Spencer Matthews on Losing Someone You Love | GREAT MOMENTS

0:02Hello everyone, I'm Jamie Lang and this is Great Moments. hello everyone this is great moments where i share some of my favorite moments from my conversations on great company something that's made me think made me laugh or change my perspective and hopefully hopefully there's something in it for you too so are you ready let's get into it how old are you when your bro died again 10 really yeah 10 quite difficult to process at that age death you know difficult thing um for anyone uh to lose a loved one but what was your relationship like he was my hero i kind of i loved him dearly but obviously it was he was in his mid 20s or you know coming into his mid 20s 22 when i was 10 so you know huge age difference it's not like you know we're outside playing sport together or socializing together in the same circles or anything he was very much uh my dad would work a lot when i was younger so he was he was away a lot of the time.

1:00Like I don't, I don't remember too much about my dad being at home with us. Um, so Mike was, was there cause James was away racing a lot. He was a professional racing driver at a very young age. Yeah. And so I was with Mike a lot, you know, Mike, Mike and I would, would play video games together. We'd play hide and seek together. You know, we, we were, we were pals, you know, and he would look after me and I would always feel that, oh, that's nice. And I would always feel that, uh, he made me feel safe and he made me feel loved and you know, So did my mum, obviously. But to me, he was everything to me.

1:37I wanted to be just like him. Really? Yeah. He was a great influence on me at a young age. Because it's your hero, right? And when he goes up on Everest and he doesn't come home. And how is that even articulated to you at the time? What happened? How do you even find out at 10 years old? language language was used with me that was accurate but that i didn't that made it harder for me to understand because it wasn't definite um it would be definite to an adult but not to a kid so i came up to my parents room do you remember it yeah yeah yeah i was in i was in uh we were in the caribbean at the time and uh my mom asked me to come up to their room and they said michael is lost on the mountain.

2:31And to a 10-year-old, I was kind of like, well, I don't understand what you mean. Surely, okay, well, he'll be found. It's fine. It was lost to an adult or anyone that knows anything about Everest. If you're missing on Everest, your chance of survival is slim. It would be near 0 % to survive the night and then be found. It has happened, but it's pretty rare. you'd need to be incredibly lucky. And Michael wasn't lucky. We never found his body. But it was just difficult to comprehend as a kid. It didn't affect me at all for a little while. But what do you mean, Spen? How could it not affect you?

3:12Because I assumed that he would come back. Yeah, for me, he was alive and well. So I couldn't really understand why my parents were crying. I couldn't understand why. Did you see your parents cry? Yeah. But I couldn't understand that. To me, it was kind of like, But Mike is, he's super strong. He's super fast. He climbed Aconcagua like better than anyone else on, you know, at the age of 19. He's fit. He's strong. He's, you know, so to me, it was kind of like, this is all a big mistake and the phone's going to ring and, oh, Mike's, you know, Mike went down with that. You know, you're a kid. You kind of fantasize about things that aren't possible.

3:47When did you understand that he wasn't going back? Well, even at his memorial service months later, there was no body there. because we weren't able to recover his body. So even then I had thoughts that he'd gone down into Nepal and was living in Nepal. And I was thinking maybe one day he'll come home, but then I couldn't quite figure out why he would want to do that to us. And then obviously you begin to process, maybe I won't ever see him again, but it took me ages to realize that that was a reality. like it never it never hit me in the way that it would have hit james you know james would have heard he's lost on the mountain james would have gone he's dead and and from that point on you begin to process the fact that you've lost your brother whereas in many ways you you're happy that you're a you're a child in that instance because you don't you don't get the gut-wrenching pain we both thought that that being on a show and being in that period would give us everything that we wanted, but in fact, it took everything away.

4:52Yeah, I think that's fair. And also just the general, you know, just when you lose someone close to you very young, I think it's, you know, it's firstly, we've established that it's hard to process, but it also makes everything else seem like it's not a problem. So I developed this very blunt nature of like, if you had a problem, I wouldn't give a shit about your problem because it's not as big as my problem, you know? And it's kind of like, it's this strange thing where almost nothing matters. It's this strange thing where almost nothing matters. And, you know, like subconsciously after a few drinks, it's kind of like, oh, how do you feel about, you know, the binky situation?

