Earl Spencer had same therapy for trauma as Prince Harry

Earl Spencer has revealed he underwent the same therapy for trauma as Prince Harry.

The brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has detailed the level of abuse he experienced while boarding at Maidwell Hall, in his newly published memoir, A Very Private School.

Speaking after the book was published earlier this week, Earl Spencer, 59, said he had therapy to cope with the physical, sexual and emotional abuse he suffered at the prep school in Northamptonshire between 1972 and 1977.

“I have EMDR, which is a form of therapy for PTSD,” he said.

In 2001 The Duke of Sussex revealed he had used the therapy, a relatively new form of treatment for PTSD, as part of his AppleTV series, The Me You Can’t See.

The Duke explained he was using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) for four or five memories that he still found disturbing from his childhood.

EMDR looks at life events that may have caused trauma. It asks the patient to move their eyes as they follow an object, or by the therapist tapping on the patient’s body, or getting them to tap on themselves.

The aim is to pair the cognitive recognition of the trauma with a memory of being safe.

Earl Spencer also spoke of not drinking for “many weeks” since confronting his past and how he had been working on “centering” himself.

“Confronting evil is cataclysmic,” he told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.

“I’ve always been intrigued by what people, humans, are capable of doing to each other,” he said.

Earl Spencer also revealed how his childhood nanny would “crack our heads together” if he misbehaved as a child.

He described the punishment as a “cracking crunch” that “really hurt”.

Earl Spencer said it emphasised the “disconnect of parents”, but he did not criticise his mother and father, saying it was “normal” to “leave it to the nanny to deal with”.

“She used to crack our heads together, if we were both found to have done something naughty, obviously without my father’s knowledge, but it really hurt.

“It wasn’t a tap on the wrist, it was a cracking crunch, you know, and I remember it still.

“I think it emphasises again the disconnect of parents and I’m really, I’m not a critic of my parents, they did their best like 98 percent of parents do, and I think again, it was just normal, you leave it to the nanny to deal with this.”

He also claimed that another nanny punished his two older sisters by “ladling laxatives down them”.

In an extract from his memoir, Earl Spencer detailed the sexual assaults and beatings he suffered at boarding school Maidwell Hall, leaving him with lifelong “demons”.

He says he was abused by an assistant matron at the school when he was 11, leaving him with such trauma that he self-harmed over the notion she may leave the school.

In a statement, Maidwell Hall said it was “sorry” about the experiences Earl Spencer and some others had at the school.