There's a particular kind of ache that arrives with summer, at least there is for me.
It might be triggered by a song that was always on during a specific season of your life. The smell of sunscreen. Humid, summer nights. Memories of an ice cream truck. The sound of kids somewhere down the street playing a game you haven't thought about in twenty years.
What nostalgia actually is
Nostalgia is formally defined as a sentimental longing for the past. Psychologically, it's a self-relevant, social emotion — meaning it's almost always about connection: to other people, to a place, to a version of yourself.
Research over the past two decades, including work published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and reviewed by the American Psychological Association, has found that nostalgic reflection does measurable things for mental health:
It reduces loneliness. Nostalgic memories tend to feature other people — friends, caregivers, community. Revisiting them reminds the nervous system that you have been in relationship, that you have belonged somewhere, even if that belonging felt incomplete.
It supports identity. Researchers call this "self-continuity" — the thread that connects who you were to who you are now. When that thread feels broken, by loss, by family rupture, by years of becoming who others needed you to be, nostalgia can help locate it again.
It lifts mood and buffers stress. Studies in Social, Psychological and Personality Science describe nostalgia as functioning like an emotional immune system — not by erasing what's hard, but by reminding you that you have felt okay before, and that you can again.
It opens a door to grief. Sometimes the ache of nostalgia isn't for what was — it's for what should have been. The summer that should have felt carefree. The parent who should have been present. The childhood that should have felt safe. That grief is real, an honest reckoning with loss that deserves space.
But what if your childhood wasn't happy?
Most of what you'll read about summer nostalgia assumes a baseline of warmth — backyard barbecues, carefree afternoons, the luxury of boredom. For many people, that isn't the whole picture. Childhood was more complicated. The home wasn't a safe place, or wasn't consistent, or had an undertow of tension that wasn't acknowledged. If that's your experience, the cultural celebration of summer nostalgia can feel alienating at best, and at worst, like another reminder of what you missed.
Shaun Cassidy, in an interview with Stanford's Center on Longevity, offered a reframe that is useful. When asked about the innocence of the 1970s and 80s, he pushed back on the premise: those times weren't more innocent, he said. We were more innocent — because we were children. Even amid hardship, even amid family systems that were struggling or broken, kids still went outside. They still found friends, invented games, lost themselves in music. People who grew up in difficult homes described how a TV show or a song made them feel like a normal kid for an hour. Like they could breathe.
That is the thing worth holding onto: the innocence was in you, not in your circumstances.
The question nostalgia invites, for anyone with a complicated history, isn't what was good about my childhood. It's: what was mine? What small corner of experience, what song or show or game or friend or feeling, belonged to you in a way that the hardship didn't touch? What part of that younger self was finding their way toward something, even then?
Reconnecting with childhood energy, not childhood pain
Reconnecting with your childhood self is not the same as revisiting your childhood wounds. Both experiences matter, but they're different work.
Nostalgia, at its best, is a tool for the former — for finding the version of you that existed before the weight of adult grief, before the roles you were handed, before you learned to make yourself smaller or harder or more palatable. The child who had preferences, who was drawn toward certain things, who had a way of moving through the world that was distinctly theirs.
For clients working through identity questions — who am I outside of my family's narrative? outside of who I had to be to survive? outside of a relationship that consumed me? — that younger self is often still available. Not as a fantasy of innocence, but as a source of real information about what you actually love, what actually brings you ease, what you've always known but may have set aside.
Some useful questions to sit with, or to bring into a session:
- What were you drawn to before anyone told you who to be?
- What did you do, as a kid, when you needed to feel okay?
- What show, song, place, or activity made you feel like yourself — or like a normal kid — even briefly?
- Is there any part of that still available to you now?
None of this requires having had a happy childhood. It only requires that you were, at some point, a child finding small ways to be alive in the world. Most of us were, even in the hardest circumstances.
Summer as an invitation
Summer has a particular quality of permission. The light stays longer. The pace, at least culturally, is supposed to slow. There's an implicit invitation in summer to be a little less serious, a little more present, a little more willing to feel things without immediately analyzing them.
For people who have spent years in survival mode — managing family dynamics, holding things together, learning not to want too much — that kind of permission can feel foreign. Or it can arrive as longing, which is another word for knowing something is missing.
If summer is bringing up that kind of feeling for you, it might be worth asking what it's pointing toward. Not as a nostalgia exercise, but as a real question: what would it feel like to move through a day with a little of that younger energy? With curiosity instead of vigilance, with play instead of performance, with permission to just be somewhere instead of managing everything?
A note on grief
Sometimes what surfaces in summer is a sadness that doesn't have a clean explanation — a heaviness that settles in during what's supposed to be a lighthearted season. This can be confusing, especially if nothing obvious is wrong.
But grief doesn't always track with external circumstances. It can be grief for a version of summer you never had. For the parent who wasn't emotionally available. For a childhood friendship that ended in a way that still doesn't make sense. For the ease you never quite felt, even as a kid, because something at home made ease impossible.
That kind of grief is real and it deserves care. It's not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's often a sign that you're finally in a season of life — and a literal season — where there's enough safety to feel it.
If this resonates with you
The work I do is with adults who are navigating exactly these kinds of questions: identity, belonging, the grief that comes with complicated family histories, and the process of figuring out who you are outside of all of it. I work integratively, which means I bring different approaches to bear depending on what each person actually needs — and I believe strongly that healing isn't one-size-fits-all.
If you're in a season where the summer ache is pointing toward something you're ready to look at, I'd be glad to talk.
Sources: American Psychological Association; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Social, Psychological and Personality Science; Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Oxford Academic); Stanford Center on Longevity, "Being Manilowed: This Is Your Brain on Nostalgia."