Prince Harry has revealed his brother William got him to get counselling after he struggled to come to terms with his mother’s death.
The Prince was just 12 at the time when Princess Diana died in 1997, and admitted he ignored his grief for years.
Harry admitted he had problems with aggression over the years, and revealed his life turned to “total chaos”.
“I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well,” he told The Telegraph.
Chaos: Prince Harry said he ignored his grief for years
“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle.
“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?”
“(I thought) it’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back,’ he added. ‘So from an emotional side, I was like “right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything”.
“So I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going ‘life is great’, or ‘life is fine’ and that was exactly it.
“And then (I) started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.
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“‘It was 20 years of not thinking about it and two years of total chaos,” he admitted.
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“For me personally, my brother, you know, bless him, he was a huge support to me,” he admitted.
“He kept saying this is not right, this is not normal, you need to talk to (someone) about stuff, it’s OK.
“What my mother believed in is if you are in a position of privilege or a position of responsibility and if you can put your name to something that you genuinely believe in … then you can smash any stigma you want.
“All I want to do is make my mother proud.’
‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. When she died, there was a gaping hole, not just for us but also for a huge amount of people across the world,” he added.
