Prince Harry on Privilege, Mental Health, and His Date With Meghan Markle at the Supermarket
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It was just over two months ago that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gave their landmark interview to Oprah, with revelations that rocked the monarchy and painted a damning picture of royal life. And now the Duke of Sussex has spoken at length once more in a different, but equally frank, interview about his upbringing and how he has come to see the world.
Harry spoke to Dax Shepherd and Monica Padman for 90 minutes on the podcast Armchair Expert. The discussion centered around mental health ahead of the Prince’s upcoming series for Apple TV+ on the subject with Oprah: The Me You Can’t See. And Harry was happy to be open about his personal struggles, seeking therapy and his thoughts on his upbringing.
“Isn’t life about breaking the cycle?” the Prince said when asked by Monica about parenting and whether he was trying to parent in the opposite direction to how he was brought up. “There’s no blame, I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody. But certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure that I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on basically. There’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway, as parents we should be doing the most that we can to try and say ‘you know what that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.’”
Clearly speaking about his father, Prince Charles, Harry continued, “I never saw it, I never knew about it, and then suddenly I started to piece it all together and go OK so this where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this bit about his life, I also know that’s connected to his parents. So that means that he’s treating me the way that he was treated. Which means how can I change that for my own kids?”
Harry went on to point out, “Here I am, I’ve now moved my whole family to the U.S. Well that wasn’t the plan. But sometimes you’ve got to make decisions that put your family first and your mental health first.”
The in-depth discussion was often serious and covered many complex issues. But it also featured moments of humor and light-heartedness—such as when Harry told an anecdote about meeting up with Meghan in the supermarket the first time she came to stay with him. “We met up in a supermarket in London pretending as though we didn’t know each other, so texting each other from the other side of the aisle,” he said. “There were people looking at me giving me all these weird looks and coming up and saying hi or whatever, and I was there texting saying is this the right one and she was saying no you want parchment paper. I’m like, OK, where’s the parchment paper?”
The Prince went on to compare these efforts to be incognito with being “more free” in his current home of Santa Barbara. “Living here now, I can actually lift my head and I feel different. My shoulders have dropped, so has hers, and you can walk around feeling a little bit more free. I get to take Archie on the back of my bicycle.”
Harry’s assessment of family life in California contrasts starkly with some of his recollections of growing up, with the media intrusion Princess Diana suffered featuring prominently in his memories. “There was very rarely a day that went by without at least one paparazzi jumping out from behind a car or something,” he said.
He told how in his early 20s, he didn't want the job of being royal. “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’s going to happen again...I don’t want to be part of this.” But the Prince added that when he started therapy, “it was like the bubble was burst...I was like, OK, you’re in this position of privilege, stop complaining or stop thinking as though 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?”
When Dax asked what the moment for him was that led to therapy. Harry said, “It was a conversation that I had with my now wife. And she saw it, she saw it straight away and she could tell that I was hurting and that some of the stuff that was out of my control was making me really angry.” The Prince recounted three times he said he had felt “helpless”; “one when I was a kid in the back of a car watching my mum being chased by paparazzi, two was in Afghanistan in an Apache helicopter, and then the third one was with my wife. And those are the moments when feeling helpless hurts.”
Another theme of the discussion was unconscious bias, with Harry speaking about the work he has been doing to understand it more. “I was really shocked once I started doing therapy and that bubble was burst and then I started doing my own work, really like a lot of work and started to uncover and understand more about unconscious bias. And I was like, wow, I thought since I screwed up when I was younger and then did the work I thought I then knew, but I didn’t, and I still don’t fully know, it’s a constant, constant work in progress. And every single one of us has it.”
The Prince went on to say that people shouldn’t be defensive about unconscious bias but commit to doing the work to be part of the solution. “A lot of people do view it as you’re either racist or you’re not”, the Prince said. “And it’s like the rest of it is where we all are...No-one is blaming you. But the moment that you acknowledge that you do have unconscious bias, what are you going to do about it? Because if you choose to do nothing, then you are continuing to fuel the problem which means you are then heading towards racism.”
A central theme of the conversation was the fact that being privileged, or having things that you think you want, does not automatically bring happiness. Dax spoke about being at the height of his success, saying: “I had all the things that are supposed make you happy and it just didn’t f***ing work.” Harry spoke about the series giving him and Oprah the opportunity to have “honest conversations” with people around the world. “About stripping away, not so much the labeling but our backgrounds and the privilege. Because, again, within certain corners of the media it’s very much like you’re privileged, how can you possibly be suffering?”
But the Prince also observed at one point about his upbringing, “The privilege does give you blinkers. Mine were never particularly on straight, I’ve always felt different.”
The trio also discussed giving back, and how this can bring great satisfaction and purpose, with Harry surmising, “Now looking back at it I realize that helping other people helped me.”
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