June, 2018

PRINCE HARRY’S RECENT WEDDING REMINDS US:

ONLY GRIEVING ENABLES HEALTHY HEALING!

Prince Harry’s recent wedding to one of our own U.S. citizens, Meghan Markle, best known for her role in the TV series, ’Suits,’  re-focuses our attention again on the importance of grieving in order to achieve healthy healing.  Without it, healthy, whole relationships that enable deep commitment can not be achieved, as the Prince came to realize.  In his own words: “I sought counseling after 20 years of not thinking about the death of my mother, Diana, and two years of total chaos in my life.”

This quote describes what happens when grief is avoided, denied and buried as emotionally deep as is possible.  I think survivors, like the Prince here, believe that feelings of loss are bio-degradable and thus, when avoided, will disappear over time.  But as the Prince was to learn, that belief is a myth: grief that remains buried does not evaporate as time passes.  Instead it impacts our lives in unsuspecting ways.  Let us return to Prince Harry’s words to learn more.

The Prince continues in an interview with [UK’s] The Telegraph NEWS [by Hannah Furness, April, 2017], that he “shut down all of my emotions” for almost two decades after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.  Prince Harry was twelve years old when he lost his mom and, as he says, he spent his teenage years and twenties determined not to think about her.  Such a shut-down “has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well.”

Prince Harry said of his loss: “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to even think about my mum because, why would it 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.’“  He further talks about feeling “on the verge of punching someone” and experiencing anxiety during royal engagements that he didn’t “understand why.”

As a grief counselor, I am not surprised, at all, to read about the Prince’s anger and anxiety.  What survivor of loss, especially a child of twelve, hasn’t felt profound, seemingly irrational anger at anything or anyone?  And how could the Prince escape anxiety during subsequent royal engagements when tens of millions watched this twelve year old participate in one of the most elaborate royal funeral services in UK’s history?

When he decided, as a youngster, not to re-visit this intense memory, decided to not talk about it with anyone because of the pain, its trauma didn’t disappear with such avoidance as the young Prince expected.  Instead it was transferred to the more general situation of ‘royal engagements’ where he then experienced intense anxiety that he did not fully understand.  A grief counselor would have explained to young Harry that his anxiety was a way for his mind to distract him from the underlying emotional imprints of his mum’s funeral that he so wished to forget.  He would have then been helped to re-visit those imprints in an effort to ‘flatten’ their emotional impact by releasing his pain.

The interview concludes with the Prince seeking support from a mental health professional after the encouragement of [especially] his brother, William, and others close to him: “Look, you really need to deal with this. This is not normal to think that nothing has affected you.”

Prince Harry says: “I know there is huge merit in talking about issues and the only thing about keeping it quiet is that it’s only ever going to make it worse.  Not just for you, but for everybody else around you as well, because you become a problem.   I, through my twenties, was a problem and I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Over the past 2 ½ years of hard work, “learning to talk honestly about my feelings,” he says, he is now “feeling able to put that blood, sweat and tears into making a difference for others.”  The great value and aid of grief counseling motivated Prince Harry, along with his brother and sister-in-law, The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, to jointly coordinate The Heads Together campaign whose aim is to end the stigma around mental health in the UK.  It is this desire to end that stigma that decided the Prince to give such an unprecedented insight into his past in hopes of encouraging and making a difference in others experiencing devastating loss & grief.