The Duke of Sussex opens up about the way grief has affected him through the years in a new MasterClass

NEED TO KNOW

• Prince Harry explored his journey with grief in a new MasterClass
• In the candid conversation, the Duke of Sussex reflected on repressing his emotions over the death of his mother, Princess Diana
• Avoiding his grief for years, Harry said, led to panic attacks and depression

Prince Harry got candid about the ways grief has affected him throughout the years.

The Duke of Sussex, 42, teamed up with neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor for a new installment of MasterClass, titled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss. In the in-depth episode, the pair explored the chemical effects of grief on the brain and body via Harry’s own experiences grieving his late mother, Princess Diana.

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

Harry was 12 years old when his mother died in a car crash in Paris. In the MasterClass, he reflected on the way that stifling his grief for many years led to bouts of anxiety and depression.

“Everybody knew what had happened to me as a kid, and I think everybody looked at me probably to see, ‘How’s he doing? Is he okay? How must he be feeling after losing his mom at the age of 12?’ ” he recalled. “It was even more of a reason to give the impression that I’m okay, that I’m fine.”

“And for 15, 20 years, when I was being asked, ‘Are you okay?’ My response was, ‘I’m fine,’ ” he admitted. “It was numbness, emotional shutdown.”

Harry explained that his teenage years were driven by adrenaline and the avoidance of any emotion connected to the loss of his mother. Joining the military at 20, he explained, was the “perfect distraction.”

“I went into the army in my early 20s, really without an identity. I was who I was, my name was my name,” he shared. “Maybe as far as other people were concerned, my identity was, ‘He’s the prince that lost his mom at the age of 12.’ So to be able to wear a uniform, the same uniform as everybody else, was not only a relief, but really gave me the purpose and the grounding that I needed at that time.”

The rigid structure of military life left Harry focused on the task at hand, and he recalled feeling like “this adrenalized state that I was in was a superpower.”

However, after his time in the military, things “caught up” with him.

“When I go back from Afghanistan on my second tour in 2013, there was no other mission,” he reflected. “Everything caught up with me, and what was very interesting was my post-traumatic stress was not tied to Afghanistan. The things that I saw, the things I experienced, appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me.”

“I started to realize that I probably had become seriously depleted when just putting a simple dress shirt on, the tightening of the collar, literally felt like I was suffocating, and I would be experiencing panic attacks just in the car on the way to work,” Harry shared. “And that’s when I realized, okay, there’s something bigger. There’s something else that you need to look into here.”

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle and their son, Prince Archie, traveled to Canada in late 2019, hoping some time away from royal life might help. By January 2020, they had announced their intention to “step back” as working senior members of the British royal family.

“Being in Canada, away from the stressful environment where presumably my body was just pumped full of adrenaline, within two or three days, I experienced this adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before,” he shared. “It was as if I needed stress in order to get the adrenaline to make my brain function because I became useless around the house. I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks, and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline.”

Part of that exhaustion, O’Connor explained, was a side effect of Harry never truly taking the time to grieve the loss of his mother.

”There is a function to despair,” she shared. “As awful as it feels, it is there to have us stop searching for someone who’s not coming back because searching for them, all that adrenaline, all that cortisol, it is metabolically incredibly expensive. To keep that up creates incredible wear and tear on the body.”

Harry admitted that, even for years after he watched his mother be buried, part of him held on to the belief that she might come back.

“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 explained.

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He also had to give up the long-held belief that working through his grief and healing emotionally would mean losing a key connection to his late mother.

“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 shared. “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.”

When he began truly processing his emotions, Prince Harry found the opposite was true.

“The reality is, what I discovered was actually that she just wanted me to be happy,” he shared. “And that was a huge mental shift for me. It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life.”

Prince Harry spoke about his connection to his mother today.

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

He also said that healing has allowed him to find joy in recognizing her in the “fleeting moments” of his day-to-day life.

“A lot has happened in my life in the last six years, and she has turned up at moments where it makes complete sense that she turned up in those moments,” Harry shared.

“It just makes me laugh out loud sometimes because it’s like, this is not a coincidence. There is no version of where this is anything else but you,” he added with a laugh. “I feel it as an energy. And also it’s visual. It’s a sign. And it’s very much connected to her.”

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