Emotional repair

Christmas trees, Elton John, grief and the psychology of rose-tinted glasses

We, the ‘Ainge family’, are supposed to breaking with tradition this year and buying a ‘fake tree’, I’d like to tell you this is ethically led but the reality is less magnanimous, the truth is that we had a new carpet and pine trees do, despite what type we buy, drop needles set off my asthma, trees are then hurried out of the house after boxing day, I thought this year it would be more cost effective to buy something and reuse it.

Photo by Alsu Vershinina on Unsplash

But I rejected the first fake tree, chosen by Mr Ainge, for being ‘too fake’, and I’ve made myself too busy to go and look for another. I believe that this Psychologist is in denial, and I think that nostalgia is to blame because a real tree is my rose-tinted view of Christmas. Importantly I’m conditioned to anticipate the future nostalgia of a real tree (I am the marketing dream), and so it follows, I am also anticipating the disappointment of a fake tree. This nostalgia is being triggered multiple times a day, yesterday it was seeing a real tree and smelling the earthy pine scents as I walked into the supermarket, today it was a Facebook memory of last year’s real tree.

It's no wonder that this powerful and intriguing emotion of nostalgia that is triggered by all our senses has sometimes had a bad press. The term nostalgia only became a permanent fixture in our vocabulary in 1934 when it was linked to the feeling of homesickness, but the emotion that happens in the present and is associated with longingness and originates from our past was feared well before then, this emotional time travelling was initially viewed in western culture as a disease or condition that would leave its victims weak with depression, there are accounts of a US military forbidding songs with nostalgic themes as far back as 1863, for fear that soldiers would succumb to ‘pathetic’ tunes and become depressed.

It is a fact that Drs, psychiatrists, and psychologists, at least in some western cultures, historically preferred to think about what was wrong with people and failed to see the metaphorical light at the end of tunnel and the benefits that feelings and emotions can bring. And this stiff upper lip thinking is still knocking around today, how many times to do you hear well-meaning advice such as ‘don’t dwell on the past’?

That advice sits uncomfortably with me, especially at a time when things are difficult for so many, when adversity and challenges and trauma are part and parcel of who we are. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that rumination is bad for us, that grief has time limits or remembrance should be only a solemn affair.

The popularity of positive psychology (looking towards our wellbeing and what makes us thrive) has led to some interesting findings about Nostalgia, and specifically how this big and complex feeling helps us to emotionally repair and contributes to our self-esteem.  

It is all down to the mechanism of nostalgia, and the way we reassemble and reconstruct our past to filter or smooth out the uncomfortable bits, we are trying to create a favourable version of events, and it seems that rose-tinting has a psychological function that enables us to see our lives in a more meaningful way. Of course, positive psychology would see the bright of nostalgia, and there is space for positive and negative emotions to co-exist, and the research shows that some of us are more prone to nostalgia than others.

The nostalgic mechanism makes use of our incredible autobiographical memory and current feelings, this means we can experience co-occurring positive and negative emotions, so when we project our current feelings onto the past, some theories suggest we are attempting to smooth out the emotional conflict, or as Bernie and Elton put it ironing out the rough spots,  this nostalgic mechanism is emotional repair in action can improve our feelings of self-esteem and authenticity.

And yet, the real paradox here is that nostalgia does make us sad too, how sad depends on the emotional state we are in at the time, we can’t always control when nostalgia occurs. Our senses get triggered unexpectedly and sometimes at the worst possible moments, it remains to be seen how our online social world is influencing with the frequency we feel nostalgia our curiosity meshed with algorithms means we are served up minute after minute of happy and sad nostalgic highlights.

Sad Songs (say so much)

‘And ironing out the rough spots

Is the hardest part when memories remain’

Bernie Turpin and Elton John

I must briefly mention musical nostalgia though (and I will return to this in the New Year), there’s a whole body of research emerging around the way music invokes nostalgia, the interesting thing about musical nostalgia is the way it creates social connectedness, especially if that song is associated with a key autobiographical memory. It seems that music, as well as being a companion to sad times, can also act as a buffer against adversity, people who choose to listen to nostalgic music have experienced a boost in feelings of optimism and inspiration too. I also read that nostalgic music can make us feel younger (Abeyta and Routledge 2016). Regardless of the nostalgic trigger perhaps the real challenge for nostalgia and its bad press, we associate sadness with loss, and too often an inability to accept loss, when its quite possible to sit with loss, and experience positive benefits and meaningfulness.  

So, how does this knowledge about how we interpret our past in the present help us and what use is it? Research links nostalgia to inspiration and risk taking, which is especially helpful in the pursuit of goals, in this sense nostalgia doesn’t always send us into a  depressive state, Professor Krystene Batcho has researched nostalgia extensively, and her findings show that our pronesess to nostalgia is linked to strategies of planning, taking action, and positive reframing, momentary dwelling can result in action, and I quite like the idea that omnipresent Christmas nostalgia might be acting as a springboard for those new year beginnings.

I’ve been thinking… surely a good rug will protect the new carpet from a real Christmas tree?

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This week happens to be Grief Awareness Week, grief is an individual process and there is no right or wrong way to feel. Here are some resources, and a blog I enjoyed in the spirit of nostalgia, about what it means to honour the people we have loved.

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/feelings-symptoms-behaviours/feelings-and-symptoms/grief-bereavement-loss/

https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org/

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tiu-de-haan/dinner-with-the-dead_b_8439660.html

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I have talked about co-occurring positive and negative emotions previously on substack, psychologists believe this is what happens when we are moved to tears by art, you can read the full article here.

Have you been moved to tears?