Thanks to therapy, Harry Styles says he’s finally been able to unpack a lot of the things that happened to him during his days in One Direction and is slowly learning how to free himself from his need to please.
In his cover story for Better Homes & Garden, the pop star revealed that he first began therapy about five years ago, but he was initially reluctant to go as he thought it “meant that you were broken.” He said, “I wanted to be the one who could say I didn’t need it.” But since then he’s seen how therapy has allowed him to “open up rooms in himself.” He explained, “I think that accepting living, being happy, hurting in the extremes, that is the most alive you can be. Losing it crying, losing it laughing—there’s no way, I don’t think, to feel more alive than that.”
With the help of his therapist, Styles also started to dig into where his need to be liked by everyone comes from. “In lockdown, I started processing a lot of stuff that happened when I was in the band,” he said, explaining that he was encouraged to give so much of his personal life away as a member of One Direction in order, “to get people to engage with you, to like you.” He realized that there are no baby photos of him in existence that aren’t also on the internet. The musician also started to think back about the kinds of inappropriate questions journalists would ask him as a teenager, like about how many people he’d slept with. And instead of telling them off, Styles would instead try and figure out how he could give them a vague enough response that they would be satisfied and not annoyed with him. “Why do I feel like I’m the one who has done something wrong?” he asked. He also said that he would spend interviews petrified he would say the wrong thing and how even when great things would happened to him, he wouldn’t feel happy, just relieved.
But Styles went on to say that with the help of therapy and after signing his solo contract all of that changed. He explained that when he learned that his ability to make music wouldn’t be threatened by anything that transpired in his personal life, he burst into tears after living in fear for years as a teenager that he would violate his contract’s “cleanliness clause” that stipulated the entire deal would be voided if he did anything perceived as “unsavory.” He said, for the first time, “I felt free.” He concluded with a laugh, “My producer keeps asking me when I’m going to have my big breakdown. The most honest version I can think of is, I didn’t grow up in poverty by any means, but we didn’t have much money, and I had an expectation of what I could achieve in life. I feel like everything else has been a bonus, and I am so lucky.”