The Complicated Case Of ‘H’. When undigested trauma, repetition compulsion, privilege, capitalism & internalised oppression intersect.
If you come from a complicated family with strict expectations and rules, have ever experienced divorce, family rupture, the grief of losing a parent or are a veteran, chances are you might have more in common with Prince Harry than you think!
In this Coronation week long read (10-15 mins) I'll walk you through a somatic trauma therapist’s-eye view designed to give you some insight into what might be informing some of what we’ve seen unfold in a very public way in the House of Sussex. I hope you enjoy it!
I have a confession to make: I’m a compulsive news scroller. It’s a problem!
Even though I gave up social media for a few weeks over the Xmas break, I couldn’t break my addiction to the soothingly dissociative effects of spiralling down the rabbit hole of the 24-hour news cycle.
I scroll a range of sites, from the intellectual to the low-brow/trashy end of the spectrum (the ones who use Tik Tok as a source and quote twitter users responses to current world events, I find this deeply annoying for some reason!). So along with exposure to the few remaining corners of the interwebs upholding high quality journalistic principles, I’m also regularly immersed in gossipy, sensationalistic commentary on the lives of people in the public eye. And now here I am, inspired to add mine!
I drafted this just after Xmas while I was recovering from surgery and spending waaay too much time online! I put it down but the media attention surrounding the Coronation this week has inspired me to pick it back up and share with you
Are you a scroller? A royalist? Even if you’re just an average media consumer, recently it’s been hard to get away from the many viewing hours of Harry and Megan’s ‘trauma porn’.
I use that phrase not to belittle or make light of the legitimacy of their experiences. Trauma isn’t what happened to you, but how you were and are able to metabolise the experiences you’ve been through. Trauma, by its nature, overwhelms our capacity to ‘cope’, it drives our bodies to take over by using any measures it can to survive and our meaning maker to generate a story influenced by that nervous system state (‘story follows state’ as they say in Polyvagal lingo). It is never up to anyone else to define what is or isn’t traumatising to you.
I use the term more to refer to the indiscriminate consumption and production of content that both harms the protagonist/victim-survivor further, even if they think it’s empowering at the time, and negatively influences the viewer, similarly often without their awareness.
What we are witnessing is a fairly complicated mix of a family culture that appears to have prioritised their internal rules and external perceptions over emotional attunement and compassionate connection, a financial imperative driving the need to make as much money as possible to support an exceptionally high standard of living, someone who experienced extreme trauma as a child (the grief of losing a primary caregiver, by all accounts the more empathic one) working through the lifelong repercussions of it (possibly without the best or most helpful support), and of course a wider culture of insatiable consumption driven by capitalism and its underlying influences (we’ll leave out the problematic colonial history for now for the purposes of simplifying the picture but it is also deeply embedded in this narrative in regards to wealth, class, privilege and race).
Childhood Trauma, Attachment injuries and C-PTSD
Whilst I’m not one for pathologising, research by the Centre for Disease Control indicates that exposure to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) plays a significant role in adult health and wellbeing. ACEs are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood. They can impact the ways a child’s brain develops and affect how the body responds to stress in the long term. ACEs have been linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood. Depending on the list you refer to, losing a primary caregiver makes the list, as does divorce and emotional neglect (3 for the Harry Bingo!).
Contrary to some beliefs, receiving all of the appearances of a ‘secure’ childhood including having your physical needs met through adequate food and shelter (or far more than adequate in the case of the Royal Family!) and the presence of caregivers does not make up for experiencing a lack of emotional attunement from those caregivers.
Emotional attunement is a connective relational skill combined of the desire and ability to understand and respect another's inner world and believe what they tell you about their experience - even if you can’t relate because you haven’t directly experienced anything similar (which is why it’s different to empathy. You don’t have to feel it with them, comprehend it or remove/fix/prevent it. If you can think more along the lines of compassionate validation you’re in the right ballpark).
When a child lacks a caregiver who can provide consistent and reliable emotional attunement, they have both bodily responses (e.g. fear/lack of safety resulting in stress responses) and adaptive meaning making in order to self-soothe (e.g. the state or experience of being alone with overwhelming emotions may result in feeling alone or abandoned in a time of need which leads to creating a story about how much you are valued by others that shapes your sense of self worth).
