OPINION:
“Behind the scenes,” reveals Meghan in episode three of Keeping Up With The Sussexes, “I was just turtling.”
Like so many of the brain burps she and Harry have felt duty bound to share in their Netflix whineumentary, this one needed to be translated. A quick Google search told me that “turtling” is a psychological term, popular in the US, used to describe a method of self-preservation whereby we retreat into our shells when the misery, trauma and pressures of life become too much to bear.
According to therapists, “turtling has been found to be effective for both children and adults”.
You see, once safely back inside your shell it’s possible to work through the essential “turtle method” steps: recognising that you feel angry (about scarring experiences such as Her Majesty getting first dibs on which colours to wear for royal events) and accepting that you have a right to that anger (I mean, who made her Queen?). Only then is it possible to “come up with solutions”.
For Harry and Meghan the solution was obvious: airing every grievance, however minute, and blaming anyone but themselves for their multi-million-dollar, duty-free “predicament” – one which, like everything else in the documentary, is described in bafflingly contradictory terms, with Prince Harry mournfully asking “How did we get here?” just minutes after his triumphant: “Look at how far we’ve come!”
So all those rhetoricals being asked by commentators around the world since Netflix dropped the first three episodes of the show last Thursday – “How can he do this to his own father and brother?”, “How could they disrespect the late Queen in this way?”, “How can they not be ashamed by the sheer tackiness of their behaviour?” – are missing the point. This is not about Harry’s loyalty to his country or family. These two crusaders can’t get bogged down with other people’s feelings, as today’s new trailer, in which Harry takes aim at Prince William, makes clear: “They were happy to lie to protect my brother, but they were never willing to tell the truth to protect us.” No, this is about Meghan and Harry’s own mental health journey, about us being invited to witness six hours of on-screen therapy – after the many hours they’ve clearly both spent “working on themselves” in private.
Having spent over a decade in California, a place that sees therapy as the answer to every ill, and “trauma”, as the New Yorker put it so beautifully in a piece on the rise of therapy-speak last year, “around every corner… like the unwanted prize at the bottom of a cereal box”, I can spot a victim of excessive “shrinkage” a mile away. God knows I didn’t need Adele to admit (only yesterday) that she was having “five therapy sessions a day” during her divorce. That much is obvious.
There’s an unapologetic selfishness, for one thing, after all those expensive hours on the couch, being told “you do you” – something the Sussexes have taken with them back into the outside world. There’s a defiant refusal even to consider another person’s pain. And a hyperbolic language that elevates every uncomfortable experience to a gaping, open wound. “I wasn’t being thrown to the wolves,” says Meghan in the new clip. “I was being fed to the wolves.”
There is no impetus to heal, of course. The wound has to remain open, ideally weeping, and the hurt revisited, time and time again, if you’re to be assured lifelong victim status. And the couple desperately need that status – certainly in the absence of a royal title – to make money and remain relevant. Hence their fluency in therapese.
Against the sweeping Downton Abbey-esque score that accompanies their confessionals, the couple talk about the “layers” of difficulty within their mythical love story and how it wasn’t “a particularly healthy way to start a relationship”. There are tortured bleatings about “self-worth”, about Meghan’s inability to “authentically be myself”, when “so much of my self-identification was trying to figure out where I fit in”. About Harry being seen as “part of the problem rather than part of the solution”. On Thursday, he will up his game: there was “institutional gaslighting”, no less.
All of this is offset with constant reminders about their loftier purpose.
Once a problem has been “identified within yourself”, says Harry, “you then need to make it right. It’s education. It’s awareness. And it’s a constant work in progress for everybody, including me, you know.” The humility’s a nice – if fraudulent – touch, but the message remains the same: when you have the moral high ground, nothing and nobody is off limits.
If the (deeply private) wedding party images released at the weekend to promote the final three hours of Keeping Up With The Sussexes are anything to go by, there will be a brief respite from the whining in episode four – just long enough for us to enjoy their wedding night – before we’re back to the evil “theys” and the “us against the world” narrative Harry and Meghan have laid out from the start. And I wonder what therapists might caution a terminally narcissistic couple who have alienated family, friends and country, played all their cards, and been left dependent on each other?
I’m guessing there might be concerns as to how “healthy” that relationship is, and how easy it might be for these two to turn on each other if things don’t play out as expected. Because as Meghan says herself: “We had to stay connected. We wouldn’t have survived it if we weren’t.” I hope for their sake that they do. But once their six hours are up and Harry’s autobiography, Spare, is published in just under a month’s time, the rest of us could do with these two retreating into their shells for good.