Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
What is Jealousy?
The focus of this book is to understand and recover from the emotion of jealousy within a relationship/marriage/partnership. Step 1 will concentrate on jealousy. Step 2 will concentrate on Envy. In Step 3, I will attempt to explain each type of jealousy before moving on to the thoughts, feelings, speech, and action that take place when jealousy is present in your relationship.
Jealousy is typically used to describe the thought, feeling, and behavior that occur when a person believes a valued relationship is being threatened by a rival. Jealousy is a destructive emotion, hell-bent on causing unhappiness. It can strike at any moment, eroding your mind and heart with thoughts and feelings that are meant to be emotionally destructive. Jealousy cunningly lies under the surface of love, hate, and desire, waiting for the opportunity to jump out and show itself. Jealousy takes pleasure in sowing seeds of discontentment in your mind and is only sated when disharmony occurs.
All of us have experienced jealousy of some description. I believe jealousy is the result of a creative overactive imagination. If you have a seed of doubt in your mind about your partner and/or your relationship, your jealous thoughts will take you through a series of negative scenarios as a means of torturing you. It feels terrible but you, somehow, can't stop or help yourself from sliding down the road to despair. Jealousy brings about an emotional state of being "out of control." Only someone who has experienced jealousy can fully comprehend how awful this feeling is. You know what you are doing but you can't stop it. Jealousy feeds you the mental images of your worst scenario and leaves you feeling angry, empty, and dissatisfied. Being jealous says a lot about who you are.
Fear Feeds Jealousy
You are afraid of ...
• Your partner leaving you;
• Being betrayed;
• Losing face;
• Having "egg on your face" (being humiliated);
• Losing your self-esteem;
• Hurting your self-confidence;
• Your appearance not being good enough to attract a partner;
• Weighing too much to be attractive;
• Being embarrassed by your lack of skills;
• Not being good enough;
• Being an inadequate lover;
• Being unable to sustain a relationship;
• Communicating about this with family, friends, and/or partners.
Each of us has a unique list of our own. Write out your own list and discover your own problem areas with regard to jealousy.
Where Did the Seed of Doubt Arise?
• Have you always been jealous?
• Were you jealous as a child?
• Were you loved as a child?
• Is one or both of your parents jealous?
• Has a past partner alerted you to jealousy by betraying you?
• Are your family or friends jealous of you?
Make a list of all the times you have been jealous. State what it was you were jealous of. Are you still jealous of those things you have identified? Do you believe you are unworthy of having a partner?
Wherever and whenever the seed of jealousy was planted, it is now firmly positioned in your mind. Jealousy is an indicator that you place no value on yourself. It searches in your memory for examples and scripts that prove you have a right to be jealous. Your mind is like a computer that forages through your mental files to find evidence that you are unworthy, and that it is only a question of time before your partner moves on to someone much better than you believe you are.
How Can I Accept Myself?
The first step in overcoming jealousy is to learn to accept and love yourself for the person you are.
You can do this by listening to ...
• What you are feeling;
• What you are thinking;
• What you are saying;
• The negative stuff that you say about yourself (mind chatter);
• The old pattern of thoughts regurgitating and repeating yet again.
In order to rid yourself of jealous thoughts, you must clear your mind of stuff (old habits and beliefs) you have been holding on to. Erase the repeating thoughts that are the root cause of you inflicting this negative pain on yourself.
You can do this by ...
• Writing your negative thoughts down on a notepad;
• Changing the negative thought script that you have identified to a positive thought script. If you writethese positive thoughts down, they will form a definite script in your mind;
• Repeating these positive script changes you have made, over and over again. This exercise will help to reduce, and eventually rid you of, your negative beliefs;
• Remembering "I am what I think I am;"
• Remembering "Others are what I tell myself they are;"
• Using your energy to create the person you want to be;
• Understanding that you must take responsibility for creating your emotional security. Don't look to your partner to provide you with emotional safety.
I can assure you that if you do this exercise and stick with it, you will see the benefits in a very short time.
Ask yourself: Am I ...
• Suspicious of my partner?
• Frequently checking up on my partner?
• Searching through my partner's jacket pockets or reading his/her mobile phone messages?
• Constantly questioning my partner about where s/he is going or what s/he is doing?
• Withdrawing from my partner without giving an explanation as to why I am doing this?
• Suspicious when I meet new people?
• Frightened of change?
• Frightened of being abandoned?
If you answered "yes" to most of the above, then you have selected the right book to help you overcome this problem.
Take time out to look at each negative script you have identified.
Looking back from now, ask yourself ...
• Have I ever had any cause to be suspicious or jealous of my partner?
