Taylor Swift for the Therapy Generation

The Alchemy of April 19th

By my calculations, I have spent at least 24 of the past 72 hours listening to The Tortured Poets Department. I was so captivated (debilitated?) by its release that I skipped publishing my column yesterday. (That, and I was dipping my feet in the glorious ocean for the first time in five years.) I was floored. I cried publicly and often as the album on repeat became the soundtrack of my day. It felt like therapy I hadn’t signed up for, but I’m not complaining.

I have no idea if Taylor Swift is in therapy. But I think one of the reasons she is so popular among the 35+ women set is that her music feels like therapy. Her recent exploration of the “Stages of Grief” playlists prior to the release of TTPD was just too perfect for armchair psychologists and therapy-goers everywhere. We all wanted to curate our own playlists of loss, didn’t we?

But more than that, as the self-appointed poster child for Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I’m struck by the correlation between Taylor’s Eras and parts work—it just fits so perfectly. Far from just a collection of tracks on an album, each era is characterized by colors, moods, themes, aesthetics, and more importantly, seasons of Taylor’s life and snapshots of who she was. The Eras have become commonly known—from the wistful, daydreamy quality of Folklore to the fierce defiance of Reputation—and fans all over the world have fearlessly declared and embodied their own favorite eras. 

Taylor Swift has created a cultural movement where listeners excavate, celebrate, and integrate different elements of themselves, and it perfectly coincides with the momentum of IFS therapy. She has given a generation of women permission to dive into their depths, and during a moment when it’s become more acceptable to gaze at our navels—or at least, inside our system of parts—in order to better understand ourselves, her Eras Tour came at a perfect time. 

She is encouraging fans—sometimes subtly, sometimes loudly and overtly— to examine their own "parts," and rather than banish an older version of themselves or compartmentalize a rebellious part or a brokenhearted part, to make space for all parts within the vastness of Self. Her music has started conversations about what it means to embrace all aspects of ourselves, and without any direct allusions, her world tour deftly incorporated these elements in a way that mirrors the current zeitgeist. And the Therapy Generation is here for it.

In a dynamic 2023 New York Times piece, Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes, “Maybe that’s what Eras really is: the acknowledgment of girls as people to memorialize, of who we are and who we were, all existing in the same body, on the same timeline. You are your sluttiest version, your silliest version, your most wholesome, your smartest, your dumbest, your saddest, your happiest — all at once.”

I am still unpacking my feelings for this album and will likely take a deep dive in the weeks to come, but in the meantime, I wrote a review on Midstory Magazine that you can read here.

And! I am desperately excited to share that we are running a 4-week writing workshop for writers of all levels, Swifties and non-Swifties alike, based on the music of Taylor Swift. As a music therapist and writer, combining lyric analysis and creative writing pretty much makes all my dreams come true. We’ll use her music to explore our own eras and explore the five stages of grief when examining the losses, heartbreaks, and transitions of our own lives. Learn more here, and don’t be scared if you’re not a Swiftie, or alternatively, if you are the biggest Swiftie ever but not a “real writer.” We all deserve to explore our own stories and voices.

The Case For Midlife As Our Tortured Poets Era

April 19th. My daughters and I had been counting down to this date for weeks and weeks: the day Taylor Swift released her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I planned to wake them up early like Christmas morning so we could climb into my bed and listen together. Instead, we discovered TTPD dropped at midnight EST, so my youngest and I eagerly gathered in my bed and devoured each track, sometimes crying upon first listen (alas, that is not a dramatic exaggeration). We stayed up for an hour and listened to the whole album—or so we thought. 

The next morning I shrieked as though I were a six-year-old discovering Santa had come. “Sophie! There is a whole second album! There are 31 songs!”

Yes, it’s true: at 2:00 am, Taylor released an entire second half, an Anthology. I spent most of the next 48 hours obsessively listening to TTPD Anthology nonstop. And I wept, even in public with my AirPods in, as though watching a slow motion movie of the most heartbreaking moments in my life flash before my eyes with each song. . .

Read the full review here.

Sign up to write with us and cry to Taylor Swift music here. The workshop begins tomorrow, Wednesday the 24th!

XOXO,
Steph