Jealousy –Don’t Be Ashamed

No, you do not have to be ashamed of jealous feelings. Just having them is punishment enough. 

There may not be a worse emotion to experience than jealousy. We all know anger, sadness, grief, even lust. But jealousy has the extra-special overlay of social shame. Jealousy is the one we whisper to friends if we tell them at all. Or when a friend suspects and asks, “Are you jealous?” we hem and haw and maybe lie: “No, I’m not jealous I’m just angry that she… or that he would….”.

Even in recovery, even in a women’s meeting, bring up jealousy as a topic and you’ll get a lot of platitudes, and some pseudo-spiritual advice about self-love and not comparing, but then if you are lucky, some brave woman—probably in longer recovery—will fess up that yes indeed she has felt this monster taking over her mind. Maybe she’ll tell a now-funny tale of really bad behavior fueled by alcohol and jealousy before her recovery. She keyed a car, she sent a note, she tossed a drink.

That laughter? It’s way better medicine than God talk and platitudes when you are in a full-blown jealousy attack. Jealousy tries to tell you that you are alone in your weirdness, so laughing with other women is the balm. 

Jealousy is awful. Admitting it is awful. So how does it get us? And what is it there for?

All emotions have a function. Anger gives us protective adrenaline is scary situations. Sadness softens us so we slow down in times of loss so we don’t get hurt. What does jealousy do?

Jealousy is a response to manage anxiety. How about that? Jealousy is connected to anxiety. Yeah, anxiety—the other most miserable feeling to feel. What a duo.

Think about this:

You get jealous when you are anxious about a relationship: Is he with me? Does she love me? Could I lose him or her? The anxious bubbles come over us and they start to weaken us. 

So, jealousy steps forward and says, “Need some energy to kick that feeling back?” Wearing all green jealousy attempts to manage your anxiety: “Feel this instead.”

Here’s how I’ve seen it play out in me: I’m unsure of him, and I start to feel anxious. I want to make myself feel safe again, so I want to control him—I want to close all the doors, so to speak, so he’s all mine.

Yep, I know it’s a creepy way to think, but it’s rarely a conscious thought. Jealousy moves underground and very fast. Jealousy is a way—a really bad and ineffective way --to manage my anxiety.  The flawed thinking (or not-thinking) is this: “If I can just control him/her and make her/him love me, only me, then I will be safe.” 

But it’s not true. What I’m doing when I succumb to jealousy’s whispered bad advice is to make myself less safe. I tie myself to a rock, and I begin to lose parts of my life: I monitor, watch, and control the other person. All that takes my energy and focus away from my own life and I begin— it happens so fast—to deteriorate.

So, what’s a girl to do when you start feeling green? (And oh, the reason for green was the belief that jealousy was caused by an excess of bile that can actually cause a slight green tinge in the skin). 

What to do? Do the exact opposite of what you feel: move away from the target and the subject, move toward your life and interests and passions quickly. Immediately invest in something that is very you, and—the big step: tell people. Tell your sponsor, recovery friends, even a stranger—who has no connection to the folks in your life. Find the humor quickly—telling other people your freakiest fantasies will move the humor up and forward. Tell your friends that you want them to help you find the funny. They can give you spiritual advice tomorrow. 

And remember that it’s anxiety that jealousy is trying to help you with, so go exercise, dance, breathwork and meditation and your other best tools for managing anxiety.

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More on recovery and relationships in "Out of the Woods" published by Central Recovery Press. 

Is Anxiety an Addiction?

As someone who has been whipsawed by anxiety for many years I am always attracted to articles that attempt to address or explain that nastiest of feelings. It’s got many synonyms—fear, nervousness, tummy-ache, stage fright and clinical anxiety. I know every variation of

the theme.

So when I saw the article called “Anxiety Through the Lens of Addiction” by Suzanne Jesse in the recent Renew Magazine I tore it out and started in.

Jesse is a clinician specializing in addiction and in this article she uses the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) which is the Bible of diagnosis which also determines who gets paid for treatment. She shows how the addictions we are most familiar with: alcoholism and drug addiction are diagnosed via the DSM and then she lays the characteristic of anxiety/anxiety disorders next to those same criteria, and voila! there is an addiction pattern with anxiety.

Jesse writes: “I was curious about the addictive nature of the underlying problem with anxiety: thoughts.” 

What felt so familiar to me was how her own story led her to looking at her thinking and how she found her thinking had become addictive. She says that she knew that her anxiety originated with her, “chaotic and unstable traumatic childhood” but she wanted to know exactly how those experiences eventually resulted in debilitating anxiety. 

And her light bulb moment came from reading “Love, Medicine, and Miracles by Dr. Bernie Siegel who said, “Thoughts are chemical.” Walter Cannon, who described the fight-or-flight response, also confirmed that thoughts lead the body to release chemicals that create and sustain anxiety.

Jesse goes on to show that the chemical nature of thoughts leads to a chemical addiction. She turns back to the DSM and answers each criteria question for substance abuse disorder but replaces “the substance” with “engaging in negative thought” and she shows that folks with anxiety get pretty high scores for an addictive disorder.

This is also why, though we know this, it’s hard to shake. If we could simply, “Change your thinking” (like it says on the many reminder post-its I have on my desk, dashboard and daily planner) we would do it, right?

