When Two Orphans Lose Each Other

   I was in a London supermarket last month, when I stopped in front of the tabloid rack. Prince Harry and Meghan again. Speculation about the Invictus Games, a possible return to the UK, what it would mean. I stood there longer than I intended, and something that had been forming quietly in my mind for years finally found its shape.

   I should introduce myself honestly, because this piece comes from more than one place in me. I spent twenty years in medicine, first training and then practicing as a medical doctor, before retraining as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist specialising in EMDR. That long road through the human body before arriving at the human mind has shaped the way I see people in ways I am still discovering. I am also an Algerian woman who has followed the British Royal Family since I was fourteen or fifteen years old, sitting in front of a television screen the night Princess Diana died. I was not yet a clinician. I was just a young girl watching something she did not have the language for yet. I visit London regularly, and every time I arrive something in me settles. This country, its people, its history have become genuinely dear to me. The royal family is part of that.

   I also carry another hat, one I cannot take off even when I try. I come from a culture that places enormous weight on the role of women in preserving the bonds between brothers. It is something I feel as a personal responsibility in my own life, something I think about when I look at my two young sons. I am aware of this lens. I do my best to set it aside and reach for something more objective. But I would not be honest if I pretended it was not there.

   I want to write about Prince William and Prince Harry. Not about who is right and who is wrong, because that question does not interest me clinically or humanly. What interests me is what happened between two brothers, and how unfinished grief has a way of waiting silently until the right moment to resurface.

   The first thing I feel when I think about them is compassion. I grew up without siblings. Brotherhood has always been something I reached toward, found in friends and cousins, chosen deliberately because I never had it by blood. So when I watch a bond like theirs under strain, I feel it as a genuine loss. At their core, beneath every title and every public narrative, they are two people who lost their mother at a formative age in the most public and incomprehensible of circumstances, two orphans who had to keep walking forward inside a world that was watching. That they found their footing at all says something real about their resilience.

   For a time, they walked forward together. When Catherine entered William's life, something in the dynamic shifted in a way that looked, from the outside, genuinely stabilising. Harry was building something meaningful, finding his place. The grief from losing their mother was not gone, but it seemed integrated enough to live alongside. In clinical work I see this often. A person who has not fully processed a trauma can nonetheless reach a functioning equilibrium, particularly when the relational environment around them feels safe and steady.

   Then things changed. And I want to be precise here, because this is not about blame and it is not about character. What I observed through a clinical lens is that something in the new dynamic reactivated what had never been fully resolved in Harry. Meghan's own story, whether consciously shaped or not, carries a structural echo of a story he had already lived from the inside as a child. A woman who struggled to find her place. A woman whose suffering became visible and public. When a present situation rhymes closely enough with an original wound, the nervous system does not always distinguish between memory and now. What had appeared healed revealed itself as dormant.

   Princess Catherine did not do this to Prince William. She did not carry a narrative that mirrored his past. She brought something genuinely new. Prince Harry was not so fortunate in that particular sense, and I say this without placing responsibility on any one person.

   What concerns me most as a clinician is something we call secondary gain. When pain becomes the organising centre of an identity, when it is what gives a person their narrative and their sense of purpose, the prospect of real healing can quietly become threatening. The wound needs to stay present because without it something essential feels lost. This is not a conscious choice. It is not performance. It can be completely sincere. But it is one of the most difficult places to reach someone from a therapeutic perspective, because the very thing that would free them is the thing they are most afraid to release.

   Trauma that is witnessed, named, and properly processed loses its grip. It becomes part of a person's history without remaining the engine of their present. That possibility is always open. It does not require an audience, a memoir, or a public reckoning. It requires only the courage to stop organising one's life around the wound, and to discover what remains when the pain is no longer needed to explain everything.

That is true for any of us...

 This piece reflects personal and clinical observations based entirely on public information. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual.

© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.