of his military service: “I can safely say it’s not Afghanistan-related. I’m not one of those guys that has had to see my best mate blown up next to me and have to apply a tourniquet to both their legs. Luckily, thank God, I wasn’t one of those people.”
Learning how to talk about his mother: “The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realize that actually you’re part of quite a big club…. What we are trying to do is normalise the conversation to the point where anyone can sit down and have a coffee and just go ‘you know what, I’ve had a really s— day, can I just tell about it? Because then you walk away and it’s done. Because of the process I have been through over the past two and a half years, I’ve now been able to take my work seriously, been able to take my private life seriously as well, and been able to put blood, sweat and tears into the things that really make a difference and things that I think will make a difference to everybody else.”
[From The Telegraph]
Harry says a few times in the podcast that William was a huge support for him and that William was one of the people telling him to seek help for his anger, anxiety and grief. Which is interesting because I sometimes feel like William is the one who hasn’t properly dealt with anything regarding his mom? William is the one who tightly balls up his fists to get through his royal events. He’s the one who chose his wife by how much he liked her mother. Still, it’s great that Harry is talking about all of this and he’s doing great work destigmatizing mental health conversations at every level.
https://t.co/yh1HPItCoz
— Sharon McDonough (@SharonMcDoo) April 17, 2017
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Source: celebitchy.com
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