But it is, in fact, not just a handy metaphor to say that negative thinking is like using heroin, it is like using heroin. We think, and think and think our fear and worry thoughts continually shooting ourselves full of fear, flooding the body with addictive chemicals. Negative thinking is addictive, and given the impact of chronic stress (even self induced) it can also be physically devastating. 

So in long-term recovery—while we may not have used an “external chemical” for many years--we may still be shooting up awful and addictive chemicals on a daily basis.

You know the saying—and it’s more true than ever: “I came for my drinking but stayed for my thinking.” Thirty years later, my own thoughts may be the toughest addiction I will ever face.

Anxiety, Ugh!

Yes Anxiety—It may be the worst thing to happen at any stage of recovery. But somehow in later recovery anxiety feels worse because we feel like we should know better, or have worked this out. At least that’s what I think each time it hits me. Yes, that word “should” is there which should be a clue. But my pattern, when anxiety arrives, is the same: Resist, Insist, Deny, Distract and then Pray and Surrender.

This week it came again. Home from vacation. Lovely sun and sand and swimming in salt water. But an email from work and my head and heart tore away into worry and dread. And I am afraid. On the one hand I know this place; it’s a childhood mantra: “Diane is not wanted, not liked, not needed, a fool.”

But it’s that tumble-down, rolling-stone-picking-up-dirt, quality of anxiety that undoes me. It’s not just that I am not liked at work, it quickly becomes not liked at all, not by friends, not by students, and of course, eventually not by those who love me, whose love actually sustains me. And that delivers Anxiety’s Nasty Goal: I will be alone, left out, shuttered and shattered. That this happens in my head in less than 90 seconds, that it is fiction, and that in reality it already happened years ago and I survived--does not seem to dissuade my ever-creative mind. Anxiety whispers, “But this time it’s different…”

If you relate to this I bless you. I wouldn’t wish Anxiety on my worst enemy. If anxiety is not your thing come back tomorrow when I write about shoes or sugar or relationships. You won’t get this; you’ll think I’m talking about fear, which I’m not.

When Anxiety hits I do what I’ve learned to do: I pray, I read recovery literature, and words of faith and wisdom; I talk to someone who knows me well (I email my sponsor—anxiety always convinces me not to call her), and I write it out, with the hope of riding it out.

But really, is there anything as gross as Anxiety?

So this week I did pray and then kept on doing my day which included reading the book I brought for the plane: It’s called, “Still” and it’s a memoir written by Lauren F. Winner, and in there, in her book, the tiniest bit of hope appeared. I read her story of her divorce and how she questioned her faith, and I saw that she is an honest, self-revealing writer—much like Mary Karr or Anne Lamott, and she has Anxiety. Hoorah!

 In fact, Winner is so much like Karr or Lamott because she is a smart, worldly woman, and a woman of faith like them who tells on herself over and over and by revealing the grossness of her feelings she invites others (Me!) to feel less lonely in their gross feelings. That, my friends, is generosity.

And I kept reading--in the car, in the airport and on the plane-while making deals with God hoping that my Anxiety has a purpose and some meaning but really just hoping it will Go Away Right Now.

But my prayers have been said and I turn the pages and here is Lauren Winner suddenly offering a chapter on anxiety. (Thank you Jesus!) and she writes about the crazy ways that hers manifests—a bunch of compulsive stuff—(brutally painful she says.) and she tells how she learned to count the “Ones”: One, one, one, one. ..and she explains some prayers that she has been taught to pray for her anxiety. (She is a professor at Duke, teaches in the Divinity School –Thank you Lauren for being a certified smart person and spiritual professional and still totally copping to Anxiety.)

Then she writes this: “Francis de Sales, a seventeenth-century priest and writer addressed anxiety in his “Introduction to the Devout Life”: “Unresting anxiety is the greatest evil which can happen to the soul, sin only accepted.”….Frances de Sales’s antidote to anxiety is two-fold, half positive, half negative: Do pray and do not do anything that might address the object of your anxiety (do not go online and check your bank balance: the action far from steadying you will just make you more frantic.) (Her words of course—de Sales probably said do not start counting your sheep)

This was great news: Frances de Sales says, “When you are conscious that you are growing anxious, commend yourself to God and resolve steadfastly not to take any steps whatever to obtain the result you desire, until your state of mind is altogether quieted.” 

The relief for me in that is two-fold: He gives an actual recipe for what to do and what not to do, but also, by the very existence of his remedy, and of Winner needing to quote a great theologian, is proof that anxiety is a common, and an actual (if not normal) part of the human condition, and it is something that even brilliant, educated and esteemed professors, theologians, saints and writers also struggle with.

Hooray! I’m not alone—the very thing that Anxiety swears that I am.

The good thing that Anxiety does—caught by its own trick—is send me back to God. And maybe, though it doesn’t quite seem fair, God uses Anxiety to get me look back in his direction? I’m not sure how I feel about that. 

But here is something else I thought about today: Why is it so hard to say, “I have anxiety today”? In talking with friends or coworkers we can say, “I’m sad today” or “I’m bummed” and I even hear people say, “I’m depressed.” But Anxiety has a bit of shame attached I think. Is it fear of contagion? Anxiety is fear attached to fear attached to fear. 

Sometimes I think that people who get mad easily, or who are deeply put-upon and victimy or who nip at people with their sharp tongues have anxiety too. But those other states are just Anxiety in prettier dresses.