These early adverse experiences and coping mechanisms, if not tended to with care and processed adequately through the nervous system at the time, embed into maladaptive (i.e. adaptations that are not good for our survival) self beliefs and behaviours that become who we see ourselves as, what we believe about others and the world and how we treat ourselves, others and the world over time. Higher exposure to ACEs results in lower self worth, higher risk taking behaviour and increased likelihood of suffering from depression and other health issues including cardiovascular disease.
Most parents don’t set out to maliciously emotionally harm their children! Life pressures causing high levels of parental stress (including relationship stress), and emotional suppression (either learned through cultural or familial traditions – hello British ‘stiff upper lip’, boys don’t cry etc. etc.!) can prevent people from tapping into their capacity for emotional attunement – both with each other in the context of a relationship and with any kiddos in their care.
The early experiences of emotional attunement influence how we develop what’s known as our ‘attachment style’. Originally coined by researcher John Bowlby to describe four main types of boding relationships observed between mothers and their babies after a period of separation, it’s an insightful model that has been extrapolated into romantic relationships too. I use Attachment Style in my Trauma Awareness trainings to help teachers understand the relationships they cultivate with their own teachers, with their students and how these can be amplified or navigated to create a business that’s best suited to their core needs and tendencies.
What I've seen while I’ve watched (ok, scrolled - as I’ll admit I have neither watched the Netflix special, the book tour interviews [I did watch the O.G. Oprah one!] nor read the book, just consumed the peripheral commentary) the media coming out of House of H&M are the open wounds of Harry’s attachment injury caused by losing his primary attachment figure, Diana – well known for her compassion (a Cancer sign trait!) and not having anyone to hold or help him through that process with any of the same level of care, kindness or unconditional love he was used to getting from her.
Long-term lack of emotional attunement can result in what’s known as Relational Trauma and may leave the sufferer with Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD). Relational trauma occurs over a period of time (unlike, for example a car accident which may leave someone with physical and emotional trauma from a single event = PTSD) where needs go unmet (hello emotionally cardboard Pappa Charlie soothing his own needs with his Mistress Camilla – grief isn’t easy to manage for anyone and it’s a huge task as a parent to navigate your own grief at the loss of a previous or current life partner while also tending to the needs of your kids grieving processes – that’s definitely not in the parenting 101 handbook!), there are power imbalances (Like Big Bro Wills being favoured as the heir), or (many!) other kinds of dysfunction.
Complex-PTSD presents in a range of ways – both physical and emotional symptoms are possible and it can have wide-ranging long-term impacts on health, wellbeing, identity and the ability to identify and form healthy relationships throughout life.
H and his life stages as: grief stricken and abandoned less favourite ‘spare’ kiddo; rebellious teen; wild partying early adult; identity, purpose defining and anger-venting/emotionally devoid soldier (yikes to the comments about his time in Afghanistan) and co-dependent (or anxiously attached) husband scream C-PTSD to me.
And it’s from deep inside this C-PTSD that Team Sussex has been speaking since Megxit (as Megan has also had her fair share of traumatic events from her own family being legit whack jobs publicly out to defame, humiliate and monetize her, to the culture shock of the transition from the Land of the Free to all things Royal from race(/ism) to archaic and style stifling etiquette, and life threatening lack of support in the name of saving The Firm’s face).
Speaking from undigested trauma sounds VERY different to hearing someone speak about their experiences while still in the thick of them. An example I’ve used before of someone who has overcome their trauma is the power, passion, yet vulnerability and eloquence that Grace Tame embodies when she speaks about her past experience of abuse and for her cause. The pain is still palpable, but the perspective and distance from those events is also evident.
Contrast this to any of the media you’ve seen driven by the Sussexes and you may notice a different tone, energy and feeling to their productions. The pain is palpable but the perspective is not yet available with any significant distance – either temporally or emotionally. They are still too close to the pain, in the pain, it is viscerally alive for them as is common with C-PTSD – it hijacks you from the present and transports you into the painful past making it alive once again in the moment.
This is not to say the place they’re at in their healing journey isn’t valid, it absolutely is. It’s more that you can feel that they are still somewhat lost in the pain and unfairness of their experiences and yet to fully grasp back onto their own power that was taken away from them during their traumatic events. One of the defining characteristics of a traumatic event is, often exactly that – the lack of choice or control over what you experienced. They are in the process of navigating their way back to themselves – just in a very public way.
