Prince Harry today spoke of being diagnosed with PTSD after Princess Diana’s death and said he was a good candidate for the Army because they ‘recruit from broken homes’.
The Duke of Sussex is fielding questions from controversial ‘toxic trauma’ expert Dr Gabor Maté as part of an intimate conversation about ‘living with loss and personal healing’, with the £17-a-head tickets including a copy of his memoir, Spare.
Harry told the author he did not see himself as a ‘victim’ and didn’t want sympathy. He compared himself to Diana in feeling ‘different’ from the rest of his family and said he tried to constantly hug his children in contrast to his father, King Charles.
The royal said that sharing his personal troubles in public was an ‘act of service’ for others and spoke how having therapy had helped ‘burst a bubble’ he felt he was living in.
‘My awareness of myself was distorted by my environment but also society,’ he said. ‘When I found my therapist and started to unpack 12-year-old Harry at the point my mother died was scary.’
Prince Harry is sitting down with Dr Gabor Maté for a livestream event about ‘trauma and healing’
During the discussion, which comes just days after it emerged King Charles is evicting Harry and his wife Meghan Markle from Frogmore Cottage, the Duke –
- Insisted ‘I’m not a victim’ and said he was ‘sharing my story will help some people out there’;
- Spoke movingly about the shattering impact of losing Diana, saying: ‘Since age 12 apart from being in a state of shock I was in fight or flight’;
- Was told by Dr Maté that he has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), prompting the prince to joke ‘a free session, great’;
- Said ‘a lot of us’ in the Army ‘didn’t necessarily agree or disagree’ with the West’s invasion of Afghanistan;
- Said therapy helped him to ‘break free and live’ from his ‘dysfunctional’ family;
- Told how he used illegal judge to ‘give me a sense of belonging’ and ‘make me feel different to the way I was feeling’;
- Boasted about the favourable Amazon reviews for his book, saying people had been writing ‘essays’ praising it;
- Asked about the concept of service to others, he said: ‘It’s a theme of the book because it’s a theme of my life’;
Dr Maté began the conversation by saying there were ‘two divergent streams of responses’ to the event based on whether or not people had read Harry’s autobiography.
He said that those who hadn’t read the book were ‘resentful’ towards Harry and thought he was wallowing in victimhood and those who had were ‘grateful’ to him for sharing his story.
‘I definitely don’t see myself as a victim,’ Harry said, adding that his experiences and his work with mental health ‘sharing my story will help some people out there’.
Harry said he had originally ‘frowned’ upon therapy but believed it had helped ‘burst a bubble’ he felt he was living in.
‘I thought that when I went to therapy that it would cure me, and that I would lose whatever I had left of my mother… it was the opposite,’ he said.
‘I turned into what I thought should be sadness to show that I missed her into knowing that she would want me to be happy.’
The conversation turned to the death of Harry’s mother, Diana, and how Charles broke the news to his son without hugging him.
Dr Maté spoke about the prince describing hugging his brother when he returned from Afghanistan and how unusual it felt to have this physical contact.
Describing how he was seeking to adopt a different approach, Harry said: ‘It leaves me in the position of a father having two children trying to smother them with love.
‘I feel a huge responsibility not to pass on any trauma or negative experiences that I’ve had as a kid or as a man growing up.
‘There are times when I catch myself when I should be smothering them with that love but I might not be.’
He added that if he did not hug his own children, it would have a ‘similar’ impact on them as to what he experienced growing up.
Dr Maté told Harry he could see ‘a lot of trauma’ in his childhood despite being ‘a scion of one of the richest families in the world, gilded with power and privilege.
Harry said he had tried to make life better for his children by providing them with a different upbringing.
‘We only know what we know, and for myself and my wife we do the best we can as parents – learning from our own past and overlapping those mistakes, perhaps, and growing… to break that cycle,’ he said.
‘You certainly don’t make friends in the process, in the short term.’
Asked by Dr Maté if he saw himself as a victim, Harry said: ‘I certainly don’t’
Speaking about Harry’s childhood, Dr Maté said: ‘I know there were great moments but there was also a lot of trauma and suffering.
Harry responded: ‘Isn’t that the same for most people?’
Dr Maté said: ‘It’s whether we recognise it or don’t recognise it, deal with it or don’t deal with it.
He added that he did not read Harry’s book for the drama but praised its ‘universal humanity’.
