Prince Harry is opening up about the reasons why he wrote his tell-all memoir “Spare,” revealing how the process of sharing details of his personal life led him to “break free” from his family and how he wants his experience to be of service to others.
On Saturday, the Duke of Sussex sat down with Dr. Gabor Mate, a Hungarian-Canadian doctor and author who specializes in trauma, addiction and stress.
The Vimeo-hosted dialogue, which was announced as “an intimate conversation as they discuss living with loss and the importance of personal healing,” focused on Harry’s record-breaking book.
For about 60 minutes, the two discussed Harry’s complicated relationship with his family, his sense of loss, his use of recreational drugs and the importance of healing.
Mate — the author of “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture” — also told Harry that after reading “Spare” and speaking with him in person, he diagnosed him with attention deficit disorder (ADD), PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety and depression, explaining that much of it stemmed from Harry’s childhood.
According to TMZ, Harry appeared to “accept Dr. Mate’s diagnoses at face value, even acknowledging that he’d been diagnosed with PTSD by his own personal therapist.”
The youngest son of the late Princess Diana told Mate how he “always felt slightly different to the rest of (his) family,” which was something he also felt about his mother.
“I felt strange being in this container, and I know that my mum felt the same. It makes sense to me — it didn’t make sense at the time — I felt as though my body was in there, but my head was out, but sometimes it was vice-versa,” he said during the interview, according to People.
Writing the book felt like a release, but it was also a difficult process he’d always hoped could help other people.
“I really hope, and I hoped right from the beginning, when I turned around to the people that were helping me write this book, I said, ‘I want this to be an act of service, it needs to be, because I know important it is, because you’re almost giving permission for people to talk about their own stuff, and be their own selves, and society doesn’t really help us,” he said.
When Mate asked Harry if he succeeded in breaking free from Royal Family, he said he had. And even though it wasn’t easy, in the end, it was all worth it.
“I’ve lost a lot, but at the same time I’ve gained a lot,” he told Mate, according to The Daily Beast.
Harry, who spoke candidly about experimenting with recreational drugs in his book, also talked to Mate about his past drug use. While cocaine “didn’t do anything” for him, he said marijuana and psychedelics helped him “deal with the traumas and pains of the past.”
