Clarkson told ‘ET Canada’ it’s “really helpful” to speak with “somebody outside your circle that doesn’t know anything but just knows what’s happening in the now”
Before Kelly Clarkson’s vulnerable new album Chemistry drops on Friday, she’s opening up about how she’s processed life after her divorce from ex-husband Brandon Blackstock.
In a new interview with ET Canada, the Grammy winner spoke about “regularly” going to therapy since she was married to Blackstock and how it’s helped her.
Clarkson, 41, was asked if she saved money by writing through her feelings on Chemistry and joked, “Girl, I didn’t save.”
The “Since U Been Gone” musician, who filed for divorce from Blackstock in 2020 after nearly seven years of marriage, said she’s “been regularly doing” therapy: “I do love it.”
“I actually started when I was married, you know, obviously having difficulties and… not just about the relationships, just in general, I’d never really done regular therapy or anything like that,” Clarkson told the outlet.
“Usually, honestly, writing is therapeutic for me and I have a really great group of friends, so I feel like I have a good, you know, listening party and like to bounce things off of thoughts and feelings or whatever,” she added. “But it literally was a really good turning point for me.”
Clarkson noted that therapists “give you so many tools for how to navigate certain situations” and said it’s “really helpful” to speak with “somebody outside your circle that doesn’t know anything but just knows what’s happening in the now.”
She wrote through the positives and negatives of her marriage on Chemistry and told ET Canada that her songwriting generally occurs as she’s “going through something.”
“That’s why I always say like people’s best work of art, whether you’re a sculptor, painter, writer, whatever you are, it’s usually after a hard time because that’s when they’re feeling everything so intensely, the artist, right?”
Last week, Clarkson had a personal conversation on We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle and revealed what kept her from leaving her marriage for so long.
“My ego… [I thought,] ‘I can do this. I can handle so much.’ My ego is, ‘I can control my actions, I can control my reactions, I can do this and I can reach this person and I can get through.’ It becomes a little bit of your ego that gets in the way,” she told the host.
“If I’m being completely honest, we don’t want to do what we saw done,” continued Clarkson, whose parents also got divorced when she was 6 years old. “I don’t want my kids to be those kids at school.”
Clarkson shares son Remington “Remy” Alexander, 7, and daughter River Rose, 9, with Blackstock.
“It’s a little different — they grew up here and it’s a very progressive city. But in the South, there was like two of us with divorced parents in our class. So it was very different,” she said. “Even when you come down to like, daddy-daughter dances and you don’t have anyone show up. You have to think about all of those things and you play it out differently in your head too.”
The “Miss Independent” singer added, “You try so hard and you think, ‘I do not want to do that to her, I don’t want to do that to him’ — that you never start thinking about yourself. That’s why sometimes to be selfish was important to me.”