Prince Harry may not look like most people out there.
He may have more money than the average individual and he definitely has had a status bestowed upon him to which nearly no one else can relate.
But that doesn’t mean the Royal Stud Muffin isn’t just like everyone else when it comes to struggling with some serious emotions.
Speaking to The Telegraph‘s Bryony Gordon for the first episode of her new podcast Mad World, Harry opened way up this weekend about his reaction to his beloved mother’s shocking death.
“I’ve spent most of my life saying ‘I’m fine’ … and most of us aren’t up for going that deep. So today I’m OK. I’m a little bit nervous. I’m a little bit tight in the chest but otherwise fine,” Harry said as a preamble to the larger discussion about mental health.
The Prince went on to explain that losing mom Princess Diana in 1997 on the “public platform” affected his personal and public life.
It really messed with his internal stability for a long time.
Harry spoke as candidly about the tragedy as he ever has before in this interview, telling the host:
“I can safely say that losing my mom at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had quite a serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well.”
Princess Diana was killed when the car she was a passenger in crashed after it attempted to speed away from the paparazzi.
It was a catastrophe whose affects reverberated around the globe.
But no one was hit harder by Diana’s passing harder, of course, than her two kids, Harry and William.
“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum because why would that help?” Harry said on the podcast.
After years not thinking about his mother’s horrible death and being “a problem” through a lot of his 20s, the Prince says he experienced two years of “total chaos.”
Therefore, with the “huge support” of his brother when he was 28, he started seeking professional assistance, telling Gordon he visited with a therapist “more than a couple of times.”
He also credited boxing as a coping mechanism.
This sport served as a healthy way to get out his anger and pain, Harry detailed, because “I was on the verge of punching someone.”
How is Harry doing these days?
The Royal Family member certainly seems happy to be dating Meghan Markle, confirming on the podcast that he’s “in a good place” at the moment.
“Because of the process that I’ve been through over the last two and a half to three years, I’ve now been able to take my work seriously, be able to take my private life seriously as well, and be able to put blood, sweat and tears into the things that really make a difference,’ he says.
Will he get married to Markle?
That issue was never raised.
Instead, Harry was far more interested in normalizing the stigma around mental health issues.
“No matter who you are, the conversation has to be the beginning,” he said.