Prince Harry: I always felt different to rest of family
Prince Harry stated that he felt “always slightly different” from his family and that his dead mother felt the same.
The Duke of Sussex spoke out about his grief in an online conversation. He said that he was afraid of losing the memories of Diana, his mother when he began therapy.
He also said he made sure to “smother” his children with affection to avoid passing on any “traumas” or “negative experiences” from his own upbringing.
His conversation was with Dr. Gabor Mate (an author on addiction and trauma).
The fireside chat in California continued the themes of “living without loss” that he had written about in his bombshell memoir Spare.
The Duke of Sussex reflected upon the public reaction to the work and insisted that he wasn’t a victim or seeking sympathy.
He revealed that his own reaction to the controversial book’s publication was to feel “incredibly free”.
Dr. Mate said that he felt a tremendous weight lifted off his shoulders. He described the book as an “act” of service to others breaking the taboo surrounding mental health issues.
Saturday’s discussion was about the prince’s thoughts, emotions, therapy, and mental health.
But it did not go into recent royal revelations, such as the request for Harry and his wife Meghan to vacate Frogmore Cottage – or whether or not he would attend his father’s coronation.
It was also not mentioned how the Royal Family, which included his brother, felt about his tell-all memoir.
Prince Harry described growing up “feeling slightly differently to the rest of our family” – and felt like he was living in a “bubble”.which Therapy had helped him burst.
In front of an international online audience, he was asked about experiencing an emotionally distant childhood, with a lack of hugs and demonstrations of affection.
He said that with his own children, he was “making sure that I smother them with love and affection”.
“As a father, I feel a huge responsibility to ensure that I don’t pass on any traumas or… negative experiences that I’ve had as a kid,” he said.
He spoke repeatedly about the importance of therapy, even though it could drive a wedge between him and other relationships.
But he said that he wrongly feared that it would erode his feelings about his mother, Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997 when Harry was aged 12.
“One of the things I was most scared about was losing the feeling that I had of my mum… whatever I had managed to hold onto of my mother,” said Prince Harry.
But he hadn’t lost those feelings and had come to realize “that actually she just wanted me to be happy”, he told Dr. Maté.
The prince spoke about being “eternally grateful” for his wife Meghan in changing his perspective, calling her an “exceptional human being”.
But he said meeting Meghan had given him a “crash course” in the experience of racism, which he described as “pretty shocking”.
Prince Harry also defended the use of psychedelic medicine, saying it had helped him “deal with the traumas and pains of the past” and was like the “cleaning of the windscreen”.
He said taking cocaine “didn’t do anything for me” but that “marijuana is different, that actually really did help me”.
To watch the online interview, the audience had to buy a copy of Prince Harry’s best-selling memoir, which had made headlines with its unprecedented account of tensions between the royals and personal revelations.
It included claims of a physical altercation with his brother Prince William, and recorded his experiences of taking drugs and losing his virginity.