Dr Maté quoted a section of Harry’s book where he described his frustration that no one in his family wanted to ‘break free and live’, asking him if he felt he had been able to do so.
Harry responded that he had, adding that he felt ‘a great weight off my shoulders’ after leaving the Royal Family.
Dr Maté said: ‘You’re working hard to become more aware, more kind but the more you do, the more distant you become from your own family
Harry said: ‘A lot of families are complicated, a lot of families are dysfunctional – but for me when I was doing therapy regularly… I felt that I learned a new language.’
He added that other members of his family ‘didn’t speak that language’.
Speaking about his time in therapy the prince said he told his therapist: ‘This is working for me and I’m starting to go back to the point of trauma and unpack everything so I can be truly happy… but at the same time I’m feeling more and more distant from my loved ones and my family’.
Harry said his therapist responded: ‘This is what happens for a lot of people.’
Dr Maté said: ‘Ideally you shouldn’t have to face that choice but a lot of people have to make a decision – am I going to be myself or am I going to… please others.’
The conversation also touched on politics, with the Duke of Sussex saying some British soldiers were not ‘necessarily’ supportive of military efforts in Afghanistan.
During a livestreamed conversation, Dr Maté said he did not align with the West during the conflict.
In one striking revelation, Dr Maté told Harry he believes he has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), prompting the prince to joke ‘a free session, thanks’
Harry responded: ‘One of the reasons why so many people in the United Kingdom were not supportive of our troops was because they assumed that everybody that was serving was for the war.
‘But no, once you sign up, you do what you’re told to do.
‘So there was a lot of us that didn’t necessarily agree or disagree, but you were doing what you were trained to do, you were doing what you were sent to do.’
Harry spoke in detail about the death of his mother, Diana, and the long-term impact it was having on him.
Harry said that he was ‘in a state of shock’ from a young age.
‘Since age 12 apart from being in a state of shock I was in fight or flight,’ he said, adding he had learned the importance of ‘self-regulation’ to deal with his mental health.
Dr Mate said: ‘We don’t develop self-regulation, we have to learn it.’
Harry added that his therapist told him ‘We’re dealing with 12 year-old Harry here’ during one of his sessions.
Dr Mate responded: ‘At a certain point you revert to much younger ages – when you get hurt, when you get upset.
‘Trauma’s what happens inside of ourselves.’
Dr Maté told Harry he could see ‘a lot of trauma’ in his childhood despite being ‘a scion of one of the richest families in the world, gilded with power and privilege
Speaking about his mother giving him to someone else to save his life under the Nazi regime, Dr Mate said: ‘The trauma was what I made that mean… my mother thought she was saving my life but I thought I was being abandoned.’
‘Who gets abandoned? Someone’s who’s not worthy’
The trauma expert added that similar traumas had to be dealt with in adulthood so they were not passed on to the next generation.
Harry’s decision to share a platform with Dr Maté has provoked fury due to his history of controversial comments, including comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis.
The 79-year-old Hungarian-Canadian Holocaust survivor has also defended Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians and once branded the Israeli government ‘terrorists’.
Today’s discussion is taking place just days after it emerged Harry and Meghan had been told to leave Frogmore Cottage, their grace-and-favour residence.
The livestream costs £17 and comes with a hardback copy of the duke’s memoir
The couple were allegedly given ‘weeks’ to pack up their British home after Harry’s memoir Spare hit the shelves in January.
Earlier this week, journalist Omid Scobie claimed that some members of the Royal Family were ‘appalled’ by the decision to evict Harry and Meghan, with the couple also said to have felt ‘stunned’.
An insider allegedly told him: ‘It all feels very final and like a cruel punishment. It’s like [the family] want to cut them out of the picture for good.’
But the couple are not as ‘stunned’ about leaving as previous reports have suggested, believing that ‘if we need to move out, we will get ourselves out’, a source told The Times.
The revelation comes as preparations are taking place for King Charles’ Coronation in May amid speculation that Harry may not receive an invitation.
Who is Gabor Maté? Guru who compared Hamas terrorists to Jews who battled the Nazis and called for ALL drugs to be legalised
By Tom Leonard
Self-help guru Gabor Mate has compared the murderous terrorists of Hamas to the Jewish heroes who rose up against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
He has contributed to a pro-Kremlin website that defends brutal regimes around the world.
