Jealousy is an emotion that involves a complex mixture of feelings, typically including anxiety, insecurity, and fear. It can surprise us to find we are feeling jealous and it can be a difficult feeling to process. But it is an ordinary human emotion, and if we find we are feeling jealous too often then it is probably worth trying to understand a bit more about it.
How do we understand it? How do we stop it?
We might think of jealousy as a primary or a primitive feeling, that is to say, that the roots of jealousy often go back to our earliest and deepest emotional experiences and memories.
Jealousy has been the mainspring of human art and culture throughout time. From ideas of the green-eyed monster, to Iago in Othello, to The Talented Mr Ripley, jealousy has been a key fascination and component of human creativity.
We might experience jealousy and the anxiety that we are less important than other people, or notice that we can be quick to feel that we are being left out of certain arrangements, or that we are being overlooked.
In many cases we find that the strength of these feelings are based upon very old and unprocessed developmental experiences.
Our jealousy may be less to do with the present and more to do with the past
When we start dating and forming relationships, it can surprise us that our feelings are more complicated than we expected. Adolescence and maturation can be the first time we realise that our emotional stability is not as reliable as we thought. Jealousy is sometimes involved in this.
We may have grown up in an insecure family. We may have had a jealous parent. Jealousy is an emotion that we may have internalised at a very early age. As we try to work on our jealousy now, we may be surprised to find that we are processing and metabolising very old experiences.
How to stop being jealous
Try to remember that the jealousy you are experiencing now may be much older than the situation you are in. These feelings may be more to do with your past than the present.
Take a moment, give yourself a chance to slow down. A lot of feelings and problems become easier to work on when we give ourselves time. Don’t let yourself be rushed into things. Give yourself time to think about what you are going through.
Being able to step back and think about our emotions is generally the start of being able to work on them.
Remember that this might not be the first time you have felt this way; that your jealous response is older than the experience you are having now.
If we can learn to work with our older feelings and experiences that are triggered by jealousy we can learn to neutralise some of the more painful feelings.
When we recognise that our jealousy is being provoked, we might try to reflect on whether this is less to do with the events in front of us and more to do with older experiences.
What we call jealousy may relate to problems and issues that are part of our history, our own past.
Jealousy is often more to do with things that have happened to us than it is to do with our present relationship.
Jealousy can be worked on and addressed successfully and safely in therapy either face-to-face, or online.
Jealousy and sibling relationships
Possibly our earliest experience and relationship with jealousy relates to our birth families, or adopted families, and our sibling dynamics. Complicated family situations make it difficult for these more primitive emotions to be processed.
Whenever I see my brother things become complicated. He was always my mother’s favourite and that still sets off problems in me. I have learnt to manage it, to keep it to myself rather than reacting, which only ever makes things worse. It has always been like this. I used to try to discuss it with them, to clear the air but it never worked. Anonymous client
Jealousy and relationships
While a certain amount of possessiveness is healthy and might be part of what helps us form and strengthen our attachments, for a lot of us, coming to terms with the fact that our partners have had relationships before us can set off overpowering and difficult feelings of jealousy. We can’t let it go. We can’t stop worrying about it. It is out of this worry that jealousy and retroactive jealousy develops.
When Jealousy leads to us projecting our insecurities
One way of understanding our jealousy is that we are projecting our fears and experiences from previous experiences onto a new relationships.
In the past, perhaps in our early family home we may have been overwhelmed by experiences of insecurity or may have experienced a traumatic degree of insecurity involving the feeling that they were being overlooked in favour of a sibling.
we may have grown up in an environment where we were the second child, or we may have felt pushed out by a sibling that came after us,
we may have had the experience that mother or father preferred anothersibling to us,
we may have had a jealous mother who had never resolved her own feelings of jealousy,
we may have felt that we were never wanted.
Being able to give ourselves time to reflect on and think about our feelings is often the beginning of being able to change our responses. Psychotherapy is a safe place to reflect on experience, a place to learn more about ourselves and to give ourselves the chance to develop new approaches to living. A confidential place where we can work on our reactions.
We can work on stopping our jealousy from spoiling areas of our lives we would rather protect.
I have twenty years of experience of working with people, many of whom have struggled to manage jealousy.
Giving yourself the chance to speak in a confidential setting may prove helpful, it may be the beginning of starting to work out how to do something that may make you feel better about yourself.
It may give you the chance to develop new and important insights into yourself. This in turn may help you to develop greater confidence and emotional stability and the freedom to enjoy your relationship without being jealous.
Contact me to arrange a free telephone consultation to discuss how my approach might help you.
