Prince Harry Told Oprah That Meeting Meghan Markle Made Him Realize He Had To "Fix Himself"

"I knew that if I didn’t do the therapy and fix myself that I was going to lose this woman who I could see spending the rest of my life with."

In the new Apple TV docuseries produced by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry (aka the Duke of Sussex), the sixth in line to the British throne, said meeting his future wife, Meghan Markle, made him realize he had to confront his childhood trauma, particularly the death of his mother, Princess Diana.

"I saw GPs, I saw doctors, I saw therapists, I saw alternative therapists. I saw all sorts of people, but it was meeting and being with Meghan," he said in the series The Me You Can’t See when asked about what prompted him to seek help and take his mental health seriously. "I knew that if I didn’t do the therapy and fix myself that I was going to lose this woman who I could see spending the rest of my life with."

"I quickly established that if this relationship was going to work, then I was going to have to deal with my past because there was anger there," he added. "And it wasn’t anger at her. It was just anger and she recognized it. She saw it.

"So how do I fix this? And it was a case of, You need to go back to the past, back to the point of trauma, deal with it, process it, and then move forward."

The docuseries, which premieres Friday on the Apple TV+, has been in the works since April 2019, when Kensington Palace announced that Harry and Oprah were joining forces to create the series and build on his "long-standing work on issues and initiatives regarding mental health, where he has candidly shared personal experience and advocated for those who silently suffer, empowering them to get the help and support they deserve."

"There was a lot of learning right at the beginning of our relationship," he said. "She was shocked to be coming backstage of the institution, of the British royal family. When she said, ‘I think you need to see someone,’ it was in reaction to an argument that we had.

"The moment I started therapy — it was probably within my second session — my therapist turned around to me and said, ‘That sounds like you reverting to 12-year-old Harry.’

"I felt somewhat ashamed and defensive. Like, ‘How dare you? You’re calling me a child.’ And she goes, ‘No, I’m not calling you a child. I’m expressing sympathy and empathy for you for what happened to you when you were a child.'

"That was the start of a learning journey for me. I became aware that I’d been living in a bubble within this family, within this institution, and I was sort of almost trapped in a thought process or a mindset."


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