He has rushed to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour from charges of anti-Semitism and he has even spoken warmly of the spittle-flecked Pink Floyd star and alleged ‘Putin apologist’ Roger Waters.
So for all that he styles himself an expert in ‘toxic trauma’, critics insist that Dr Mate — a bestselling writer and fervent advocate for drug legalisation — knows a few things about being ‘toxic’ himself.
And yet, despite these and other controversies, today Prince Harry will be sitting down with the 79-year-old Hungarian-Canadian Holocaust survivor for a cosy chat, livestreamed for paying customers on the internet, on ‘the importance of personal healing’.
With his popularity plummeting in America and even the makers of the satirical comedy South Park savagely mocking him and his wife Meghan, perhaps the Duke of Sussex can’t be too choosy about his friends these days.
Nevertheless, what’s billed as Harry’s ‘intimate conversation’ with Mate — the latest effort to promote his memoir, Spare — has appalled Jewish leaders who have questioned how the Duke felt it remotely appropriate to collaborate with such a man.
‘I am working under the assumption that the Prince did not know this person’s political bias, his hatred for the Jewish state and his covering for Hamas terrorists,’ said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group. Whoever made the arrangements to have this individual appear with Prince Harry did him no favours.’
Mate (pictured with wife Rae) has published a string of bestselling books, but insists that he isn’t interested in money but only in ‘helping the suffering of humanity’
The Prince and Mate both have books to plug, however. And they also share the same publisher, Penguin Random House, which together with bookshops has arranged today’s discussion.
But this tête-à-tête is far more than a neat little marketing stunt. Rabbi Cooper may be disappointed to learn that the Prince is well acquainted with the doctor, according to a British interviewer who visited Harry at his Californian mansion in January and who reported that ‘we spoke excitedly about Mate for some time’.
After all, despite their very different backgrounds, the two men have a surprising amount in common.
For example, Harry has admitted consuming the powerful Amazonian hallucinogen ayahuasca, which Dr Mate — a former family GP and palliative-care specialist — once enthusiastically promoted to his patients. (That is, until the Canadian government threatened to arrest him for doing so on the grounds that the drug was illegal.) For another, Mate is a self-confessed neurotic attention-seeker who believes that most adult hang-ups can be attributed to something bad happening to us during childhood.
And this, some might judge, makes him perfectly suited to talking to Harry — who suffered the loss of his mother at a young age and who has spoken exhaustively about his various gripes in TV interviews, a Netflix show and while promoting his memoir.
Those willing to stump up the £20 to tune in to the exchange (a copy of Spare is included in the price) should not expect a robust exchange of views.
Not for the first time, Harry has chosen to talk to an interviewer whose calls for greater compassion towards mental health mirror his own.
Meanwhile, in another neat symmetry, Mate’s new book seems strangely appropriate.
Entitled Hello Again: A Fresh Start For Parents And Their Adult Children, it should make fitting reading for a son who remains all but estranged from his own father and who was recently told that his British home, Frogmore Cottage near Windsor Castle, is no longer his to use.
(Harry is said to be furious at the perceived slight.)
Even if the Duke avoids talking about his father, his chat with Mate is expected to dwell heavily on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The two men, we are told, will discuss ‘the difficulties of living with loss’ in an event that will help to ‘remove the stigma around what we call mental illness’.
Over the past couple of decades, Dr Mate has built a lucrative self-help empire and carefully cultivated a reputation as a guru on addiction, stress and child development.
Once hailed as the ‘sainted icon of the drug-legalisation movement’ — he would decriminalise all drugs, no matter how dangerous — Mate has since moved on to become the darling of the therapy-obsessed, touchy-feely California circles in which Harry and Meghan now move.
He has built a huge and, critics say, almost cult-like following, relying especially on YouTube to communicate with an audience hankering, as one observer put it, ‘to escape feelings of despair, anxiety and spiritual emptiness’. Mate’s books — with titles such as ‘The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness And Healing In A Toxic Culture — satisfy the same yearning for meaning.
The former GP often quotes his spiritual mentors — including Jesus and the Buddha — to support his thesis that addictions are caused by an unaddressed inner emptiness.
Critics complain that the ambitious Dr Mate, who was a high-school English teacher until he qualified as a doctor in 1977, weighs in on areas in which he has no real training or expertise.
