Prince Harry Talks ‘Post-Traumatic Stress,’ Reveals Afghanistan Was ‘a Trigger for Other Traumas’

Prince Harry is opening up about his experience with anxiety and depression.

The Duke of Sussex, 42, is featured in a MasterClass session titled Redefining Grief, which is now available. A trailer for the class was released last week.

According to a People report published Tuesday, October 13, the father of two — who lost his mother, Princess Diana, after she tragically died at age 36 on August 31, 1997, following a car crash in Paris — said his anxiety was heightened after his time in the military.

“Everything caught up with me, and what was very interesting was my post-traumatic stress was not tied to Afghanistan,” he explained. “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,” the Spare author revealed. “And that’s when I realized, okay, there’s something bigger. There’s something else that you need to look into here.”

Harry is joined by Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor in the MasterClass session, which unpacks how people process death and trauma.

The duke said that he went on for “so long” being “emotionally numb” following the death of his mother because “I felt disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her.”

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

In the trailer for the MasterClass session, Harry talked more about how he thought he could “outrun” his feelings by going to war.

“But that’s not what happened,” he said. “I’d spent so long emotionally numb to a large extent because nobody told me joy was still allowed — that it wasn’t betrayal.”

“This class will hopefully give you that permission and the tools to access it,” the duke added. “What you’ve lived through isn’t just something to survive. It’s the foundation for what comes next.”