'You're not crazy' Prince Harry gets reassurance over Diana grief

Prince Harry got candid about losing Princess Diana.

During the new MasterClass, with Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, on Thursday, October 8. Prince Harry spoke about the experience of losing his mother, Princess Diana in a car accident, and how he used to hope that she might return someday.

“I believed that she had created this exit to get away from all the things that were destroying her life and that she was gonna reenter the fray in some disguise and then whisk me and my brother away,” the grieving son recalled.

Adding to the conversation, Dr Mary-Frances describes how our brain struggles to process the loss of a loved one. “When we bond with someone, when we fall in love with our spouse, or you fall in love with your baby, that’s actually encoded in the brain as a ‘we’ that says, ‘I will always be here for you, and you will always be here for me.’

She went on to explain, “And so when a loved one dies, that is not evidence for the brain to give up that they are everlasting. We still believe that they are out there, that they are just lost, that we need to find them, that we yearn for them because we still expect that they’re gonna walk through the door.”

“You’re not crazy. It’s an important part of your brain that holds attachment-bonded relationships together by believing they’re out there,” the Dr reassuringly added.

Prince Harry further recalled his changing perspective of grief, saying, “I’d spent so long emotionally numb, to a large extent, because I felt disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her.”

Noting, “I felt like I had to be sad and I had to be emotionally numb in order to prove to her that I missed her.”

“But the reality is, what I discovered was actually that she just wanted me to be happy. And that was a huge mental shift for me. It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life,” the Duke of Sussex revealed.

However, he hoped that his “mother will be proud about it.” Moreover, he is “Trying to continue and protect her legacy, what I didn’t realize was the work that I ended up choosing, or the work that I ended up getting drawn in and attracted to, was so similar to the work that she was doing.”

“With grief comes this, it’s not so much responsibility, but this carrying of the person that you’ve lost throughout your life,”he continued, “There is an element of carrying my mother in me that ultimately energizes me for the work that I do.”

It is pertinent to mention here that Princess Diana died in August 1997, when Prince Harry was just 12-years-old.