Alexandra NielDivorce Recovery Coach, ANiel International, LLC. · I help women who held it all together through divorce finally build a life that’s actually theirs | Thrive After Divorce

Why I Sometimes Play Sad Songs on Purpose and Why You Might Want To Too

14 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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In this personal vignette, the speaker—originally from France—describes the disorienting experience of moving to the United States after college. Feeling out of place and emotionally unsettled, she recounts deliberately playing music she knows will make her cry. By allowing herself to “evacuate” those feelings through tears, she uses sad songs as a purposeful coping mechanism to process the confusion and loneliness that accompany cultural transition.

Chapters

It's funny that you talk about music because I know I had a hard time when I first moved to the US because I felt very out of sorts. Everything was very unfamiliar, even though we had moved before. There was something very different about living here. And I remember when I— oh, I'm originally French, but the accent. Yeah. So when I found myself living alone after I graduated college and everything else, every once in a while I would put music on that I knew was going to make me cry because I needed to evacuate and let all of those emotions, whatever they were. I don't even know what the heck was going on.