Prince Harry needs to work on himself “first and foremost” and accept “accountability” for his relationships with the royals, a top psychologist claims.
Author Dr Meg Arroll said from seeing the Duke of Sussex’s explosive interviews it seemed the Prince was “very, very far” from acceptance in relation to the traumas he was expressing.
Dr Arroll said the 38-year-old royal had clearly experienced some huge, big ‘t’, traumas in his life, including the death of his mother when he was young, or his experiencing serving in Afghanistan.
But she said Prince Harry was also expressing the cumulative, tiny ‘t’, traumas he has experienced, such as ‘sibling rivalry trauma’ over the alleged physical altercation with Prince William and ‘touch deprivation’ trauma from his father King Charles not hugging him after his mother Princess Diana’s death.
However, Dr Arroll said the Duke seemingly seeking an apology or reaction from the Royal Family over these events, was not the answer or a “positive avenue to go down”.
She said it was “heart-breaking” to see the Prince “throw out the baby with the bathwater” in his “cry for help” interviews.
Dr Arroll said: “Within a therapeutic process we wouldn’t encourage individuals to try and garner a response, if somebody has had a traumatic experience the situation may no longer exist, and those people may not be here anymore.
“The answer is to create an acceptance around the trauma, not look for an apology per se. The work to be done is within Harry first and foremost. He needs to ignore everyone else and to find some peace, that level of acceptance is incredibly important and from what I’ve seen, he seems very, very far from that.
“I find that interesting as a practitioner because I’m not sure he has worked with practitioners that would challenge him around that, to be able to develop that sense that he can actually do quite a lot of this work on his own. He’s looking for a reaction that’s not the most adaptive and positive avenue to go down.
“In terms of my process, we call it triple A, start with awareness, the second A is acceptance and the third is A is action. With my practice people do have quite high levels of awareness and they move straight into action, and they miss out the most important step which is that level of acceptance.
“We cannot expect an apology, or on the other hand forgiveness, from other people because we can spend our whole lives waiting and not taking into consideration the other person’s viewpoint, be it William, or King Charles’ point of view in this case.
“Harry can do much more of that work himself and he would be much more at peace. It’s heart-breaking to see a lot of his interviews, it really is, and it does feel like he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It does feel like a cry for help in lots of ways, and when someone is doing that in a therapeutic sense, you bring them back to look within.”
She said: “It is about recognising the experiences that you build up over a lifetime can impact you in a significant way even if the individual events are small, or even tiny.”
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Analysing Harry’s recent admissions Dr Arroll also picked out what she called ‘betrayal trauma’, in relation to how Prince Harry felt about his father’s affair with Camilla, the Queen Consort and his insecure ‘attachment trauma’ concerning King Charles joking about calling him “the Spare”. She also highlighted Harry’s drug use as ‘emotional blunting’.
Prince Harry’s choice to express his experiences in a six-part Netflix series, a book and in TV interviews was his decision, but Dr Arroll said the difficulty was the “lack of accountability”.
She said: “I really think the difficulty here, is not so much the oversharing, it really is the lack of accountability, too.
“He has obviously had quite a lot of therapeutic interventions and he has a lot of awareness, but as for acceptance of what has happened, I’m not sure he is really there.
“I do think the difference really is there’s not very much accountability on his part within his family dynamics at least being portrayed in the interviews that I’ve seen.
“When somebody is just not taking any responsibility and is just blaming then it’s very hard for people to really sit with that. He’s not coming to these interviews with solutions either so it’s hard to see where you can move on from here.”
Dr Arroll’s book, Tiny Traumas, is out on February 2 from HarperCollins Publishers.
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