Taylor Swift Is Embracing the 5 Stages of grief right now

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.”

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 and Loss. “She described what people were telling her, and those descriptions are still accurate. Many people do feel angry; many people do feel depressed.”

Kubler-Ross later expanded her work to apply to people grieving a loved one—and, clearly, it resonated, evolving into a cultural touchstone. The problem, O’Connor says, is that “it became used not as a description, but as a prescription.” People interpreted the stages strictly, assuming that mourners had to pass through each one sequentially. (That thinking has persisted, though in a book Kubler-Ross wrote shortly before her death in 2004, she noted it was not her intention, and that the stages do not have to happen in one particular order.)