Unquestionably, taking back that power through regaining control of your own narrative is one way or part of the process of regaining your voice and your power. But sadly, given the way our culture is structured, and the overwhelming desire for humans in general to want to avoid pain, when we hear victims voicing their pain from deep inside it, it often causes the opposite to what the sufferers are really calling for - empathetic connection (or emotional attunement: see me, hear me, believe me) - and instead causes a retreat by the listener from the uncomfortable so as we too are not overwhelmed or drawn into the suffering that we cannot salve, or faced to feel or face our own similar pains. So we instead move away from discomfort until we’re at a safe distance to breathe again (this can be both an engagement of the ‘flight’ fear response and a characteristic of avoidant attachment) - or worse, pass judgement on the 'other' so as to separate ourselves from them.
Internalised oppression, misogyny and victim blaming
We’re all acculturated (learning how to ‘fit in’ to the socially accepted norms) though a process of exposure. We are steeped in life lessons from the minute we’re born from family myths, books (hello fairy tales!), to church doctrine, to media advertising. We unconsciously absorb from these exposures the ‘rules for life’. It happens so seamlessly that often we don’t really know how to pinpoint how we came to believe a particular thing… it’s just always ‘been’. These beliefs, when actually counterproductive to our own power, freedom or happiness can be thought of as internalised oppressors. We can’t see them or sometimes even say them, but they influence our experience of life and often cost us dearly or cause us pain, and they stand in the way of us allowing ourselves to live fully – or see others fully. It can be hard to untangle ‘opinion’ from internalised oppression and here’s some ways I see this playing out with H’s case.
When conversations about traumatic events unfold in the public sphere, there is an often an expectation that a victim present themselves in a particular way in order to be ‘believable’. This prejudices the victim who is, given their traumatised state, unlikely to be able to present with a well-regulated nervous system. This means that they may present as ‘emotional’, they may be sensitive to perceived criticisms of their experience (be ‘reactive’), they may NOT have full and accurate recollection of the event or events that traumatised them – because the brain goes into a protective shutdown mode during a traumatic event which means that memories are not laid down sequentially or may be inaccessible to the victim or unable to be recalled in an organised manner. These are all effective adaptive strategies of the brain, which is wonderful at trying to protect us from pain and keep us alive. It’s just not exactly how our societal expectations or systems of justice work.
Regardless of what your personal opinion may be about the Sussexes circumstances, it takes incredible courage for anyone who has experienced abuse to voice their experiences, whether directly to their abuser, a family member, to police, counsellors, lawyers or other support providers, or in H&M’s cases to the media.
The judicial system (and the media) are not designed to support a traumatised victim and the process of having to recall, relive and repeatedly revisit the trauma, can in itself be re-traumatising. Two recent high profile cases have seen victims withdraw from the legal process due to the demands of these expectations (Amber Heard and Brittney Higgins). While the media might have the means to amplify a message (as in spread it far and wide) and the judicial system might create the means to hold someone accountable for they pain they caused you, they can both come at a cost.
Harry’s case is interesting as it also highlights victim-blaming in a way that isn’t as common in the media – that it’s also possible for men to be abused – and that victims, in general have a hard time being listened to or believed, regardless of their gender, and in this case significant privilege as a while, wealthy, middle-aged male.
The traditional male stereotypes are still at play, when a man who feels he has been harmed speaks up and lays his emotions about his experience bare truthfully, he is shamed and accused of being less of a man. When a woman does the same (Megan) she gets death threats or calls to be publicly shamed (courtesy of Jeremy Clarkson… who was ironically publicly shamed and forced to apologize for his comments).
Even it if it feels unpalatable to watch the Sussex trauma express you pass by, there can be no discounting how much strength it takes to stand up and tell their stories, however stylised and curated they may seem. In the era of the influencer they are both a brand and people with personal stories to sell, I mean tell…
When Daddy turned the money tap off, H was faced for the first time in his life with the prospect of providing for himself and his family financially at a standard of living 99.99% of the world’s population would never have access to, pressure much? There still seems to be a lack of clarity in the Sussex camp about what privilege they want to let go of for reasons of political correctness (the Royal family should be more inclusive and progressive on race mental health matters for example) and what they want or feel ‘entitled’ to (such as their titles, yes pun intended, and their UK government/public funded security detail so they can live in a country they defected from, their privacy… as public figures and let's not forget their private jets).
That Harry continues to fight for his personal right to privacy in court, while also publishing tell all memoirs dishing dirt on himself (however awks these factoids may be… ‘todger’) and others is a fascinating and many layered thing. In a capitalist system that values celebrity, your worth is based on owning your story so your story is currency. For the Sussexes to own their story becomes valuable not just in terms of their recovery from abuse, but in tangible monetary terms.
