Emotional Safety and Attachment in Taylor Swift’s “Opalite” and Maggie Rogers' “Light On”

**Lauren Skuba** (0:09)
Welcome to Love in Lyrics, Exploring Relationships Through Taylor Swift's Discography. Our discussions in this podcast are inspired by the lyrics written by Taylor Swift in the relationship themes we work with. Any references to our work are generalizations, and we'll never reference specific people we've worked with. This podcast is not intended to serve as therapy or diagnose our listeners, Taylor Swift, or the relationships she may be singing about.

**Paige Sutula** (0:41)
The topics and opinions expressed in this podcast are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Any discussions or insights provided should not be considered advice, and listeners are encouraged to seek professional support.

**Lauren Skuba** (0:54)
All right. Hi there. I'm Lauren Skuba, and I'm a relationship therapist.

**Paige Sutula** (0:59)
I'm Paige Sutula, and I'm also a relationship therapist. Welcome back to Love in Lyrics Season 2 We're really excited to be recording again. We've taken off a few months for the holidays and are coming back with more lyrics to explore, more songs to dive into through our relationship therapy lens, and we're excited to be here.

**Lauren Skuba** (1:22)
So excited to be back with you all and to be sitting here again with you, Paige. This season, we're going to be exploring some Taylor Swift songs and lyrics, and we wanted to bring in at times some other artists' lyrics as well, just to deepen the exploration, to bring in some other perspectives, and I'm hoping that this can bring a lot of rich dialogue about the different relationship themes that show up. So today we're going to be exploring Taylor Swift's song Opalite and Maggie Rogers' song Light On.

**Paige Sutula** (2:01)
Yes, we're really excited to bring in a new element to this season, and I think since the last time we recorded the Taylor's new album, Life of a Showgirl came out. So got to take a moment to acknowledge that because we were really excited. Lauren and I were talking a bunch about our initial thoughts to the album, and when we're recording, we've had a couple of months to sit with it and listen to it. And I just have to say personally, I really enjoyed quite a drastic shift from the Tortured Poets Department, but a lot of fun music to be able to listen to. And I think both of our brains started going almost immediately with different songs to explore in our podcast. So we are excited to dive in today.

**Lauren Skuba** (2:44)
I second that, Paige. And yeah, I was really curious knowing the title of the album. Curious what the songs, how the songs would be and what themes would show up. And it's been a lot of really catchy songs. And so I've definitely been listening to the album on repeat. So yeah, very excited to explore today. And just at the start here, as we have done in our previous season, we're going to go over some of the main relationship themes that we are noticing in these two songs. And also that we'll be exploring a bit today as we go through each lyric. And those themes are anxious pursuing strategy and an anxious withdrawing attachment strategy. We also are going to be exploring how attachment strategies repeat across relationship experiences, how healing from past relational hurt, trauma and attachment wounds shows up, growth, resiliency and uncertainty, earned attachment security, and taking the Chance for Love connection through haunting or past relationship pain.

**Paige Sutula** (4:00)
Yeah, we're really excited to dive in here. So we will plan to start with Taylor Swift's Opalite lyrics, and then we'll move on to Maggie Rogers Light On. And with this, we always kind of approach these podcasts by picking out a few lyrics that stood out to us and just deepening our discussion around some of the attachment themes that we've noticed. So the first lyric we'll jump into is from Opalite, and the first lyric I picked out was, You had to make your own sunshine. And first I just want to say as a whole, this song is, you know, one totally catchy. It has the most upbeat sort of happy music, and it really does kind of feel like a sunshine in a bottle experience to listen to. With this lyric in particular, one of the themes that stood out to me was this idea of self-soothing after experiencing relationship hurt through navigating complicated experiences with love and connection, and this idea of resiliency. That is a theme I think we'll talk about across both songs, but really seeing someone be able to take the lessons they learned, acknowledge and feel all the painful and heavy emotions, and then find ways to turn it into forward motion, to turn it into sunshine, and really honoring those protective strategies or those things that we lean into when we know that we need to keep going.