AMP in the post
Currently one of the world’s most popular princes, Prince Harry appeared as a guest on Dax Shepard’s new Armchair Expert podcast episode released today to talk about getting therapy, coping with media attention, and how his wife Meghan forever changed his life.
The Duke Of Sussex Discusses Mental Health
During the interview, the prince offered a closer look into his personal life and shared things people scarcely knew about him before.
He also revealed that constantly being under the gaze of the cameras was stressful for him and he didn’t have a choice or control over it as it was what he was born into. He credited his wife as the one who advised him to get much-needed therapy to deal with periods of his life that kept coming back to haunt him.
“It was a conversation that I had with my now wife [Meghan]. And she saw it. She saw it straight away. She could tell that I was hurting and that some of the stuff that was out of my control was making me really angry and it would make my blood boil. You have that fire. It’s not a temper, it’s a fire. I’ve never screamed. I’ve never shouted. For me, the best way of letting out the aggression is through boxing.”
AMP in the post
“But for me, prior to meeting Meghan, it was very much a case of certainly, connected to the media, that anger and frustration of this is so unjust. Not, by the way, just about me but all this stuff that I was seeing. Helplessness [that I feel], that’s my biggest Achilles heel. The three major times I felt completely helpless: one when I was a kid in the back of the car with my mum being chased by paparazzi, two was in Afghanistan in an Apache helicopter, and then the third one was with my wife. Those were the moments in my life where yeah, feeling helpless hurts. It really hurts.”
For the royal, he admitted that therapy helped him a lot to put things into perspective: “And then once I started doing therapy it was like the bubble was burst. I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake off and I was like, ‘you’re in this position of privilege, stop complaining and stop thinking you want something different — make this different — because you can’t get out. How are you going to do these things differently, how are you going to make your mum proud and use this platform to really affect change?”
Harry continued, speaking about how Meghan hadn’t expected to live a normal life when she married him, but knowing what she knows now as a princess, Harry predicts that she’ll probably now say: “You don’t need to be a princess. You can create the life that will be better than any princess’”.
Harry Reveals That He Once Hated Being A Prince
Further down the line during the interview, the prince, who has left the Royal Family and once sympathized with his father and brother who he felt were “trapped” within the institution, shared how much he didn’t want to be a prince in his 20s.
AMP in the post
“In my early 20s, I was a case of just, ‘I don’t want this job. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be doing this. Look what it did to my mum. How am I ever going to settle down and have a wife and a family when I know that it is going to happen again? Because I know—I’ve seen behind the curtain. I’ve seen the business model. I know how this operation runs and how it works. I don’t want to be part of this.’
“And then once I started doing therapy, suddenly it was like the bubble was burst. I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake-off. And I was like, “Okay, you’re in this position of privilege. Stop complaining. Stop thinking you want something different. Make this different because you can’t get out. So how are you going to do this differently? How are you going to make your mum proud? How are you going to use this platform to really affect change and be able to give people that confidence to be able to change their own lives?” It was interesting because well, when I am looking back now—of course, at the time, the lack of awareness, now looking back at it, helping other people helped me.”
Prince Harry And Meghan Markle Went To Great Lengths To Shield Their Relationship From The Media When They Started Dating
Prince Harry also shared with the world his and Meghan’s experiences when they started dating, especially since they wanted to keep it from the British media.
“The first time that Meghan and I met up for her to come and stay with me, we met up in a supermarket in London, pretending that we didn’t know each other, so we were texting each other from the other side of the aisles,” he said. “There were people looking at me, giving me all these weird looks and coming up to me and saying ‘hi’ or whatever. I was there, texting her, saying ‘is this the right one,’ and she said, ‘no, you want parchment paper,’ and ’I’m like, ‘okay, where’s the parchment paper?!’ So it was nice. I had a baseball cap on, looking down at the floor…trying to stay incognito.”
He never owns his responsibility for fixing his life, just blames his family for ruining it.