• Has this cause ever created a rift between me and my partner?
• Do I think I handled the situation in the right way?
• Can I see that my negative thoughts produced negative results?
• Do I think I behaved reasonably?
• Do I believe I acted in a rational manner?
• Do I think I exaggerated the situation?
• Would I handle the situation differently in hindsight?
• Am I focusing on my partner because I am unable to focus on myself?
• Do I trust my intuition?
• Do I trust my perception?
• Do I trust myself?
All these questions are important in order for you to see clearly, on reflection, that you may have made a "mountain out of a molehill" through your own fears and emotional insecurity. These issues, which are seated in the past, stem either from your childhood or from your recent adult relationships. This results in you feeling out-of-control and unable to sustain a healthy relationship. Before you can have a better relationship with your partner, you must exorcise these irrational fears. Get rid of them, once and for all. Take a peek at your past history, alone or with a friend or therapist, and you will discover how this negativity came about.
Once you have identified the root cause, don't make the mistake of hanging on to it, thereby justifying your present behavior. Look at it, accept it, and decide to "move on" from it. Is there any benefit from reliving your past ad infinitum?Sufficient to say that you have allocated the cause, and are now ready to address it. By doing these exercises, you will find it easier to let go of your destructive negative jealous feelings and embrace new positive thoughts, feelings, and attitude.
Jealousy is powerful and dangerous, and is a real issue. It destroys your relationships and it destroys you in the process. It is one of the biggest emotional problems and is a barrier to creating a successful partnership. You feel jealous when you think that your partner is being unfaithful or looking at someone for too long. You see other people as "predators" who are trying to take your partner away from you. When this happens, you feel physically sick, with your heart pounding and on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. Jealousy isolates you. However, the good news is that jealousy can be controlled. It will not go away forever. It will lurk in the depths of your mind, ready and waiting to erupt if you allow it. It needs to be put away into a safe place with you holding the key. You are in control.
Take into consideration the following suggestions:
• Do not rely on your partner to make your life complete;
• Create your life and fill it with stuff you want to do;
• Have mutual friends but also have your own circle of friends;
• Value who you are;
• Learn to be more understanding;
• Learn to be more honest;
• Learn to be more trusting.
The next step is to learn to have faith: faith in yourself, and faith in your partner.
What Is Faith?
Faith is blind. Faith is a strong belief. It's a feeling of warmth and loyalty you generate when you believe in yourself, your partner, your family, or others. Without having faith in your relationship, you will flounder and fall by the wayside into an emotional, unhealthy abyss. A healthy relationship is based on trust and faith. Decide together to be open with each other. Communicate your worst fears to each other and work through these fears to a positive outcome.
CHAPTER 2
What is Envy?
How does envy differ from jealousy in a relationship?
• Jealousy supports the fact that you want to keep what you have. It is a righteous indignation that "what's yours" stays that way.
• Envy is the desire to own something that is not yours.
• Envy can be seen as a mild jealousy which can be a route to improved capabilities. The term used for this is "creative envy." It is part of a process to improve by putting pressure on yourself to develop new skills.
Some suggest that the main difference between these two words is the involvement of a third party. The jealous person wants all the attention to be on them, but a third party in this equation would rob them of this attention. The third party is seen as a predator and a rival, and the jealous person will be very unhappy if the person they are jealous of gives any attention to the third party.
Another common distinction between jealousy and envy is that envy is the desire for something in general (more money), whereas jealousy is the desire to have something in particular, and to take it from someone else (one is jealous of a friend's girlfriend/boyfriend).
Envy begrudges another person's success, possessions, and lifestyle, even if they earned it by their own hard work. You may remember that the seven deadly sins are anger, covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth. Envy is the age-old monster that motivated Cain to murder his brother Abel. According to the Bible, it's an evil that leads to quarrels, fights, disorder, and "every vile practice."
Envy Rots the Soul
When you see something or somebody having what you yearn for, the envy you feel squeezes the very life out of your being. It highlights the dissatisfaction that you believe that you haven't got what you want in your life. This can happen at any place and time. Envy holds no boundaries, but strikes with a powerful force. Envy is one of the deadly sins and is named such because it can cause serious emotional and physical damage to yourself and others. It acts like a cancer, eating away at the very core of your being.
As Proverbs says, "A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot" (Prov. 14:30, ESV). When envy strikes, it takes away your logical, lateral thinking pattern and instead you become irrational, unreasonable, paranoid, and out of control; and you display warped thinking. Shakespeare called it "the green-eyed monster." Envy destroys relationships. What does envy do to you; how is it displayed?
Here are some examples of what you may become ...
