Therapeutic Value in Creating Our Life Soundtrack

The term nostalgia is defined as ‘a yearning for the past, often in idealized form’, taken

from the Greek compound, meaning ‘returning home’. The meaning of nostalgia ‘is often

triggered by something reminding the individual of an event or item from their past; the resulting

emotion can vary from happiness to sorrow. ‘Feeling nostalgic’ is more used to describe

pleasurable emotions associated with and/or a longing to go back to a particular period.

There are some experts that have spoken about different ways of understanding nostalgia:

we are the main character in our memories, and remembering the past can be therapeutic in a

sense. We can remember circumstances, recount emotional reactions, and on the flip side, can

also experience potential feelings of depression and loneliness from our nostalgic memories.

Nostalgia can be viewed as a bridge at times between areas of our lives, and at the same

time, we can remain stuck in time, unable to move past it, reliving the experience in our head;

experiencing feelings of remorse, guilt, maybe regret. I think this is also relevant in addressing

how trauma and traumatic events play on an individual’s psyche. Experiences we enjoy thinking

about can sometimes be mixed in with other moments from our past that have a component of

emotional trauma connected to it. Nostalgic memories can be viewed as both healthy and an

emotional expression of our lives, like concrete shoes, refusing to let us live in the present and

move on.

We grow up, become adults, and over time, everything feels sentimental for our more

youthful days. That somehow youth equals better; it could also stem from the exuberant amount

of possibilities in front of us when we are younger. As we get older, we have made decisions

about our life, options become a bit narrow. I think somewhere along my adult development, I

came to believe that inner freedom lied only in the past; years later have I come to understand

how inaccurate that is.

Almost two decades ago, I decided to capture nostalgic moments from my life through an

experimental project called ‘The Soundtrack.’ The idea was simple: come up with a list of songs

from my life-starting with the year I was born; select songs that trigger a memory or evoke a

feeling of the past. Once the songs were collected, I put them on CD albums, labelled them in

autobiographical order of how I heard them—and then listened to it in its entirety. All in all, I

came up with about 1,500 songs.

Music to me means something different in middle age: you have pretty much heard all

types of music by this time, have your favorite bands, preferences, biases, guilty pleasures, and

of course the uncompromising hatred for some musicians. One of the things you lose at this age

(or probably years before) is the euphoric feeling / sensation in your stomach or head when you

first hear a piece of music that has meaning to you, whether it’s the sounds or lyrics. Our

emotions, hormones and romanticism can get tied up with this expression, starting in

adolescence.

I can distinctly remember how it felt the first time I heard A Tribe Called Quest’s Low-

End Theory playing at a party my senior year of high school; I had never heard rap music like it

before, and all I remember was everyone at the party silently bobbing their heads in unison. Or

the feeling I had when Stone Temple Pilots’ Plush became the anthem in the summer of 1993,

along with some my other favorite artists of that era: Blind Melon’s No Rain, Soundgarden’s

Black Hole Sun, and Pavement’s Cut Your Hair. 

I learned and obsessed about pop music before I ever bought tapes or CDs. As much as I

would love to cite some impressive record that I could say provoked the beginning of my music-

listening life, that life started with MTV. So, the imagination was sort of handed to me, like

watching a movie first and then reading the book second. So much of my time as a kid was spent

absorbing music through visual images that most of my memories directly relate to a specific

artist or tune. Currently hearing songs from my childhood immediately brings me back to very

specific memories in early life, which I cherish.

It all seemed so exciting and grown up to me back then; songs about people and issues

too complicated for my childhood brain to comprehend. The MTV symbol alone triggers the

memory of our worn-down carpeting in the living room where my butt had been planted in front

of the TV, that led to the floorboard starting to creak.

I think the soundtrack project was born out of a subconscious feeling of being

overwhelmed by thoughts, feelings and past experiences from life that would float around my

brain with no way to keep track of it all. I stood by the notion that everything we have

experienced is important; that maybe somehow it was a way to record parts of my life so that

they remained in my stratosphere so to speak.

So why delve deep into music with a concept like nostalgia, that encompasses the

passage of time? By looking deep into our lives through a vessel such as music, maybe we can

then somehow find solace as we head into the future. At times, the experience of nostalgia can be

two sides of a coin: both in someone’s belief that their past is better than their present; and to

conjure up moments to see how far we have come, to remind us of the victories as well as the

losses.

I may not have the exact same experience of listening and hearing music now that I did

back then, but being able to recall life experiences based on music is something even more

important in the grand scheme of life. I would prefer not to think of what life have looked like

without the childhood compass of Duran Duran and Tears For Fears, among others. 

Our memory has stories that have been locked up over time, ones that pass through our

minds, others that are visually embedded. Each of the songs I selected in the ‘Soundtrack’

experiment has their own story. Although we know these types of existential projects down

memory lane will be in some ways life-long, maybe that’s the way that nostalgia is supposed to

be experienced: yearned for, chased after, dissected, and eventually, put to rest. Give it a shot to

create your own soundtrack; you might be surprised what you learn about yourself.

Our memories, experiences, relationships, and the meaning we make from them can become part of the conversations we explore in therapy. If you're interested in starting a conversation of your own, get to know the therapists at VMA Psychotherapy!

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