Some psychologists also insist that his ‘reductionist’ view of addiction — in which a history of childhood unhappiness, particularly in the first five years and even in the womb, chiefly explains later self-destructive behaviour — is too simplistic.
But such scepticism among professionals has been drowned out by the rapturous acclaim of his fans.
Mate has published a string of bestselling books, but insists that he isn’t interested in money but only in ‘helping the suffering of humanity’.
However, he did admit to one interviewer: ‘I am arrogant. I like attention.’
This need to appear in the limelight can take rather unfortunate forms.
In 2011, Mate’s talent for controversy landed him in trouble when he partnered with a Peruvian shaman to run ‘retreats’ for drug addicts at which participants were given the powerful drug ayahuasca, which causes hallucinations, vomiting and altered perceptions of reality.
Mate claimed patients had given up addictions to sex, cocaine and heroin after swallowing this noxious brew.
When the Canadian government learned what he was doing, it threatened to arrest him unless he stopped administering the drug. (In 2015, a Canadian visiting Peru stabbed a British tourist to death after they both drank ayahuasca.)
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in New York, may be disappointed to learn that the Prince is well acquainted with Dr Mate
Mate has also courted the wrong sort of attention when it comes to politics. He says he is a former Zionist but has since become far more critical of the Israeli state.
Writing for the Toronto Star in 2014, Mate likened the Palestinian terror group Hamas — which he claimed was fighting ‘ongoing ethnic cleansing’ at the hands of the Israelis — to ‘my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw ghetto’.
During the 2021 Gaza conflict, he even accused the Israeli government of ‘terrorism’.
Mate has appeared repeatedly on pro-Kremlin and pro-Beijing website The Grayzone, where his son, Aaron, is a leading contributor.
In a talk with Aaron on the site in 2019, Mate said it was ‘manipulative’ to call Jeremy Corbyn — the disgraced former Labour leader — an anti-Semite.
In another chat, in which the avowed Marxist politician was described as the victim of ‘Israeli assassination’, Mate told fellow guest Roger Waters it had been a ‘pleasure’ to meet the singer.
(Pink Floyd’s lyricist Polly Samson, wife of guitarist David Gilmour, described her husband’s bandmate Roger Waters as a ‘Putin apologist’ and ‘anti-Semitic to [his] rotten core’. Waters said he ‘refutes entirely’ the ‘repugnant, incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments’.)
Again, one wonders whether Harry has done his due diligence on Mate. And if he has, what does that say about his judgment?
Whatever the truth, the two men could hardly have come from more different circumstances.
Born to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1944, Mate was lucky to survive at all. His maternal grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and his father was forced to work as a slave labourer for the Nazis.
When he was one, he says, his mother gave him to a stranger for five weeks to keep him out of the Budapest ghetto — a gesture that may have saved his life.
Yet he was so hurt by this, he has said, that he couldn’t look at his mother for days after they were reunited. This trauma of ‘abandonment, rage and despair’ continues to plague him in his adult life, he has claimed.
A married father-of-three, he says he is often afflicted by fears his wife of more than 50 years is about to leave him.
After moving to Canada aged 12 in 1956 as part of the refugee exodus that following the uprising that year against the Soviets, Mate began making waves in the early 2000s when he spent a decade working with drug addicts in Vancouver.
He helped to run North America’s only supervised injection site, where addicts could shoot up their own drugs under medical supervision.
Many experts said the scheme only encouraged addicts to take harmful substances that would eventually kill them. When Canada’s health minister questioned the ethics of doctors supporting such a scheme, Mate called the politician’s remarks ‘repugnant’.
Critics accused him of revelling in the squalid lives of addicts. He once wrote: ‘I saw the cockroaches and fell in love.’
Prince Harry, of course, has caused widespread shock by expounding in detail about his own long-standing penchant for drugs. But then, Mate insists, it’s a mistake to stigmatise drug use as it’s only a way of reducing the pain caused by childhood trauma.
Everybody is to some degree addicted to something, he preaches. His own, he says rather fatuously, is buying classical music. He says he has lied to his artist wife, Rae, about the extent of his compulsion and once spent $8,000 on it in a week.
In times past, the prospect of Prince Harry sharing a platform with a terrorist sympathiser and advocate for illegal drugs would have caused a PR meltdown at Buckingham Palace. But the Duke is long past such concerns.
Whatever controversies Harry chooses to avoid, it’s clear he and the doc will still have much to discuss.