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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle want to make amends with the royal family. Toxic relatives anywhere need careful handling
So, six years after escaping Britain on his ‘freedom flight’, Prince Harry has announced that he is returning home — wife Meghan and kids Archie and Lilibet in tow — to spend more time with the family that he has been dissing for the better part of a decade. He wants to spend more time with his cancer-stricken father, King Charles, because (as he put it so charmingly in a recent interview) he “doesn’t know how long he has left”. And presumably, he wants to make peace with his elder brother (and heir to the throne) now that he has had his fill of attacking Prince William in his book, Spare, and his Netflix documentary.
It was Leo Tolstoy who famously wrote that all happy families are alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Well, much as I admire the Russian novelist, I must beg leave to disagree with him on this. Unhappy families are also very alike, especially when they house toxic members like Harry and Meghan (yes, I am very much Team Wales). And the tricks of dealing with them are pretty alike as well.
So, even if you are not the heir to a kingdom, here is how you can deal with a toxic family member who has barged back into your life without so much as a by your leave, and who — no matter how much you despise them — you can no longer safely ignore.
Find safety in numbers. Instead of agreeing to one-on-one meetings that involve discussing issues that are festering between you, meet in large family groups that don’t allow for much deep conversation. That is the best way to ease back into a situation when both of you can be in the same room without scratching each other’s eyes out. Keep the conversation at a superficial level, don’t share any confidences that you don’t want betrayed, and remember that everything you say will be recorded for posterity, so proceed with caution.
Change focus on to the newer generation. You and your sister may be on outs because of some dispute whose details are now lost in the mists of time, but there is no reason the acrimony should spill over into the next generation. So, be open to letting your children meet one another and form bonds that are independent of yours. Let those relationships develop without being shadowed by adult disputes. And maybe in time, those disputes will lose their power to keep you apart.
Be the bigger person. You might think that given how things panned out in the past, you are owed an apology. But given how much recollections may vary, it is quite possible that your bête noire thinks that he/she is the injured party. Now, it really comes down to who can say sorry even though he/she doesn’t really mean it. It may be a bitter pill to swallow — but maybe, just maybe, you will feel better for it after.
From HT Brunch, August 29, 2026
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