The Code of Jealousy: Getting Out of Extreme Protection and Guarding What You Think You Have
Jealousy is a particularly difficult negative emotion to write about for me, probably because I have mostly been on the victim side of people being jealous of me. I have more experience with trying to cope with jealous people than being jealous myself. It doesn’t come up that often for me. I will do the best I can in explaining it so that when it comes upon you, you can have some awareness and tools about how to deal with it. It can very destructive.
Jealousy is the feeling you get when what you have (materially speaking) comes under threat of being lost. Most often, people talk about jealousy in terms of relationships like when a committed partner spends time with others outside of the committed relationship, but it is quite common with leaders as well. When you feel jealousy, it means that you feel threatened that you are going to lose what you perceive to have, but what it should indicate to you is that you are lacking in basic relational capacities around closeness and intimacy. Feeling jealous means that you have issues with developing intimacy. If the jealous feeling takes over the person, then the ego mind often tries to use power or intimidation to keep what it has. Instead of doing the inner work of developing intimacy and closeness with others, the tendency is to use power in the wrong way to keep what you have. If you feel jealous and you are resorting to trying to force your will on others, then it means your relationship or position in an organization is already in big trouble. When you get jealous, the ego mind tries to make you think that the other person is the problem not you. People, who try use power and intimidation, always end up where they actually are when jealousy strikes, empty and alone.
Relational abilities, where you are trying to get close to others, are largely built on the fundamental process of seeing the positive in others and acknowledging them. When jealousy takes over the mind, people make small negatives into big threats. It takes them away from closeness rather than getting closer. You need an act of self-discipline to humble yourself to get out of the addictive state of using power when jealousy strikes because the use of power can be a drug like state. In extreme cases of territoriality people can become addictive to abusing and killing others because the use of power is such a strong feeling especially when intimacy is so hard for them to feel.
Jealous is not the same as envy even though people use them interchangeably. Jealous is about protecting what you have, whereas envy is about what you don’t have. Jealousy makes you use power to keep what you have like a title, whereas envy tries to find shortcuts to getting what you don’t have.
What can you do if you feel jealous?
Step 1. Recognize the feeling, especially the tendency to blow up small negatives in others so that you feel justified in ending the relationships with them.
Step 2. Get counseling help or some type of outside support so that the addictive processes of power do not take over you.
Step 3. Believe that learning how to get close to others in positive ways is extremely more satisfying than being protective and threatened all the time. Humble yourself so that you can begin to learn what you do not know how to do. If you have used charm to get in a relationship, then you are going to have let go of your arrogance about how good you are. Charm is not closeness. It is attracting someone for your own gain. There is nothing mutual in the use of charm.
Step 4. Inevitably the roots of jealousy stem from having been abused; so you are going to need help in dealing with the complexities of abuse.
It is actually very rare for people who feel jealous to seek help because the belief that they are right and others are wrong is so strong with them. They also believe that intimidation and power and the use of constant criticism can keep what they have.