• Spiteful
• Resentful
• Obsessive
• Competitive
• Arrogant
• Paranoid
• Unhappy* Distrustful
• Dissatisfied
• Driven
• Slanderous
• Malicious
• Gossipy
• Poisonous
Make your own list. Envy is the rust in any relationship. It creeps around your thoughts and corrodes your emotional intelligence. You can't get away from it as it strangles your feelings, attitude, and behavior.
The English word envy is from the Latin word invidia, meaning "to look with ill- will or malicious intent" at another person. It is close in meaning to the words resent, begrudge.
How do you rid yourself of envy?
First of all, by owning that you are envious! Do this simple exercise:
1. Write down exactly you are envious of. Is it people, possessions, professions, relationships, money, behavior, etc.?
2. Continue this exercise, and write down opposite each item that you have found that you envy, how you can change your belief and reaction to those issues.
Use the form on the following page to do this, or write in your own private journal.
I want you to answer each of the following questions with a Yes or No. Take some time with this exercise. It is important that you are clear and honest in your observations of yourself.
Ask yourself ...
• Are they spiteful to me? (people or their individual successes);
• Are they ignoring me? (people or their individual successes);
• Do they put me down? (people or their individual successes);
• Do they make me feel inferior? (people or their individual successes).
Let's take this a step further.
What has your partner said and/or done to you to make you envious?
These are some suggestions to help you unravel and uncover your thoughts and feelings:
Ask yourself ...
• Has my partner called me names?
• Has my partner left me out of a girls'/boys' night out?
• Do people or my partner poke fun at me?
• Have I overheard some gossip about myself?
• How can I be successful in my chosen career?
• How can I be positive and proactive?
Dig deep beneath your feelings and unearth exactly what makes you envious of these people. Take each question and explain exactly what you think and believe. When you have finished writing down your answers to each of the questions, I want you to imagine yourself sharing this information with a close friend.
How would you feel sharing this information ...?
• Justified?
• Stubborn?
• Frustrated?
• Guilty?
• Embarrassed?
• Ashamed?
• Secretive?
• Unburdened?
• Relieved?
Most people, who undertake this exercise, find that they have difficulty identifying exactly what they are envious of. If you are one of these people, this exercise will unearth these issues and you will see that you have no reason to continue to feel envious of these people or situations. If, however, you still feel envious, then you will need to take this exercise one step further.
You can do this by ...
• Confronting the people you have identified that you are jealous of, and be prepared to discuss your issues with that person;
• Confronting this person without being aggressive;
• Confronting each person individually;
• Being prepared to be open, and to listen to what each of them are saying to you;
• Being prepared to explain to each of them that you have heard that they are talking about you behind your back and that this situation is making you unhappy;
• Being prepared to ask them "What don't you like about me?"
Confronting your innermost fears and thoughts will assist you in overcoming the problem. In some cases, your worst fear might be justified. However, when you do this exercise, you are most often left feeling a bit silly that you have been thinking in this way. If this is the case, then you will see that the problem is not with those other people?but with you. You should then look into your mental thought patterns and attitudes and do the necessary readjustments. In other words, you need to repent (change your mind). Turn your negative thought processes that are displaying envy and change them to a more positive emotion. Remember: treat others as you would like others to treat you.
If you needed to do the last exercise and now understand that you had no cause for feeling envious, you might like to:
• Send them a card, thanking them for listening and putting your mind at rest;
• Ask each person in turn around to your home for coffee.
Grudges
Grudges are the things we remember and hold on to with bitterness, anger, resentment, and/or hostility. If you are holding on to a grudge, you are ensuring that you remain a miserable victim. Holding on to a grudge causes more harm to you than to the person you are holding the grudge against. It makes you unhappy. It stops you from achieving personal development, and it is disempowering. In order to move on from a grudge, you must forgive the other person for whatever you believe they have done to you.
Dr. Phil McGraw quotes studies that show feelings of grudge increase stress, raise blood pressure, promote ulcers, and a multitude of other side effects. In short, it can ruin your health and shorten your life.
A grudge is a tool to gain control over someone who, you believe, has wronged you.
A study at Michigan State University found that 48 percent of us admit to holding grudges, and that probably the actual figure is much higher than that.
Ask yourself ...
• Do I hold grudges?
• Do I repeat the cause of the grudge over and over again?
• Is this grudge affecting my life?
• Do I find it easy to forgive?
• When I am hurt, what does it take from the other person before I am willing to reconcile?
• Do I build a wall of silence?
• Do I withdraw into myself?
• Do I persecute my victim?
• Do I persecute myself?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Life Without Jealousy"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Lynda Bevan.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
