Jealous ? How Green Do You Get? One Of Your Primal Fears Has Been Triggered …

Yep. Jealous. The subject is green but is not ecological-green. And it’s related to primal fears. Green jealous or envious? Is not the same thing. Similar but not the same.

One is envious of someone when one, by dictionary definition, has “a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck. “

One is envious of another’s status quo, or about shoes, or about another one's quality of speaking in public or because one is more good looking compared to… Envy is all about comparing yourself with what others have and you feel like having less. Comparison.

Feeling jealous might involve comparison. But this one is deeper: are related and linked to two of our primal fears:

Fear of Separation - the fear of abandonment, rejection, and loss of connectedness; of becoming a non-person-not wanted, respected, or valued by anyone else.
Fear of Ego-death - fear of humiliation, shame, or the disintegration of one's constructed sense of lovability, capability, and worthiness.

Both fears are related to the feeling of jealousy.

So how jealous are you?

What triggers it?

How can you minimize its impact on your life?

It’s not as if it was a powerful skill: it causes more damage to your well-being and the ones around you: but you’re the main target here.

Yes: for someone who feels jealous might seem impossible to control this emotion, but maybe, if knowing what is behind those feelings, one can learn how to tame this specific monster that might take you over, damage your personal life and go deeper into a loop of low self-esteem.

Let’s got through this together, because I’m sure that more or less occasionally you felt jealousy. What is the feeling behind jealousy?

1. The Feeling Behind The Feeling of Jealousy…

As it was said before, the feeling behind jealousy is one or two of our primal fears.

So the feeling behind jealousy is fear.

Read this definition of “Jealousy” defined by French lexicographer freemason and philosopher Emille Littré, which pretty much says everything:

It’s natural to have someone in your life that is meaningful and you want to be significant to that person too. Up to now: healthy, fair, and reasonable.

What is not so healthy, fair, or reasonable is that you might want to be everything to that person. Important? Yes. Everything? No.

Rather toxic.

If it t’s momentary jealousy that you recognize and control: it’s ok. We’re human here. Who hasn’t felt jealous at some point, of a brother or sister the had at some moment had a preference of a parent or of some common friend? Pretty much all human beings.

When it becomes toxic? When it transforms a meaningless situation into hell between two people because one is ghosted by the dysregulated fear of being abandoned.

Of course that the so-called jealous person doesn’t feel it coming, doesn’t know where it comes, when it comes and gets…

We could say: let’s use reason here, but there’s no reason in toxic jealous: just fear.

Limbic primal one. Fear of being abandoned, fear of shame of being abandoned.

So when you feel jealous, question yourself, preferably before reacting into a harsh argument that looks like messy crosstown traffic:

Are you jealous because your person gave you a reason to feel neglected in the relationship? If the relationship involves care for one another, normally a good open conversation where you verbalize to your partner know your specific need for attention will diminish the impact. But let your partner know what that is.
Or are you jealous because of your own insecurities?

Do you fear that your partner has a life outside your relationship? That shouldn’t scare you: it’s healthy. Your partner is not supposed to fade into you. If the rules of the relationship are well defined and accepted for both and supposing that trust exists - otherwise there’s no reason to call it a relationship – then you should focus on your insecurities.

By principle: you chose each other for that relationship. You are a special human being recognized by some specificities: value yourself for that.

Because when you’re being controlled by jealousy you’re not valuing yourself: you’re feeling that you are not enough.

That’s an awful feeling to have: of not being enough.

Awful because you’re putting the measure outside of you, but in reality, you’re not feeling enough, basically to yourself: maybe you should try to fix that.

Starting some activities, hobbies, or side-work activities that build up your self-esteem. So you can feel you’re enough to yourself.

If you go through day after day after day after day, doing things that you hate, behaving in a way that doesn’t make you feel proud of yourself: are going to feel enough to yourself?

When you feel like you are enough for yourself, you won’t feel that haunted by jealousy and feelings of insecurities for not feeling enough.

So: what kind of jealousy do you recognize in your life?

2. Types Of Jealousy You Recognize In Yourself

Let us hope is not ALL of them, but you’re surely familiar with most of them…

Romantic Jealousy

This is a type of jealousy that most people experience in romantic couples, that pretty much was mentioned previously and within the couple exists some suspicion of emotional infidelity.

Platonic Jealousy

I bet you had that close friend that you were jealous of when that person spent some time or gave more attention to another person than you? Well: that’s platonic jealousy, normally happen between friendship and done feel that that friendship is being jeopardized by a third element.

