The session was specifically focused on how London is a “trigger” for the Duke of Sussex due to the press harassment and intrusion directed at his mother Princess Diana while she was alive, an ongoing experience that left a young Harry feeling utterly helpless: “Being a guy, but being too young to help a woman—in this case, your mother," he told Oprah in an earlier episode of The Me You Can’t See, describing how Diana would barely be able to drive due to her tears as she tried to escape the hordes of paparazzi. “And that happened every single day," he said. “Every single day till the day she died.” So what is EMDR, and how can it help? EMDR stands for Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and can help a person deal with trauma in their past by providing them with a safe space in which to explore distressing memories. By doing so, this can help their brain “re-process” such events. In the future, when such memories surface again, they will be associated with the safe space in which they were re-processed—and the brain will have adapted to triggers that were previously associated with trauma. During Harry’s session, he closed his eyes and crossed his hands over his chest, alternately tapping on his left and right shoulders. This is known as “bilateral stimulation” and, as well as eye movements, can help a person to calm down and allow them to re-process previously distressing information. It was Meghan who recognized the trauma and anger in her husband, and after undergoing conventional therapy Harry said that EMDR was one of the forms of healing that he was “willing to experiment with.” The EMDR clinician asked him to focus on the memory of how he feels when he’s on a plane coming into London, and to describe the sensation. Harry described a “hollow, empty feeling” and a feeling of being “the hunted and the helpless.” “There is no escape,” he said. “There is no way out of this.” How would Harry prefer to feel in such situations, his therapist asked? “I’m not helpless,” Harry replied. “It’s only a brief moment of time and you’re living your life by truth, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He located the feeling of sadness in his body within his chest. At this point the therapist asked him to cross his arms over his chest and tap gently on his shoulders in order to begin the re-processing of this trauma. Harry talked about how a family trip to Africa shortly after Diana’s death was “such a cure.” “I just felt so free,” said the duke, who has previously spoken of how Botswana became a “second home” for him in the wake of losing his mother. “It was this sense of escapism I’d never felt before. And then to come back to the UK, knowing what I was going to be confronted with, and knowing what I couldn’t get away from, was scary.” He described the EMDR process as akin to cleaning his hard drive. When the therapist asked him to go back to the original image of being on a plane and to describe what feelings are now associated with it, Harry said, “Calmness. And strength. Strength because of the calmness.” The Duke of Sussex said that therapy “has equipped me to be able to take on anything.” And that that was how he and Meghan managed to break free of the royal family and settle in Montecito, California, with their two-year-old son Archie and a daughter on the way. Harry said, “One of the biggest lessons I’ve ever learnt in life is that sometimes you’ve got to go back and deal with really uncomfortable situations and to be able to process it in order to be able to heal.” Next up, Will Meghan and Harry Name Their Daughter After Diana? Find Out the Top Name Predictions for Baby Sussex
