Expressing anguish helps us carry it: Therapist reacts to “Broken” by Seether
“‘Cause I’m broken when I’m open
And I don’t feel like I am strong enough
'Cause I'm broken when I'm lonesome
And I don't feel right when you're gone away.”
This song is so emo-coded. It's like, “Oh, it's just the good old days, but so sad.”
You can tell by the song’s tone that he wants to do all of these things, but he can't, for whatever reason. It's sad. It's like, “I want to do these things and I won't be able to.”
I know that Sean Morgan of Seether originally wrote this song before, and then they did it with Amy Lee for a movie. Let's see quickly, what did he say?
“I wrote it two and a half years ago for my daughter. She was just born, and I had to come to the States . I wrote the lyrics for her. It's about leaving somebody behind. It's really painful, and ultimately, you're looking to the future saying, ‘we'll see each other again and everything will be fine.’”
That puts this song in a different perspective because this is about pain that he's choosing, right? It must be such a hard place to be because it's like, “I feel so much anguish that I'm doing this, and I'm still making this choice.”
At the start of the song, it feels like it's starting to ramp up. Even from the first verse to the next, to the full chorus with Amy Lee, it almost sounds like he's walking more into his pain.
The start is like, “I wanted you to know this is just me talking about it. I'm in pain, I'm feeling anguish, but I'm just talking about it.”
And then, “I'm walking down into this place where I'm accessing the pain that I'm feeling about this situation. Most of the time I live in a place of knowing that this is the choice I made. I just have to deal with it. But when I start to talk about it, when I start to express it, I start to actually realize that there's depth to my anguish down here.”
“‘Cause I’m broken when I’m open
And I don’t feel like I am strong enough
'Cause I'm broken when I'm lonesome
And I don't feel right when you're gone away.”
Musically, the progression of the song is really interesting. It starts slowly, and then it continues to ramp up. As it's ramping up this way, it's walking us into the depths of anguish. Although it's still building toward the end of the song, there's something about the expression that sounds more resolute, sounds more settled than the beginning. The beginning sounds uncertain.
I imagine that when Sean was making this tough decision to leave his daughter, there were a lot of feelings of unsettledness. There were a lot of feelings of uncertainty: “Is this the right thing?”
At the end, it's almost like through the expression of the pain and the anguish, the acceptance could coexist simultaneously. It's like, “yes, this is painful. I'm expressing this pain, and I'm accepting that this is where it is.”
Often, we resist the expression of our anguish, for so many reasons. Maybe it’s because we feel like it won't change the situation. Maybe it’s because it feels like we don't deserve to talk about it, when this is the decision that we are making ourselves.
But we need to express our emotions, not because it changes what we carry, but because it changes how we carry it.
“Broken” points to that truth. Before the expression of this emotion, you can hear that it’s soft, it's sad, it's uncertain. At the end, it's still sad, but there's a resolve in it. There's a commitment to it, there's a certainty in it, and that is easier to carry than this feeling of anguish, uncertainty, and a lack of acceptance all mixed around together.
This song points to a truth that the only way to get to acceptance is often through anguish. You can't skip around. It's like in Finding Nemo when he's like, “I think we should go over,” and she's like, “We should go through,” and he's like, “It looks scary in there.”
And she's like, “Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that it's actually not the right way to go up there.”
Pixar is life you guys, because we have to go through the little court of anguish to get to acceptance. That's what the journey of this song is.
Regardless of why we are feeling the anguish, whether it's our choice or not, we still have to go through that journey. I think that's the gift of this song: we can process through our own feelings as we listen.
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