Call it the Five Stages of Grief (Taylor’s Version). Last week, ahead of the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift shared five new playlists that sort her old songs into stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. “These songs represent making room for more good in your life,” she says in a brief audio message accompanying the final playlist, acceptance. “Making that choice. Because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too.”
In the two months since Swift announced her new album, which comes out April 19, fans have speculated that it will explore themes related to coming to terms with the loss of a long-term relationship. (The pop star revealed the end of her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn last April; she’s now dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.) “She’s doing the same thing with grief that she did with the NFL,” introducing the concept to a new audience, says Jason Holland, a clinical psychologist in Nashville who has researched grief, loss, trauma, and stress. “Grief isn’t a topic that gets talked about a lot—so anything that someone can do to bring more attention to it, and get people thinking about it and talking about it, is a good thing.”
But the “five stages of grief” is a contested concept among psychologists, as not everyone experiences them the same way. We asked experts what they like about the theory—and which limitations and caveats to keep in mind.
Grief is less predictable in reality
The five stages of grief were introduced by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. The theory, born out of her work with terminally ill patients, initially focused on how people grapple with their own mortality. “She was a pioneer at the time,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love…
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