The Duke of Sussex shares how a technique used with military veterans helped him reconnect with memories of his late mother in a new MasterClass about grief

NEED TO KNOW

• Prince Harry reveals how the scent of Princess Diana’s perfume helped him reconnect with memories of his late mother
• The Duke of Sussex says he had forgotten the sound of Diana’s voice and laugh after years of shutting down his emotions
• Harry says his therapist introduced him to a technique he had previously seen used with military veterans experiencing PTSD

Prince Harry is revealing how the scent of his late mother Princess Diana‘s perfume helped bring back memories he feared he’d lost forever.

In a new MasterClass about grief, the Duke of Sussex, 42, recalls how years of shutting down his emotions following Diana’s death left him struggling to remember even the sound of her voice and laugh.

“I forgot what my mom sounded like. I forgot her laugh. I couldn’t really visualize what she looked like without looking at a photograph of her,” Harry says.

Years later, Harry’s therapist introduced him to a technique he had previously seen used with military veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): using familiar scents to help access memories affected by trauma.

For Harry, that meant revisiting the scent of his mother’s favorite perfume, First by Van Cleef & Arpels, a floral fragrance he previously identified in his 2023 memoir, Spare.

“It was like being transported to another time,” he recalls. “It unlocked everything that had been locked previously. There was still the wall there, the emotional and mental wall that I built up, where everything good and bad was on the other side of the wall. But spraying my mother’s scent was almost like knocking certain bricks through, so that I could see through and certain memories and experiences could start seeping through.”

The revelation comes in Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, a new MasterClass in which Harry joins neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor to explore how grief affects the brain and body.

PEOPLE has learned that MasterClass approached Harry last year about developing a class centered on grief. The program was filmed in California early this summer and debuted on Oct. 8, ahead of World Mental Health Day on Oct. 10. It benefits two bereavement charities, Comfort Zone Camp and Scotty’s Little Soldiers, a longtime cause of Harry’s.

Harry was just 12 years old when his mother died in a Paris car crash in 1997. He and his brother, Prince William, famously walked behind their mother’s coffin during her public funeral procession through London.

“Looking back on it now, I felt as though, you know, my brother and I were intermediaries for these people’s grief towards our mother, and they were showing more emotion than we could,” Harry recalls.

“It felt very, very strange for the hundreds of hands that we shook to be soaking wet with tears that they wiped away from their own faces. I almost felt guilty that I was unable to show the same emotion as these people who were crying for someone they’d never even met.”

Harry says he finally cried following Diana’s private burial at her childhood home, Althorp.

“I remember thinking or feeling that it actually felt really good to cry,” he shares.

Still, Harry admits that for years afterward, part of him held out hope that his mother was alive and would one day return.

“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,” he explains.

“That protective belief lasted for a decade,” Harry recalls. “The defense mechanism for the mind and the body was [to] shut down the emotions and shut down the memories. Not just the bad memories, the good memories as well.”

O’Connor explains in the MasterClass why scent can be such a powerful trigger for memory, noting its connection to the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain involved in emotion and memory.

“What’s important about that is, when you’re doing exposure because of grief, the thing that you’re being exposed to is that the person is not coming back…that they really are gone and you’re going to be okay,” she says.

“There are moments in grief where it is really difficult to remember them…but scent just cuts through all of that.”

For Harry, reconnecting with memories of Diana became part of a broader journey toward allowing himself to experience happiness without feeling that he was leaving his mother behind.

“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,” he shares. “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.”

Today, Harry says his family and charitable work have given him a meaningful way to carry Diana’s legacy forward.

“Everything I do, everything I put my energy towards, I hope that my mother will be proud about it,” he says. “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 adds. “There is an element of carrying my mother in me that ultimately energizes me for the work that I do.”

As the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death approaches in August 2027, PEOPLE understands that Harry is considering a number of projects to honor his mother and her legacy.

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Among them is the possibility of a documentary about Diana, although PEOPLE understands that no documentary project has yet been finalized or confirmed.

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