Prince Harry today spoke of being diagnosed with PTSD after Princess Diana’s death during a livestream Q&A with a controversial ‘toxic trauma’ expert, as he insisted: ‘I don’t see myself as a victim’.
The Duke of Sussex is fielding questions from Canadian-Hungarian academic Dr. Gabor Maté as part of an ‘intimate conversation’ about ‘living with loss and personal healing’, with the £17-a-head tickets including a copy of his memoir, Spare.
Harry told the author he did not see himself as a ‘victim’ and was not looking for sympathy. He compared himself to Diana in feeling ‘different’ from the rest of his family and said he tried to constantly hug his children, unlike his father, King Charles.
The royal said that sharing his troubles in public was an ‘act of service’ for others and spoke about how having therapy helped ‘burst a bubble’ he felt he was living in.
‘My awareness of myself was distorted by my environment and society,’ he said. ‘When I found my therapist and started to unpack 12-year-old Harry at the point my mother died was scary.
‘One of the things I was most scared about was losing the memory of my mum. I thought therapy would cure me but I’d lose what I had managed to hold on to my mother. It was the opposite… it was a huge weight off my chest.’
Dr Maté began the conversation by saying there were ‘two divergent streams of responses’ to the event – those who had and hadn’t read Harry’s book ‘Spare.’
He said that those who hadn’t read the book were ‘resentful’ towards Harry and those who had been ‘grateful’ to him for sharing his story.
Harry added that ‘it feels like an act of service’ sharing his experiences through his book.
Dr Maté has said Harry starting therapy ‘was like bursting a bubble’.
