Are Shakira’s revenge songs bad or therapeutic?

There is a thrill that runs through us every time we see a rejected woman raise her voice in front of the world and express her anger without filters. Whether it’s Miley Cyrus dancing in gold singing “I can buy myself flowers, I can love me better than you can”, by Taylor Swift in red, of Beyoncé shining like a goddess after the betrayal of Jay Z or even of Shakira, ready to unload on Piqué, again and again, all her anger as a wounded companion, the shiver runs through us like a shock. Are they really doing it? Are they really shouting to the world what we, our bad loves, our unfaithful companions have only dared to think? Perhaps this is why we are obsessed with revenge songs. Sure: in public we belittle them, we say them embarrassing, painful, useless but, listening to them, we savor their power. Next will be the summer when we sing them all out loud and then it’s worth asking yourself: are revenge songs really that bad?

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Let’s start from the beginning, from what they say about Shakira and Piqué, their Rolexes and their Twingos: revenge doesn’t lead to anything good, only to generate hatred and endless skirmishes. Yet, in the face of a traumatic breakup, music can take on a therapeutic role and we feel it on our skin. «Expressing one’s emotions is always important», explains Dr. Valeria Fiorenza Perris, psychotherapist and Clinical Director of Unobravo, a leading Italian startup in the online psychology and psychotherapy sector.And, «Any creative effort that goes in the direction of focusing on one’s moods, becoming aware of them and being able to talk about them freely is undoubtedly a positive conquest and lays the foundations for the elaboration of what has happened». After a betrayal, the first instinct is to hurt the other person and this has to do with anger and frustration. «These feelings can be so strong as to cover everything else, even the sadness and the hope of recovering the bond that characterized the early stages, immediately following the couple crisis. The phase of anger is pervasive, but it also represents a way to achieve progressive detachment and to process what happened little by little». Anger isn’t bad in itself, it depends on how we use it.

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For us who follow the events from the outside, listening to revenge songs can become a way to fantasize about our desires for revenge using music as an emotional vehicle. «Feeling that someone has given voice to what we feel, that he has translated it into words favors identification», explains Perris, «Singing out loud something that, although not written by us, seems to trace our thoughts and our emotions can being really liberating, it can help normalize these states of mind as part of a natural phase, as a legitimate reaction to something that we probably didn’t expect and that has deeply shaken us». We limit ourselves to listening and singing, the consequences (the vicious circle of wrongs and the conscience that, in the long run, remorse) face them, if anything, directly concerned.

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“If anger and the aggressive communication of suffering were not limited to a precise moment of the process towards elaboration, but became a consolidated dynamic, this would be the sign of a difficulty in refocusing on oneself and one’s needs”, explains l ‘expert, «The consequence could be a difficulty in turning the page and in finding serenity again». Shakira, therefore, may not benefit in the long run from taking out her grudge against her ex before the world by immediately satisfying her desire to hurt him. We like, however, to believe that, in choosing to sing of her revenge, she also thought a little about us and our badly broken hearts of today and tomorrow. If we sing Music Session #53 it’s also why not we know where to put all the hate, the desire to hurt, the desire for revenge that we feel when they hurt us. We’re not used to hearing certain things, they didn’t teach us how to do it. We were told to smile, to be nice, and at most, to cry. While we figure out how to use our anger and frustration without denying ourselves, our feminism maybe, our values, it’s not bad to know that there are those who have felt exactly the same way.

We can call them all together, like talismans. Invoking Shakira’s spirit and her anger, disproportionate, imperfect, perhaps misdirected. Feel the strength of Beyoncé as she smashes glass with the baseball bat in Hold Up and use it to get out of bed the next morning. Go buy flowers like Miley, remind ourselves we deserve them, feel better for five minutes. We can get back on our feet by ending a toxic relationship like Taylor Swift teaches in Dear John, wearing the purple dress from the Speak Now World Tour. We can sing with her «I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town», and wait for some of her fireworks to light up for us too. It doesn’t hurt us.

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