Prince Harry & Therapy
Prince Harry in The Me You Can’t See, Photograph Apple/AP via The Guardian
“Without therapy, without doing the work, we would not be able to withstand this.”
I have been watching the docuseries: The Me You Can’t See. At first I thought I could binge watch this show but the series surprised me. I’m not new to topics around mental health, particularly anxiety and depression, both professionally and personally. I have had my share of therapy and know very well of the incredible amount of work it takes to go somewhere to be able to look at yourself, your thoughts, your pattern of behaviours in order to understand and perhaps shift them.
When I started watching the show, I thought this was a celebrity form of activism about mental health, and although there are some understandable critique of the series as this Guardian piece pointed out, the series and its openness surprised me. Each episode worked hard to highlight a certain fragment of a mental health journey and make its invisibility more visible. For me and others who wrote about the show, this show is not meant to be binge watched. The show is meant to draw the viewer in with its celebrity factors and then keep people tuned for the stories of others. The show is emotionally heavy and it needs reflection and introspection. I was crying at the stories of the Syrian children after the trauma of the Syrian war, the importance of EMDR therapy for those children, and their resilience.
For me one of the most profound part of the series, and of course the selling point of the show, was its biggest celebrity: Prince Harry. He talked openly about his trauma and about processing that trauma. He opened his heart a little to the viewer and took us to a trauma-story of what it was like to hear the sound of the camera shutters as the paparazzi were chasing them, him and his brother strapped to their car seats and their mom at the wheel crying and unable to see the road. He talked about his panic attacks! This man, one of the most famous people in the world ,talked about the panic attacks that he would have before going somewhere for his job, how he would feel his body temperature rise and would worry that everyone else could see it.
As he was talking about all these things, I couldn’t help but admire him. This is not an easy thing to do for anybody, let alone for a British man, brought up with the ideas and the ideals of the stiff-upper-lip and the never-lower-the-drawbridge attitude of the British aristocracy and the Royal Family. Here was a man, a war veteran nonetheless, sitting down talking about his anxiety, trauma, and panic attacks. He talked about the years he went to therapy and there, in that safe space of examination, he learned more about himself than in the whole of his life prior to therapy.
On camera, he even went through an acted out an EMDR therapy session. That’s incredible. It is all incredible. I have done EMDR myself and it is a form of therapy that is directed especially towards healing trauma. It helped me quite a lot with my own anxiety. As I watched him and as his therapist, or the person who acted as his therapist, asked him the same significant questions that my therapist would ask me: ‘what is your negative belief about yourself? And what would you like to believe about yourself instead?’, I kept thinking that this man must have done a lot of work on himself to be able to sit in front of the camera and show this work to the viewer.
I was so touched that he did that. He was vulnerable and brave. As a woman, I especially appreciate when men are this brave and they show their vulnerable sides. Men especially are taught that few emotions are admissible for display and sadness, tears, talking about feelings of powerlessness, and out of control, are not among them. Our patriarchal society teaches that in order to attain and maintain the ideals of masculinity, men must possess power and be in control at all times. The emotions that are considered ‘feminine’ are not given space to be expressed. Those emotions are considered to be ‘less then’. And the thing about emotions are, whether we want them or not, they show up in different situations because we are all human beings who are affected by the forces of our environment.
I hope this inspires other men to reach out. He certainly inspired me to write this post. I know personally that it takes a lot of courage and guts to talk about mental health. There is an enormous amount of stigma around going to therapy and perhaps a silver-lining of the pandemic time has been the ability to reach out for mental health support because that support is considered a very normal need right now.
He was brave, and his bravery inspired me. Let’s keep the conversation going.