Workspace Jealousy

What if at work one does one hell of a job and it's recognized by the superior hierarchy, gets a raise, or a promotion? Bet you felt jealous... Don’t: just do a better job next time.

Siblings Jealousy

Anyone who has brothers experienced that: o because the other was braver, or because, I was favorited by one of the parents, or because one was a better student, or because of charm and beauty or apparently had better results with the opposite sex… Reason are many: reasonable or not.

Abnormal Jealousy

Abnormal says it all: out of normal.

When is that?

When it’s paranoic, gets kind of morbid, gets you anxious, sound psychotic. This can be attributed to extreme insecurity mixed with a lot of immaturities or an obsession with being in control.

It can also be related to mental illness or chemical imbalance in the brain: biological or stimulated by the use of psychotropic substances. I should be treated with a professional.

3. What Jealousy Can Do To You

Depending on how this emotion is out or under control, it can damage your relationships in a severe way, because of the huge amount of stress it puts on your and the people that are targeted by your jealousy.

When because when jealousy jumps invades, the level of stress hormones raise, you enter (and your partner) might enter in fight-flight mode (fight in this case, because the primal fear is in the backyard, commanding you to fight in order to survive) and it clouds your judgment: Your partner becomes the enemy:

Bad words are spoken
Poor decisions are made
Attitudes might be disruptive to the relationship…

It can be an authentic snowball going down the hill: that only gets bigger, feeds itself on the way down, and becomes a devastating weapon that crushes all.

A lot of things have to be mended afterward. And you know what they say about words in this famous Arabian Proverb…

"Four things come not back: the spoken work, the ped arrow, the spent life and the neglected opportunity."

Feeling a LITTLE jealousy can be just a little thrilling because it kind of passes the message that “Yes I still want you don’t want to feel threatened by the feeling of losing what we have”.

But when the threat is the jealousy itself, you have to think it through and don’t treat it like is nothing: and the problem is you.

Take responsibility for your feeling (don’t go saying, thinking, or feeling that is all about the other person’s fault) and treat the cause, not the symptom.

After all, it's about you, the quality of your life, and the quality of your relationships, that starts with your relationship with yourself. Treat the cause not the symptom

And if you find that the person you are with, is not worthy of your trust, then you’ll have to reconsider the nature of the relationship: but that’s another conversation.

Over time, jealousy will poison the relationship and undermine any feelings of love and affection that might have existed. And in extreme cases, jealousy has been the cause for murder and suicide.

4. How Can You Be Less Jealous?

Talking to a therapist might be helpful if you verify that feeling jealous is:

Leading you to obsessive thoughts.
Leading you to compulsive behaviors.
Uncontrollable Jealous thoughts become uncontrollable or intrusive.
Leading you to rages or violent thoughts.
Making you follow, checking up, or stalking your partner constantly.
Affecting your daily life in a negative way, preventing you from being focused on other things.

As it was said before, blaming your partner is an unproductive way to handle your jealousy: the feeling of jealousy is yours not your partner’s

So treat the cause – from where it comes from your fear.

Don’t focus on the symptom which is external to you, normally the other person.

If it is not such an extreme case then you probably only need to build up your self-esteem and value yourself more.

No: the intention is not to be more selfish or shallow.

The intention is to get better every day.

Do some inner work, small things that will compound your self-love, and diminish the impacts of that hidden feeling of not being enough. So, work on yourself:

learn a new skill: might be sports, a musical instrument, carpentry, whatever. No matter what it is that you once found enjoyable. Do it now: with the internet, you can even do it from home, if that’s your choice
learn a meditation technique: it will help you be more in contact with yourself and acknowledge your own feelings. You’ll find it easier to control yourself and be less reactive. Of course, it won't come in a day. Is like everything: takes time and practice to compound the good effects.
voice your concerns: learn to put in words what’s really concerning you instead of just overreacting built-in with another overreaction and some more overreactions: that compounds too: but negatively…
find a coach to work specifically on that jealousy.
nurture yourself so you can be stronger on the inside.

One of these days Sadhguru & Lewis Howes were in this conversation/interview and Sadhguru was saying that he did not understand the way Americans refer to children growing up as “have being raised”. He said that cattle are supposed to be raised. Children, on the other hand, are supposed to be nurtured.

You’re going to say: ah, that you are not a child anymore. And that’s right.

The more of a reason you have to take the responsibility to nurture yourself before expecting others to do it for you.

Because now you are an adult now.