The Soup, the Songs & the Pull of the Past

I've been thinking about nostalgia lately, and I'll admit it caught me off guard. It started with the Oasis documentary about their reunion tour, Don't Look Back in Anger. I settled in expecting a bit of music and a bit of banter, and instead found myself properly moved. Not just by my own memories of a band that I loved alongside my teenage friends, but by the crowds. Thousands of people, many of them clearly carrying whole chapters of their lives inside those tunes, singing every word back at the stage. There was something almost tender about it. Strangers, bound together by a shared memory of who they used to be.

Then, a few days later, something far smaller and stranger happened. I suddenly, urgently, wanted a bowl of Heinz cream of tomato soup. Not a fancy soup, not a considered choice. Just that one, in that particular shade of orange, with a slice of buttered bread on the side. And with the first spoonful I was a child again, sitting on the floor or squashed onto the sofa with my family on a Sunday, watching Land of the Giants on the telly. Tiny people in a world of enormous things, which, if I'm honest, is not a bad metaphor for being a kid. The whole room came back to me. The light, the warmth, the feeling of being held inside an ordinary family experience that I had no idea, at the time, would one day feel precious.

Two very different triggers, one big and loud and one small and quiet, and yet they did exactly the same thing. They pulled me backwards. And as a therapist, I couldn't help wondering what that pull is actually doing to us.

A feeling with a complicated history

It's worth knowing that nostalgia wasn't always viewed kindly. The word was coined in the late 1600s by a Swiss physician who thought it was a medical condition, a kind of debilitating homesickness afflicting soldiers far from home. For a long time it was treated as something closer to an illness than an emotion.

Modern psychology has largely turned that on its head. Research over the past couple of decades, much of it associated with Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, suggests nostalgia is generally a bittersweet but beneficial emotion. People who reflect on nostalgic memories tend to report a stronger sense of meaning in life, greater feelings of social connection, and a firmer sense of continuity between who they were and who they are now. It can lift mood, soften loneliness, and even help people feel more optimistic about the future. That Oasis crowd, in other words, wasn't just indulging in a trip down memory lane. They were, in a very real sense, topping up something essential: the feeling of belonging to something bigger than themselves.

And that tomato soup moment? There's a reason a taste or a smell can transport us so completely. Our senses of smell and taste are wired closely to the parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, which is why a single mouthful can bypass the thinking mind altogether and deliver the whole feeling at once. No effort, no storytelling, just there.

For the people I work with, this can matter a great deal. When life feels fragmented or uncertain, nostalgia can be a quiet reminder that we have a story, that we've been loved, that we've been somewhere and survived it. It can be a resource we reach for when the present feels thin.

When the past becomes a place to hide

But I'd be doing you a disservice if I painted it as purely warm and cosy, because nostalgia has a shadow side too, and it deserves honest attention.

The first risk is that memory is not a recording. It's a flattering editor. We tend to sand down the rough edges of the past, remembering the good light and forgetting the arguments, the boredom, the anxiety that was probably also in the room. When we lean on those polished versions too heavily, the present can start to look drab by comparison. If every year since feels like a pale imitation of the golden era, that's less nostalgia and more a quiet grief that hasn't found its footing.

The second is avoidance. Sometimes we reach for the past precisely because the present is hard. A little escape is entirely human, but when looking backwards becomes the main way of coping, it can keep us from facing what actually needs our attention now. Rumination can wear a nostalgic costume, and it's worth noticing when a fond memory has become more of a hiding place than a haven.

And then there's the one I think about most in my own work. Nostalgia assumes that the past was a safe and happy place to return to, and for many people it simply wasn't. Many of my neurodivergent clients describe childhoods marked by feeling out of step, misunderstood, or exhausted by pretending. Many LGBTQ+ people grew up having to hide or edit themselves, learning very early that parts of who they were were not welcome. For them, "the good old days" can feel like an invitation to a party they weren't really allowed to attend. Nostalgia can sting, or ring hollow, or bring up something that needs gentle care rather than a warm glow. It's a good reminder that nostalgia isn't a universal comfort, and that nobody should be made to feel they're failing at it.

Interestingly, some people find a different kind of nostalgia instead, a longing not for a past they had but for one they wish they'd had, or for the chosen family and communities they built later. That feels worth honouring too.

Holding it lightly

So what do I take from all this? Mostly that nostalgia is neither good nor bad. It's information, and an invitation. When a song or a spoonful of soup pulls me back, I can ask myself what, exactly, I'm longing for. Usually it isn't the thing itself. It's what the thing stood for: being together, feeling safe, having nowhere to be, belonging to a family who sat in the same room and watched the same silly programme.

And that's useful, because those needs don't have to stay in 1990-something. I can't go back to those cosy childhood afternoons or hedonistic Britpop times, but I can build moments of togetherness into the life I have now. I can put the telly on with people I love. I can make the soup and share it. I can sing along, loudly and slightly out of tune, with a room full of strangers.

There's a lovely irony in the fact that the Oasis song everyone sings is called Don't Look Back in Anger. Because what I noticed in that documentary wasn't anger at all. It was gratitude, mixed with a little ache. Perhaps that's the healthiest version of nostalgia there is: looking back not to live there, and not to resent the distance, but to remember what mattered and carry it forward.

So here's my gentle invitation. The next time the past comes calling, in whatever form it takes, don't rush to dismiss it or to drown in it. Sit with it for a moment, like a warm bowl of soup. Notice what it's trying to tell you. Then, when you're ready, bring a little of that warmth back with you into today.