This year, my pastor husband used part of his sabbatical to clean the garage.
While sorting through the clutter, he found a stack of boxes labeled “Craig’s keepsakes.” He slowly and deliberately went through those boxes, taking out photos and newspaper clippings and old handwritten scripts and concert tickets. At the end of each day, he delightedly showed me what he had unearthed.
His memories put him in touch with deep affection for people from the past, gratitude for formative experiences and only occasionally, regret for mistakes made or opportunities not taken. As he reflected, he wrote about the experience, bringing it all together in a narrative that captured the meaning and significance of his decades in ministry.
This lines up with what we know about nostalgia and the brain.
- Nostalgia is powerfully evoked by the senses. Music, scents and physical artifacts of the past all produce the self-reflective, emotional experience we call nostalgia.
- Nostalgia mostly feels good. Nostalgia involves the brain’s reward network, activating dopamine and serotonin to reinforce certain memories.
- For that reason, we often default to nostalgia when we’re feeling sad or lonely. When we feel better, we’re less likely to want to think about the hard realities of the present.
- Our proneness to nostalgia depends in part on the makeup of our brains and our genetics.
- Nostalgia connects us with our brain’s desired sense of “self.” Often our memories reinforce the way we want to see ourselves and may not be factually accurate.
- And a fun fact: nostalgia can even change our body’s temperature!
Our brains rely on nostalgia to help us manage the losses of change and aging. “In a way, nostalgia allows us to place ourselves back in a supportive social context in which we feel connected and important. (Stoycheva, 2020)” That’s the good news.
The bad news is that what is good for the individual can be problematic for an organization.
For example, the individual members of a congregation may rely on nostalgia for “the way things used to be” as a way of making sense of their own faith journeys at the same time that the congregation needs to break free of nostalgia in order to reach a new generation.
Leaders can help the members of the organization hold this tension.
Recognize nostalgia as an appropriate response to grief and respond to the grief directly. What need is the nostalgia pointing to? What loss still needs to be mourned? The losses that spark nostalgia are real and need to be acknowledged, not glossed over in favor of a seemingly better future.
Use nostalgia to address the painful realities the organization faces now. Past generations lived through wars, political upheaval, leadership change, financial insecurities and organizational conflict. Help members remember the challenges of the past and how they overcame them. This can provide hope and perseverance for the present.
Insist on a version of the past that is complex and truthful. Nostalgia tends to be ego-centric, helping us to hold on to a version of the past that aligns with how we want to see ourselves. When I helped a small-town congregation begin to integrate in the 1980s, an elderly man told me about his childhood experiences with racial segregation, insisting that African American members of the community had preferred to have their own schools and churches. I think he was sincere in his belief but his memories were self-serving, conveniently omitting the struggle for racial inclusion that had dominated the social landscape of his lifetime.
Use nostalgia to help members feel more like themselves in the present. If nostalgia helps members to return to a time when they felt connected and important, how can we help them to feel connected and important today?
Instead of resisting the nostalgia of the community, embrace it as a tool of leadership and see where it might lead.
Sources and resources:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-everyday-unconscious/202009/the-dark-side-of-nostalgia
