intended no harm by his silence, which seemed a predictable response for a nobleman of his generation, but it worsened the situation, especially for Diana. At age six, she had witnessed distressing tension and strong emotions in her parents: anxiety, anger, and grief. Naturally reticent, she was unable to speak about either their reaction or her own, and she kept her feelings inside. At a time when a healthy child should be building a strong bond with parents based on love and trust, Diana was emotionally adrift, her mother gone and her father sinking ever deeper into melancholy.
Chapter 3
The emotional drama we grow up in can be, even without our knowing it, an imprint for life. It stays with us and shapes who we are and our expectations. What we observe in our parents’ relationship to each other and to ourselves provides emotional signposts for what each of us feels entitled to get out of life
.
—SUSIE ORBACH (WITH LUISE EICHENBAUM) ,
Diana’s therapist from 1993 to 1997
W hen Diana Spencer first hit the tabloid headlines in September 1980, the press and the public glossed over her parents’ divorce, neglecting to consider the damage it might have caused her. The fairy tale couldn’t have a dark side. Diana was portrayed as the perfect mate for Prince Charles: well-born, pretty, virginal, and charming. She was from a “broken home,” but the tabloid reporters responsible for creating her image regarded the Spencer divorce as an unfortunate incident that Diana had simply brushed away. (Indeed, in their quest for scandal, they were far more focused on futile attempts to uncover a secret lover.)
Diana’s chroniclers focused on her willfulness as evidence that she had come through the divorce unscathed. In his portrait of Diana’s troubled childhood in the
Daily Star
on July 1, 1981, James Whitaker wrote, “It is hard to imagine it now but this sequence of events shattered Diana. It was worse for her because she loved her mother and father so much, and like anybody of that age couldn’t really understand what was going on.” Continued Whitaker, “Outwardly happy she may have appeared, but I am told she often suffered ‘like mad.’ ” Nevertheless, Whitaker concluded on a typically upbeat note, “Diana’s tremendous strength and depth of character brought her through it all.”
Over and over, those who knew Diana in her childhood and adolescence insisted, “She was just an ordinary girl.” As a child, especially when she was in supportive surroundings, she seemed even more adept at shielding herself from emotional turmoil than she was as an adult. To most of those around her, Diana’s personality and demeanor seemed little changed after her mother left home. But if anyone had bothered to dig more deeply, some clues would doubtless have been apparent.
As difficult as it is to diagnose mental illness in adults, it is even harder with children because their personalities are still developing—yet warning signs are often evident. Virginia Woolf once wrote that from an early age she had “never been able to become part of life; as if the world was complete and I was outside of it, being blown forever outside the loop of time. Other people seemed to live in a real world but I often fell down into nothingness.”According to psychiatrist E. James Anthony, Woolf’s description suggested the early stages of serious psychological problems. Her words differ little from Diana’s confession of childhood isolation to Andrew Morton: “I always felt very different from everyone else, very detached.… I always had this thing inside me that I was different. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t even talk about it but in my mind it was there.… I felt I was in the wrong shell.”
By the time Diana began divulging intimate details of her life to Morton in 1991, she had been through a number of psychotherapists, as well as several less conventional spiritual advisers and astrologists. She had grown accustomed to
Chapter 3
The emotional drama we grow up in can be, even without our knowing it, an imprint for life. It stays with us and shapes who we are and our expectations. What we observe in our parents’ relationship to each other and to ourselves provides emotional signposts for what each of us feels entitled to get out of life
.
—SUSIE ORBACH (WITH LUISE EICHENBAUM) ,
Diana’s therapist from 1993 to 1997
W hen Diana Spencer first hit the tabloid headlines in September 1980, the press and the public glossed over her parents’ divorce, neglecting to consider the damage it might have caused her. The fairy tale couldn’t have a dark side. Diana was portrayed as the perfect mate for Prince Charles: well-born, pretty, virginal, and charming. She was from a “broken home,” but the tabloid reporters responsible for creating her image regarded the Spencer divorce as an unfortunate incident that Diana had simply brushed away. (Indeed, in their quest for scandal, they were far more focused on futile attempts to uncover a secret lover.)
Diana’s chroniclers focused on her willfulness as evidence that she had come through the divorce unscathed. In his portrait of Diana’s troubled childhood in the
Daily Star
on July 1, 1981, James Whitaker wrote, “It is hard to imagine it now but this sequence of events shattered Diana. It was worse for her because she loved her mother and father so much, and like anybody of that age couldn’t really understand what was going on.” Continued Whitaker, “Outwardly happy she may have appeared, but I am told she often suffered ‘like mad.’ ” Nevertheless, Whitaker concluded on a typically upbeat note, “Diana’s tremendous strength and depth of character brought her through it all.”
Over and over, those who knew Diana in her childhood and adolescence insisted, “She was just an ordinary girl.” As a child, especially when she was in supportive surroundings, she seemed even more adept at shielding herself from emotional turmoil than she was as an adult. To most of those around her, Diana’s personality and demeanor seemed little changed after her mother left home. But if anyone had bothered to dig more deeply, some clues would doubtless have been apparent.
As difficult as it is to diagnose mental illness in adults, it is even harder with children because their personalities are still developing—yet warning signs are often evident. Virginia Woolf once wrote that from an early age she had “never been able to become part of life; as if the world was complete and I was outside of it, being blown forever outside the loop of time. Other people seemed to live in a real world but I often fell down into nothingness.”According to psychiatrist E. James Anthony, Woolf’s description suggested the early stages of serious psychological problems. Her words differ little from Diana’s confession of childhood isolation to Andrew Morton: “I always felt very different from everyone else, very detached.… I always had this thing inside me that I was different. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t even talk about it but in my mind it was there.… I felt I was in the wrong shell.”
By the time Diana began divulging intimate details of her life to Morton in 1991, she had been through a number of psychotherapists, as well as several less conventional spiritual advisers and astrologists. She had grown accustomed to
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