Prince Harry speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting at New York Hilton Midtown on Sept. 23, 2026. (Photo by JP Yim/Getty Images for Clinton Global Initiative) Class is in session for Prince Harry, and swearing is allowed.
“Let’s fucking go,” the Duke of Sussex says at the top of a new and revelatory conversation that debuted Thursday on MasterClass. The popular online education platform put Prince Harry and neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor together for a new offering, Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, that finds the pair covering all things grief, what it does to the brain and body and how best to move forward from the trauma of loss.
Fittingly, the conversation is shaped by Prince Harry’s experience with grief after the traumatic death of his mother, Princess Diana, who died when he was 12, and some of his other life experiences (like serving in the British Army and going on two active deployments in Afghanistan). He also dives deep into O’Connor’s research by asking her questions and engaging in a lively back-and-forth on the topic.
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“Everyone goes through some kind of loss in their lifetime. Think about the COVID pandemic. People lost loved ones, jobs, whole identities. Most of us had no roadmap for how to come back from that. Resilience isn’t about not falling. It’s about what you build on the way back up. And this class is how I got there and how you get there too,” Prince Harry says as the class opens with clips of him at various stages of his life. “It took me a long time to find my path to resilience. I didn’t cry when I was told my mum died, only at her burial, and then not again for nearly two decades. I was convinced that was strength, but it wasn’t. It was a 12-year-old boy with no permission to fall apart and no roadmap for how to heal. In my 20s, I went to war twice thinking I could outrun my grief, but that’s not what happened because unprocessed grief doesn’t stay in the past.”
He goes on to say that it is assumed that he would have the “best” help in the world to heal — “I’m a prince for God’s sake,” he quips — but grief delivered a challenging hurdle to cross. “Grief doesn’t always look like sadness. It can look like numbness. It can look like distraction. It can look and sound like the answer I’ve given nearly every single day for 20 years when asked, ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m fine,'” he explains.
Prince Harry went deep on grief while uncovering parts of his life for the memoir Spare, written with J.R. Moehringer and published by Penguin Random House in January 2023. He covers some of those same revelations in the new MasterClass while also offering up new details.
He credits adrenaline as the driving force for signing up to serve in the British Army at age 20. “It was the perfect distraction,” he says. “I couldn’t really think about much else apart from the task at hand. I realized that I could do things that I never thought were possible. This adrenalized state that I was in was a superpower. I certainly felt as though it gave me a skill set in multiple areas that I otherwise wouldn’t have. When I got back from Afghanistan on my second tour in 2013, there was no other mission. Everything caught up with me. And what was very interesting was my post-traumatic stress was not tied to Afghanistan. The things that I saw, the things I experienced appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me.”
Those started to present during routine tasks like putting on a dress shirt, he adds. “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. And that’s when I realized, OK, there’s something bigger. There’s something else that you need to look into here,” he explains.
He finally did that in late 2019, when he and his wife, Meghan Markle, temporarily relocated from England to Vancouver Island on an extended holiday stay. They ultimately announced they would be stepping back from royal duties in early 2020.
“It was myself, my wife and our son Archie, and we moved to Canada to get some space away from everything just to be able to think. Being in Canada, away from the stressful environment where presumably my body was just pumped full of adrenaline, within two or three days, I experienced this adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before. It was as if I needed stress in order to get the adrenaline to make my brain function because I became useless around the house. I actually slipped into depression for about two weeks and I felt like I couldn’t function without adrenaline,” he reveals.
Prince Harry also talks about the weight of shouldering the grief of others after Princess Diana died on Aug. 31, 1997, at age 36. “Within five days of my mother’s death, there was thousands of people laying flowers down outside Kensington Palace, and we went out to greet them. Looking back on it now, I felt as though my brother [Prince William] and I were intermediaries for these people’s grief towards our mother, and they were showing more emotion than we could,” he says. “It felt very, very strange for the hundreds of hands that we shook to be soaking wet with tears that they wiped away from their own faces. I almost felt guilty that I was unable to show the same emotion as these people who were crying for someone they’d never even met.”
It wasn’t until later, at her burial, that he shed any tears.
“I cracked to the point of where I cried, and I remember thinking or feeling that it actually felt really good to cry. Then years later, I was looking for proof because at the burial, I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t believe that she was gone. I believed that she was going to come back at some point. I believe that she had created this exit to get away from all the things that were destroying her life and that she was going to reenter the fray in some disguise and then whisk me and my brother away,” explains Prince Harry, who later talks about how he used her perfume later in life to unlock memories, something he has talked about as recently as three years ago.
On the subject of panic attacks, Prince Harry recalls a time when “public engagements just created absolute panic right from beginning to end.” He worried about getting out of the car, the cameras that would be waiting, not knowing who to talk to or what to say, and whether anyone would notice his issues. “The biggest anxiety that was created for me was the fear of sweating. It was the fear of people seeing me looking disheveled and me not being able to explain to them in one short sentence what’s actually going on. I would feel like I’ve just been in a boxing match. There are some public engagements that still involve adrenaline. I’m not going to lie there, but it’s more appropriate adrenaline,” he continues.
Prince Harry says he finds more positive emotions by focusing on his family and the work he does that aligns with the example left by Princess Diana.
“The biggest factor for me is the energy and the joy and happiness that I get being with my family, especially our kids, and the joy and happiness I get by being on the ground for my work. And the key to finding the joy and happiness balance is no more than 10 days away from my wife and kids. This is balancing my work and the purpose behind that as well as being a dad and a husband and the sort of multi-identity elements coming together,” says Prince Harry, who recently relocated back to England with Meghan and their two children after several years spent in Montecito, California. “Everything I do, everything I put my energy towards, I hope that my mother will be proud about it.”
There’s a moment near the end of the MasterClass session that finds Prince Harry looking back on that 12-year-old kid to help him heal from the trauma to come. “If I could go back and have a moment with my younger self, it would be to give 12-year-old Harry a hug and tell him that everything’s going to be OK.”
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