Imagine being a time traveller from the medieval period. Imagine you have landed in 2023. Imagine thinking: “And how do the noble kings at the top of this golden and wondrous society inspire and guide their subjects?”
And flicking through some online stuff, and seeing: “Prince Harry will unpack his trauma live in an ‘intimate conversation’ with Dr Gabor Maté.”
What is happening?
Why is he doing this?
Hasn’t ol’ frosty pecker unpacked his trauma enough?
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It was the “live” bit that made me bellow — as if, after all these years, after Megxit, the mercy flight (plus dogs) to Canada, Tyler Perry, Oprah, the Ripple of Hope Award, anxiety, pain, racism, “archetyping”, and now, this week, the Frogmore Slap — the couple have told us they are actually “OK” with being booted out of Windsor — Harry thinks we STILL need to see yet more blood oozing from the tastefully airbrushed royal stigmata.
It’s quite some arrogance, that.
Harry’s trauma livestream, a one-hour live therapy session slash interview arranged by his publisher with the Hungarian-Canadian doctor Gabor Maté, is the latest mutation in the Harry-Meghan suffering industrial complex.
The marketing was: you’ve read the book, you’ve seen the television series, you can experience the Royal Raindrop’s pure, uncut trauma and collapse in real time, before watching him build himself up again with the help of a rockstar therapist in a single hour. If that ain’t a Victorian circus freakshow act, I don’t know what is.
Watching the live feed was extraordinary, like seeing Prince Harry being brainwashed live on global television. Whatever Dr Maté said, Harry automatically agreed, capitulated, hung on every single breath — even let him read out some nonsense German poem — at one point even saying to Maté, “correct me if I’m wrong”. It was like watching a prince being put under a spell.
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Sitting opposite each other in yet another of the many bizarrely accoutred podcasting bungalows that seem to clog Harry’s part of California, Harry was dressed in a sort of Shane Warne memorial golf dinner outfit: taupe jacket, taupe jumper, taupe shoes. Only his trousers — navy chinos — suggested he’d ever been to England.
Maté appeared in shades of “Buddhist Dad in crisis” olive green. On his fingers were many rings — never trust a man with man jewellery. He began the session with a Latin definition: “vulnerare”, he cooed, “is to wound”. He invited Harry to talk about his childhood. Or at least, Harry said a few things about not getting hugs, and Maté nodded in approval, but when Harry suggested in some ways he’d had an “incredible childhood”, he shook his head solemnly.
“It was a story of deprivation.”
Harry looked chastened.
When Maté read Harry’s book he was horrified. He saw a “little child” who was utterly abandoned, “born into a marriage where there was a lack of love”, born to a father (“Charles”) who himself had been “bullied mercilessly”, born into a family “where people are not held and held”, he said. And what are children born into such families? “Animals”.
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Animals. Even Harry was silenced.
I’d never heard of Gabor Maté before this glossy fireside pile-on, but to say Harry was no match for this strident, stern, overbearing literal merchant of pain — albeit one with a million Instagram followers — would be an understatement. He invited Harry to see pain in almost everything, even one of the happiest times of his life: serving in Afghanistan. Immediately he let Harry know that he disagreed with the war, and instead of saying he was proud to serve, the prince quickly said: “There were a lot of us who didn’t necessarily agree or disagree but you were doing what you were sent to do”.
Imagine the power Maté must feel — this British royal bent at the knee, cringed, rolled over, accepted nearly every single one of his diagnoses. In the course of the chat, Maté diagnosed Harry with PTSD, ADD, depression, anxiety and panic disorder, plus much more.
I don’t often feel bad for Prince Harry — he is unflinching, unlikeable, unbending on television, evangelical and humourless in tone. But he’s mesmerised now, and he cannot get out of it, and it is rather sad to watch.
One of Maté’s main beliefs is that humans are born in total innocence and purity and that it is this toxic world that wounds people, or vulnerares them, as I should now say. But I wonder what Maté thinks creates this “toxic culture”? Does it occur to him, for example, that many people might be driven to great pain and needless suffering by watching two, unprepossessing, not very talented seven out of tenners in business/casual taupe scrap about titles then claim how wounded they are, while accusing people of being racist and raking in millions in cash?
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If Maté wants to know what a toxic culture actually is, he’s sitting right in front of it, enabling it, being an active participant.
