Harry Styles on going to therapy after One Direction split
Harry Styles has opened up about how his mental health was impacted by One Direction's split, revealing that he went to therapy, although he was reluctant at first.
Speaking to Better Homes and Gardens, Harry explained how the COVID-19 pandemic gave him time to reflect on the issues he'd perhaps been avoiding. "In lockdown, I started processing a lot of stuff that happened when I was in the band," he said, pointing out that he was encouraged to give so much of himself away to the media and the public "to get people to engage with you, to like you."
It's something that still plays on his mind, as he told the magazine that there's no baby photos of him that aren't on the internet, and recalled how interviewers would pry into his sex life as a teenager, asking how many people he'd slept with leaving him anxious that being too coy would damage his career: "Why do I feel like I'm the one who has done something wrong?"
After the band's shock split, the musician came around to the idea of therapy, which he'd previously misunderstood. "I thought it meant that you were broken," he said, adding that he "wanted to be the one who could say I didn't need it". But Harry admits that going to therapy enabled him to "open up rooms in himself" that he didn't know existed. In fact, during his therapy sessions the 28-year-old realised he had "emotionally coast[ed]" through life, something which he's since actively worked on changing.
"I think that accepting living, being happy, hurting in the extremes, that is the most alive you can be," the former One Direction singer continued. "Losing it crying, losing it laughing — there's no way, I don't think, to feel more alive than that."
Previously, Harry told DJ and producer Zane Lowe that British attitudes towards therapy had made him doubt the process. "I think for a really long time, especially when I started coming to California, there was a big thing for me where I felt like everyone went to therapy," he pointed out. "And I think for a long time I was like, 'I don’t need that.' You know, it’s very like British way of looking at it, I think."
He went on: "I think with the therapy thing, I just realised I was just getting in my own way."
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