And finally, as anyone who’s lived through family drama can attest to - it sucks. It’s painful to feel obligated to stay connected to people who are meant to love you but also hurt you and won’t or aren’t emotionally mature enough to own or understand how they impacted you or continue to impact you (helloooo C-PTSD!).
It hurts just as much to cut ties with people you previously loved or still love for your own mental health or emotional recovery. It’s hard to have difficult conversations about feelings with people who don’t have the same emotional vocabulary (my fave term!) as you. It is literally like you’re speaking different languages – some things just don’t compute which tends to leave one, both or all of you feeling unheard and misunderstood.
Asking others to see the world the way you do is often a losing battle. Asking your abusers – who by their definition have already likely demonstrated their emotional immaturity, lack of empathy or non-desire/inability to take into account your feelings – to finally meet your needs they way you are asking them to often leads to disappointment.
It is also an example of externalising your power – desiring your inner state to be dependent on someone else’s anything (behaviour, response, state) is a recipe for feeling like you’re out of control leading to nervous system dysregulation. It’s often a sign your trauma is running the show as you’re not able to self soothe by tending to or validating your own experience.
Co-regulation, the physical process of literally catching another person’s nervous state is the basis of human relationship development and a great healing tool. When we connect, we calm, we relax when we feel authentically seen. It is possible to find reliable people you can do this with. If it’s not available with your partner or family – your yoga teacher, your therapist or another trusted person may offer this to you.
The tricky thing is that trauma can erode your of your capacity to trust making everything from simple daily decisions to big life decisions and cultivating healthy relationships challenging. It also drives your nervous system to act out of survival mode meaning logical, rational thinking is no longer accessible to you so your judgement is impaired, and your actions are predominantly in-the-moment reactive rather than considered in terms of your long term best interests. You begin to play life on defence rather than with the creative vision and strategic choices or responsiveness of offence. You're living life in emergency mode trying either to correct the wrongs of the past or just hang on/defend yourself in the present moment.
When taking control of your narrative is helpful and when it’s harmful (hint – when you have bad, or no advisors)
One interesting symptom of trauma is called repetition compulsion. It’s an unconscious tendency to repeat traumatic events or be attracted to situations and people that have happened in the past simply because they are familiar. For the dysregulated nervous system, familiarity feels safer than something new.
If H’s life experience has been that the people he loves let him down, betray him or disappear it might be hard for him to discern what kinds of people he can trust. This may make it hard for him to choose a wise advisor – or the right therapist - at this point in his journey.
The fact that repetition compulsion is ‘unconscious’ indicates that we are being driven to these actions below the level of our immediate conscious awareness - and therefore have no power to exert power over them or 'change' them because you can’t change what you can’t see. THIS is where effective psychotherapy can assist.
Talk therapy can only ever give you access to what is already conscious. That’s wonderful for well-regulated nervous systems where the prefrontal cortex of your brain is accessible for logical thought and problem solving. In traumatised nervous systems, the brain is often functioning in parts that evolved before language developed – in the form of feelings, senses, emotions, physical sensations – these are felt and experienced in the body.
There’s an ever-growing evidence base that body-centric or somatic approaches need to be integrated into any trauma healing protocol for it to be effective.
While biography can be a fantastic tool for reclaiming and taking ownership of one’s narrative, it’s also true that over-explaining is a trauma response and the use of a ghost writer may somewhat remove you from the personal growth involved in really investigating your story for it’s inherent valuable insights.
Talking about, without fully feeling through to a full and satisfactory resolution (integrating) your past experiences leaves you undercooked – you’re only part way there on the healing journey… you’re just not quite at the Grace Tame level of the game yet!
Harry has been very transparent with his experiences with therapy and it sounds like he’s tried a few but as mentioned above, he appears to still be quite deep in his healing process. So while the Sussexes might claim that telling their story is helpful, it may be but will only ever be to a certain degree. Until they can move through what’s still locked in their bodies (which is still a story, just with a different language!) they will remain stuck partial healing that’s only focussed on the mind and possibly stuck in the survival mode that’s activated in trauma. That he had a recent chat with Gabor Mate gives me hope that access to the more somatic approaches might be in their future! Once the body and mind are integrated your lived experience changes. It feels different, you start to feel safe enough to be you again – or for the first time - and are able to own your nervous system and therefore change your narrative completely, because story follows state.
Thank you for making it this far in my musings. Hopefully something in here resonated with you. If it did feel free to reach out and connect with me, I love to support you in your personal healing journey.
Ramone
