Sentimentality

Sentimentality is an enemy of progress in individual lives and groups. Sentimentality goes beyond the lessons learned from tragedy. It goes beyond healthy grieving. It is depressive and ruminative.

When an entire nation wallows in sentimentality, it is a symptom of deep dysfunction. The facts of dysfunction may be obvious to everyone who is affected by that dysfunction. Sentimentality about it becomes a useless drug, a repetitive rocking and self-hugging that goes nowhere. The weeping drunk is the archetypal sentimentalist.

Healthy grieving leads to looking forward with the application of the ongoing pain of loss. The past is done. Its lessons may be useful; its constant recital is not. When grief is prolonged, depression can become chronic. Chronic depression impedes further healing. It is cyclic, unless a significant intervention expedites change. 

I have known too many human beings whose lives are mired in rumination and depression. They are a sentimental lot. Draped photographs of long-dead loved ones clutter their homes. Their dark rooms become agoraphobic prisons. Within those environments there is little peace, less love and no joy. There is the constant drum of narcissistic self-pity. 

My own practice evolved as a healing process from depression, which plagued me for over a decade, after deep losses in my early adolescence triggered a longstanding depression from abusive parenting. I recognized early on that birthdays triggered a sentimental rush of depression. I stopped trying to celebrate them, despite the attempts of well meaning friends to get me into it. The same was true for major holidays like Easter, Christmas and Thanksgiving. They were easily and happily forgotten as part of my liberation from depression. 

Those who were nurtured as children through birthdays and anniversaries are highly prone to turn to sentimentality in times of stress. Ritual's happy associations are tempting. Sentimentalizing trauma, however, can be deadly to the human mind. Group sentimentalism can lead to violent nationalism and war. 

Healthy emotional lives are constantly and consistently cognizant of anger, sadness and joy in daily living. The emotionally repressed are drawn to binges of emotional expression at socially acceptable times, like funerals, weddings and memorial services. Alcohol use is often employed as a lubricant for this emotional catharsis. This is not a solution to the problem. In fact, the dependence on drugs and alcohol to deal with normal emotions in this society is a problem in itself. 

Those who practice often speak of detachment in the Buddhist sense. Detachment, as I experience it, comes with the practice of honestly acknowledging thoughts and emotions in the moment as they occur. Some of these thoughts are distasteful or alarming to a mind striving for peace and love. Yet, the acknowledgment of them diffuses their power upon unintentional actions and reactions. This detachment, as I see it, is the detaching of thought from unintentional or habitual action. 

Sentimentality clouds this process, in my opinion. Rumination on the events of the past blurs the clear experience of the present. It can breed a self-indulgence in individual need over the greater good. When groups indulge in sentimentality, in my opinion, it can prevent them from being forces for progressive change and creativity. Sentimentality becomes a box, outside of which lies the means of going beyond trauma or habit.