Prince Harry Didn't Cry for 'Nearly 2 Decades' After Mom Princess Diana's Burial: 'I Was a 12-Year-Old Boy With No Permission to Fall Apart'

Prince Harry reflected on the grief he carried following the sudden loss of his mother, Princess Diana, revealing that he kept his emotions buried for years.

"It took me a long time to find my path to resilience. I didn't cry when I was told my mom died, only at her burial, and then not again for nearly two decades," Harry, 42, revealed during a MasterClass on grief with neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor that went live on Thursday, October 8.

Harry reportedly filmed the episode titled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss over the summer, which was released ahead of World Mental Health Day on Saturday, October 10.

During the episode, Harry offered his insights and tools to help others navigate challenging situations, drawing from his experience of losing his mother in a car crash at age 12 in 1997.

"Men are encouraged not to grieve," he explained during the conversation. "I think men and young boys are brought up to believe that crying is weakness, crying is unacceptable, crying is not what men do."

The Duke of Sussex emphasized that "you have to be able to cry," noting that he was someone who "suppressed his emotions for 20 years" and his health suffered for it.

"For 15, 20 years, when I was being asked, 'Are you okay?' My response was, 'I’m fine.' It was numbness, emotional shutdown," Harry explained. "And without knowing it, adrenaline was pushing me, was driving me."

The U.K. native explained that his bottled-up emotions caught up with him in 2013 when he returned from his second tour in Afghanistan, explaining that things he saw abroad were a "trigger."

"I started to realize that I probably had become seriously depleted when just putting a simple dress shirt on — 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," he explained. "And that’s when I realized, 'Okay, there’s something bigger, there’s something else that you need to look into here.'"

Harry confessed that despite his mother's death, he held onto a small glimmer of hope that one day she would return.

"I believed that she had created this exit to get away from all the things that were destroying her life and that she was gonna reenter the fray in some disguise and then whisk me and my brother away," he said.

The father-of-two explained that his road to healing included confronting the guilt he felt about being happy without the late princess.

"I'd spent so long emotionally numb, to a large extent, because I felt disloyal and guilty for the possibility of being happy and joyful without her," he admitted. "I felt like I had to be sad and I had to be emotionally numb in order to prove to her that I missed her."