The Emo Cure: How Music Helped Me Heal From Heartbreak
The unspoken power that music has for healing and growth
Emo music thrives on themes of heartbreak and loss. Raw, unfiltered emotion is where the magic lies, but this is also a double-edged sword.
Because it’s easy to get addicted to the pain.
While this kind of music is often tied to heartbreak or emotional pain, if used intentionally, it’s a useful tool for validation and healing.
For me, it’s been a bridge toward growth and rediscovery. It’s like journaling but more exciting.
Use music thoughtfully — not to dwell in sorrow or anger, but to grow beyond it and become a more complete version of yourself.
My past story
I’ve been through many relationships, and a lot of them ended in unexpected ways, particularly one of my long-term ones from a few years ago.
When my ex-fiancé ended our relationship abruptly, right before our marriage, my world felt like it was shattered.
One moment, we were together, then before I knew it, I was hauling my shit into a U-Haul truck to my new apartment.
The hardest part wasn’t moving my stuff, it was what followed.
Welcome to adulthood, where all your hopes and dreams can suddenly come crashing down, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
And I had to face reality.
She ain’t coming back, I’m alone, and I don’t have anyone to turn to. The next year-and-a-half was hell. I didn’t just lose a partner; I lost a part of myself.
But this pain taught me something incredibly valuable — a lesson that cannot be fully articulated into words. I could not let this happen again.
Yes, losing her fucking sucked. But I invested so much of myself into her and that relationship without realizing how little I had to show for it after she bailed on us.
Let me be clear, when you completely divest all aspects of yourself — your identity, your hopes and dreams, and your passions into someone else or something like a relationship, you leave yourself completely vulnerable to the whims of fate.
The roots of emo
Emo is short for emotional. It’s about the raw, emotional lyrics over heartbreak, identity, and mental health, paired with a blend of punk rock and alternative sounds.
It’s the soundtrack for feeling deeply and unapologetically expressing it.
The ‘emo’ sub-culture has grown up.
We’re the same ones who are still listening to the heavy, angsty, sorrow-filled music of the early 2000s and the 2010s.
We’re working in corporate jobs. We’re software engineers, teachers, analysts, nurses — millennials and older Gen Z’s who are getting married and starting families.
So it’s not just a phase or ‘for the kids’ anymore.
You wouldn’t even know we had this taste in music or lifestyle unless we invited you into our homes and saw our vinyl collections, our full-sleeve tattoos hidden under our shirts, or the occasional Halloween decoration that’s still hanging up in July.
Lyrics from artists like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Hawthorne Heights, or Panic! at the Disco, that once fueled teenage angst now serve as reflections on life’s complexities.
It’s the genre that validates that gets us.
Creative pursuits
Instead of falling victim to our pain, we’re channeling this spirit into creative outlets like:
Writing poetry
Making art
Producing music, or
Starting podcasts and blogs
We’re very artistic and find meaning in things that others might not see.
For some, these passions have even turned into side hustles or full-time careers.
The music itself and what it means
I’ve always felt a lot of emotion with music.
And frankly, I don’t know where this all started, but I remember when I was 4 or 5. Perhaps younger.
My dad took me to some church, like one of those big cathedrals.
They were playing church music. I don’t know why, but I started crying.
It wasn’t that the music was ‘beautiful’ or that I identified with it, but for a young kid, it was mostly just emotionally overwhelming.
I’m not religious, but I still feel deeply when I listen to certain kinds of music.
For years, while I’ve always enjoyed artists from the emo/screamo subgenre, my music taste started to lean heavily into more aggressive and primal bands like Deftones, Nile, or Behemoth.
Earlier I mentioned that emo music is useful for healing but it can perpetuate states of grief, apathy, or anxiety when we listen without intention. The pain becomes an addiction.
Here’s a perfect example, the angry, death metal music I started listening to wasn’t just a reflection of where I was at, it was feeding into my emotional state.
I was emotionally: guarded, angry, and driven by a need to channel frustration and anger into something tangible. The heavier the music, the more cathartic it felt.
But when my relationship with my ex fell apart, that aggression didn’t hold up.
Instead of rage, I was left with sadness, longing, and questions I couldn’t verbalize.
That’s when I found my way back to emo music — the genre I had drifted from but never fully left behind.
