“Still Standing” portrays Phoebe's deeply complicated and ambivalent relationship with her father, Tony Bridgers. Despite holding great affection for him and attempting to reconcile with him after the pandemic, he would end up passing away between late 2022 and early 2023. Phoebe has gone as far as describing her father's abusive behavior as “textbook domestic violence” (Mish Barber-Way for The Fader, 2026). This song explores this and much more. Tony's abuse spans multiple manipulation tactics, some more common than others. The song opens in its first verse with a heartbreaking image: “You left your suitcase by the bed like you needed to know you could go whenever you wanted”. Tony seems to have coerced his own family with the constant threat of abandonment, perhaps leaving Jaime, Phoebe's mother, without financial support, or stripping away their emotional stability, as in Phoebe's case. Physical violence emerges with the horrific scene the singer-songwriter paints in her second verse, where she recounts the traumatic moment of finding her mother bleeding because of her father: “I found her bleeding over the sink”. The subsequent bid for validation and emotional manipulation happens when Tony apologizes not to his wife, whom he just assaulted, but to his daughter who witnessed it all: “But when you said, "Sorry", you were looking at me”. Phoebe, for her part, having been a victim of domestic violence until age 19 when her parents divorced, directly and indirectly narrates everything she endured. Among these experiences is dissociation in the face of a traumatic event too painful to process properly: “I can't remember what I said, but I didn’t mean it”. She was pushed to minimize her father's harm toward her and her mother to make the hell she lived in more bearable, something she suggests she still does: “I wasn't too young to understand, I just didn't think it was so bad, and it wasn't, in a way”. And most characteristic of the song is navigating the grief over someone who abused her by saying: “Sometimes I want you back, but not today” or “I can't imagine you dead, but you are every day. Thank you for everything”.