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. 

Jealousy is a Gold Mine

Jealousy is one of the oldest and icky-est emotions, and it is linked to shame so it has real sticking power. What I find interesting is that it’s one of the hardest emotions to talk about in recovery because we, sober people, shame each other for feeling it. In 12 step programs and even in therapy we may hear how wrong jealousy is—and yet—here it is.

But as I was feeling some of this green icky stuff this week I dipped back into a rare and provocative resource.

My tutor is French analyst Marcianne Blevis and her book “Jealousy: True stories of Love’s Favorite Decoy.” She makes the powerful case that jealousy exists to help us and to free us. Yes, I know it never feels anything like that, does it? She’s onto something though.

Look at this thing she says: “Jealousy is a response to anxiety. (Jealousy is not the anxiety but a response to a preexisting anxiety”). She writes that the anxiety arose early in our lives: “If an impulse in childhood is struck down by a prohibition, it transforms itself into a terror and anguish” Ok, that makes sense: I will be jealous of one whom I perceive to be the thing I was never allowed to be. But then she says this: “Jealousy not only tangles our memories, but also puts us in contact with those unconscious forces of childhood that are struggling to free themselves from the realm of the incommunicable.” Jealousy is actually the route out of childhood anguish.

So when we shove away or shame away the jealous feelings we are cutting off a life preserver and tossing it back to the one trying to rescue us.

Blevis insists that jealousy is not bad no matter how bad it feels. It is built in as a gift to save us. It is as if it is the antidote that is taped to the side of the poison bottle. It comes to free us and give back to us the thing that was prohibited in our early lives, the thing we transformed into terror long before we had words.

Here’s a simple way to get at this in yourself: What were you not allowed to do that you did naturally and freely as a child? What did your mother or father prohibit? What were you shamed for as a kid? Was there something you did or liked to do for which affection or love was withdrawn? This will show up in your jealousy targets as an adult. For many women it has something to do with bodies, sexuality, attractiveness --and creativity--which is why we get confused as adults when we think our jealousy is about another woman’s attractiveness it’s actually about our own—and its repression.

There is freedom here –in the jealousy—for the taking. But it means not shaming ourselves for feeling jealous—but rather relishing it and mining those jealous feelings for the gold buried there.

Jealousy

Yes, jealousy. One of the most universal human emotions that we cannot speak about. It’s gross and miserable and beyond uncomfortable and it strikes us mute. We sputter and spit and stumble in trying to express it without sounding insane or weak and yet—and yet—jealousy is a powerful emotion which taps directly into our bodies.

I have stumbled through this territory all of my life, and perhaps that is the clue. It’s old. Jealousy is always old. I’d like to think it is about this man or that woman but at heart it never is.

It is also never this: Jealousy is never about love, it’s never about sex, it’s never about attractiveness even though those may be the cards we play in trying ever so hard to explain our predicament when trapped in jealousy’s swamp.

It’s also—and I am slowly coming to get this—never about him.

My recent tutor is French analyst Marcianne Blevis in her book “Jealousy: true stories of love’s favorite decoy.” She makes the powerful and iconoclastic case that jealousy exists to help us and to free us. Yes, I know it never feels anything like that, does it? She’s onto something though. (Yeah duh, she’s a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist and brilliant so I’ll concede that she’s “onto something”).

But look at this thing she says: Jealousy is a response to anxiety. (jealousy is not the anxiety but a response to a preexisting anxiety) and she says the anxiety arose early in our lives: “If an impulse in childhood is struck down by a prohibition, it transforms itself into a terror and anguish” Ok, that makes sense I will be jealous of one whom I perceive to be the thing I was never allowed to be. But then she says this: “Jealousy not only tangles our memories, but also puts us in contact with those unconscious forces of childhood that are struggling to free themselves from the realm of the incommunicable.”

I did mention that she’s brilliant right?

Jealousy is not bad no matter how bad it feels. It is built in as a gift to save us. It is as if it is the antidote taped to the side of the poison bottle. It comes to free us from the thing that was prohibited, the thing we transformed into terror long before we had words.

Here’s a simple way to get at this in yourself: What were you not allowed to do that you did naturally and freely as a child? What did your mother or father prohibit? What were you shamed for? Was there something you did or liked to do for which affection or love was withdrawn?

And consider this: many women drank over this thing that was trying so hard to help us become free.

Jealousy

In my therapist’s office I read a back issue of Psychology Today from August 2009.

Here was the fascinating tidbit I learned about jealousy:

French Psychiatrist, Marcianne Blevis,—(It really helps that she is French I think) wrote a book called, “Jealousy—True Stories of Love’s Favorite Decoy”. She insists that jealousy is a signal—not to blame a partner—but to look within. Inside ourselves, she says, we will find the source of insecurity that makes a rival seem superior to us. What’s at stake in jealousy—she suggests—is not the partner or the relationship—but the survival of our sense of self.

What is exciting about this idea is that it follows another of Blevis’ assertions: All human emotions exist to help us figure out who we are in the world. So jealousy too is a productive emotion for us. This very thing we cringe to feel or are shameful to admit is trying to help us claim a self. Jealousy is a resource that we call on when we feel at risk, when our sense of self is in jeopardy. “When we are jealous we are in the grip of an identity crisis.”

But invariably, according to Blevis, we misdirect our attention. We imagine our so-called rival with an aura of magical attributes—yet we are the one who assigned those attributes to the rival!—and they represent (hello projection!) something unrealized in ourselves.

I love thinking like this and ideas like this that turn it all upside down.

Think about the kind of people who trigger jealousy for you. Pretty? Young? Sexy? Smart? Successful? Children? Travel?

They are shouting thru a megaphone—This is what I want! They are invitations to take a step toward something that YOU want.