Songs like Motionless in White’s Another Life or Crooked Soul, by Dayseeker activated certain feelings that I was holding back.
Rather than fixing it, these songs helped to express my pain.
Another Life:
But I hate that it seemed you were never enough. We were broken and bleeding, but never gave up. And I hate that I made you the enemy. And I hate that your heart was the casualty. Now I hate that I need you.
This song represented a lot of guilt that I had for what I used to say to her.
Accepting that helped me move on to be more self-compassionate. I acknowledge, that yes, I did fuck up, but I was only doing the best I could at the time with what I knew.
There were unlikely to be any other ways I would have reacted to my circumstances.
Crooked Soul:
Drunk off mistakes, addicted to the everlasting hell. So I take another drink, throw up in the sink. The darker that it gets the easier I can breathe. If I have a heart, why am I so cold?
This song touches on the theme of trying to fight your own inner demons while grappling with the feeling of being misaligned or unworthy.
The metaphor of a ‘crooked soul’ represents the internal struggle to find peace amidst emotional chaos.
I had a lot of shame and self-judgment not just for breakups, but for a lot of the things that happened to me throughout the years. Like it was my fault, like I should have been stronger, should have known better.
Another layer of shame existed, one that gnawed at me quietly: shame for being a man with needs.
Society has taught young men that the only valid way to exist is to be entirely stoic, self-sufficient at all times, unshaken by any want, need, or vulnerability.
And to be anything otherwise for a fraction of a second is weakness.
To admit I needed love, sex, and connection, felt like admitting a weakness I wasn’t supposed to have.
At the same time, I felt unworthy of those very things I longed for.
And yet, there was still that pull — an undeniable, instinctive yearning for what is natural to all of us: to be seen, to be held, and to feel like I mattered to someone.
Throughout this whole process, this music didn’t just help me consolidate the ending credits of my relationship with her, it helped me piece together my own story.
To grieve for what was lost and what was never even there in the first place.
It also helped me see the ‘arc’ of my life for the last several years.
The 1975
I remember right before our first date I was listening to this song called The Sound, by The 1975.
It’s more of an upbeat kind of indie-pop song (that I at least, interpret about falling in love).
But as the climax of our relationship came and fell into decline, I found myself listening to the more somber side of one of their songs on the same album, A Change Of Heart.
Was it your breasts from the start? They played a part. For goodness’ sake. I wasn’t told you’d be this cold. Now it’s my time to depart, and. I just had a change of heart… Finding a girl who is equally pretty won’t be hard.
That song helped me understand the deeper layers of feeling I couldn’t quite understand. Even after it was all over, I found myself replaying it over and over again.
Then there was another song, ihateit, by Underoath. This was during my darker days of grief. This song expresses frustration and self-loathing. The title itself says it all.
It’s about being angry not just at external circumstances but for letting things happen.
Self-loathing or anger might seem like a bad thing, but they won’t go away until you acknowledge their presence.
Moving onto something more hopeful
And finally, eventually, I realized I had to shift how I engaged with the music. We can’t stay stuck in grief and anger forever, not if we expect more from life.
When I first turned to emo music after my breakup, the rawness of this music felt right. But as time went on, I craved more. Something different.
Something that could lift me out of the sadness and guide me toward healing, not just reliving my pain.
I drifted back to one of my favorite artists, Heilung.
From Scandinavia, and comprised of three artists from Norway, Germany, and Denmark, ironically, the name itself means “healing” in German, and it couldn’t have been more fitting for where I was emotionally.
Anoana, specifically, was a symbol of something deeper: a reminder that healing wasn’t just about sitting in the pain, but also about transcending it.
While this artist is far from anything ‘emo,’ their music touches on something far more touching and deeper than most modern artists fail to capture.
This song became a bridge to a different emotional state. Its ethereal, hopeful tone reminded me that healing wasn’t just about feeling pain — it was about rediscovering myself on the other side of it.
The deep, tribal rhythms, drums, and haunting vocals of Heilung helped me shift my focus from emotional stagnation to forward movement. While I’ve teared up listening to them before, the tears were of hope.
Instead of circling back to the same sorrow, I began to see my pain as part of a larger story, one that included both the darkness and the light.
While emo music will always be a part of me — part of my emotional landscape — it’s this kind of music that helps me transcend the pain, to step into something greater than what I was before.
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