5:44well I don't give a fuck about the binky situation because my brother died you know it's always there type thing the binky situation is pointless and it's tiny and it's irrelevant right because I lost my brother so there's bits of that that are always kind of there when you're a bit drunk that's very honest well yeah but also it makes you I've never heard you say that ever well yeah I don't think I've said it before it gives you a lack of empathy as well so I am I do have empathy, but I'm not, it's not easily accessible. Because your brother died and it was so awful. The fact that you've broken up with someone, I don't care because...

6:26It's irrelevant. It's irrelevant. Who could care less? Yeah. Like, you know, it doesn't, this doesn't affect anyone. You know, so what? Wow. Because something like that affects... But, you know, just, just, that's just a kind of thought that I just had. The, you know, I think you can associate... That makes a lot of sense. You can associate a lack of empathy with all kinds of stuff or lack of sympathy or lack of empathy. But, but I think that, I think that when you have gone through something really turbulent as a kid that you struggled to process for your entire childhood, almost everything else feel like your business goes bust.

6:55So what? My family is still alive. Yes, this is exactly 100%, which I think that's exactly it. This is it. This is what I was saying at the beginning, that I think because that happened to you at such a young age, such a catastrophic disaster, that after that, you're just like, well, that doesn't matter compared to what happened when I was 10. I'm not chucking our friendship into that category, but when you come at it from that angle, it's kind of like, you know, to your point, imagine telling Theodore that there's a loss in the family or something, or, you know, heaven forbid you lose a child.

7:29You know, that happened to my parents, right? They lost one of their sons. And so I'm assuming that nothing could ever be as bad as that ever again in life, right? So you lose a friend along the way. I'm not sure it's going to feel like it matters very much. You know, that's kind of spend that's it that's exactly it of course and i i can't believe i didn't even put one and one together like that is of course it because no wonder you were so blase about so many things because it doesn't matter because i lost my brother but it didn't matter to me no and you know if you think i'm a prick because of that then so what if something happened that so that that there was a lot of that in my teenage years it's something you've really upset this person i don't care you know that kind of hard-nosed like i'm just going to do my thing and if it bothers you i couldn't care less is something that i have moved through now because i think now because i'm just thinking if i lost man if i if i lost sophie i wouldn't care about anything i just wouldn't i wouldn't i wouldn't care potentially ever again no i don't think i would i i don't i would i'm not i'm not by the way I'm not trying to find some blanket reason for having behaved the way I behaved in, in made in Chelsea and stuff.

8:41I'm just, I'm just drawing attention to the fact that as a young man, that was an easy, that was at the forefront of a lot of thoughts. It's like, oh, you know, it, it, it made it. And, and, you know, I spoke to a therapist once about the turbulent drinking, the nature of my drinking, right? Cause at one point it was very, how bad was it as hard and heavy? How bad was it? What day do you remember when even you went, this is bad, when it came to drinking? It got to a point where I began for the first time in my life to kind of black out a bit. Like I wouldn't know where I was. Like I'd come to and I'd be like just in some bar somewhere with people.

9:28And like sometimes I'd be like, I don't fucking know who that person is. like you know like so i i so i wouldn't be sure how i got to the place that i'm in that probably only happened like two or three times in my life but it happens it happened towards the very end of my alcohol abuse and there were times when i you know i think i've told you this before i would drink quite early in the morning like you know if i could walk past the liquor cabinet and there was nobody looking or nobody around i might have a sneaky shot of tequila or something at you know 9 a.m uh and then i'd go about my day and i'd lie to myself about stuff you know so you know and even sometimes vogue would say like have you have you had a drink today and i'd just be like no you know and all of a sudden you've got this you're lying to the person that you love the most in the world and it creates this um slight albeit slight lack of trust and all of a sudden you're living this like little lie and you know that it's wrong because you know you shouldn't be drinking spirits in the morning um and and then it begins to have an effect on your self-worth right over time when you compound behavior like that over a long period of time you start to feel quite worthless because you you give yourself excuses to do it because you just go well you know i haven't got much on today or you know oh this is a this isn't a busy time of the year for for me and it doesn't really matter if I make it to this meeting or not, you know, and you start to take corners and you start to do less.

10:53And for me, that's like, that's real, like the house is burning down mentality and stuff. You know, I, I, I'm a million miles from there now. And, you know, I'm really thankful that I was able to, to achieve that.

11:18Thank you.