Treatise on Jealousy

In Personal Relationships

Jealousy.

You can't really have what, or whom, you are not willing to not have. Don’t worry, I will explain this to you in a moment.

But first…

Jealousy is the mirror image of guilt.

Guilt is inner-directed and jealousy is outward-directed. They carry a similar theme, one of betrayal.

In act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet, Gertrude says, "So full of artless jealousy is guilt, / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt."

Gertrude here compares guilt to jealousy. The jealous person, like the guilty person, is afraid that he or she will be betrayed. Because both the guilty and the jealous are so afraid of being betrayed and try so hard to keep their guilt and jealousy from being exposed, they tend, ironically, to expose themselves.

This is because there is a truth to be unearthed, one that must be exposed in order for healing to occur. It is also why we attract and/or create reflections for ourselves in order that we can see the self and make those corrections. We must “get out” of our own selves in order to see ourselves.

It is the excessive concern in a relationship that the other person is not adequately committed to the relationship. The concern is accompanied by a panic state associated with the thought of the other person leaving the relationship.

Jealousy is a "feeling" and, like all feelings, supports a position that the mind has adopted.

To deal with jealousy, then, we must focus on its origin: the idea or position that it supports within the mind.

What is the driver of the fear of betrayal? It is the same underpinning as a fear of abandonment.

Survival.

It turns out that the position that it supports is 'always' as follows: "I am incomplete and I require this particular person to complete me. Incomplete people do not survive; therefore I must have this particular person to survive."

Thus the person you are jealous of must stay and allow you to possess him or her or you will have a fear arise that you will not survive in life.

Jealousy will create its own cause.

By that, I mean that it creates its polar opposite in the mind of the person you feel the need to possess. This is the developing mirror.

The idea that develops in the mind of the other person is: "This person can't survive without me; therefore I must stay." The mind will then develop a position which is called "entrapment." This will be held in place by the mirror emotion, guilt. If you and I are in a relationship and you give me no choice as to whether or not you and I will continue in our relationship, then I am not in the relationship by choice, I would feel guilty to leave you when you need me so much.

The condition of “no choice” constricts my experience of you and constricts what is possible in our relationship. It can justify, in my mind, my feeling resentment toward you and my acting out my resentment in a number of ways.

I 'may' choose to act out my resentment in such a way as to truly support your jealousy by now giving you something to be jealous about. The dance between freedom and belonging ensues. This dance will continue until either the jealous one sees themself and owns their behaviour or the resentment of the partner overrides their sense of guilt and they leave.

So we see here that jealousy works to bring about the condition that it most fears: loss of the other person, betrayal, and abandonment = core survival fears.

Jealousy drives others away so successfully because it is hostility with a mask. In this way, it is the cousin of guilt.

Guilt is hostility directed toward yourself, and jealousy is hostility directed toward another person. Both wear a mask in that the person who feels guilt or jealousy is the last to appreciate it as a hostility equivalent. Nonetheless, the result is the same: a damaged relationship.

To reiterate a bit: when there is no choice 'not to be' in a relationship, then there is no choice 'to be' in the relationship. This is a universal law: you can't really have what (or whom) you are not willing to not have. In other words, if you aren't complete without it, you aren't complete with it. You 'will' lose what you are not willing to give up. In fact, you never really had it. Too bad.

What works to transform jealousy is, to be honest with yourself and stop hiding from the core of the matter, the fundamental fear. The truth is that you are complete right now, the way you are. You may be complete with an idea that you are not complete, but even so, that does not make you incomplete. You are complete 'with' your ideas and feelings, 'all' of them. So, you don't need a particular relationship. Notice that I didn't tell you that you don't need any relationship.

If you have jealousy in your life, your condition is that you are stuck with the idea that you need a 'particular' relationship. Of course, you need a close, intimate, meaningful, close and loving relationship. Remember that love from another is essential to life itself. What is vital to know is that you are responsible for creating the experience of being loved. You have to notice the relationships that 'are' in your life and quit wasting your vital energy on those that are 'not' in your life.

Fortunately, there are many people in the world so you don't necessarily have to rely on one particular person. Therefore, you can freely give permission to whomever you thought you had to have in a relationship to not be in the relationship. Again, If you have people in relationships by entrapment, you don't really have them.

Now a curious thing happens when you give people the choice to be in a relationship or not. All other things being equal, they will choose to be in the relationship. If other things are not equal and they leave you, So what? You never really had them anyway. Now you are free to have a relationship of choice instead of entrapment.

I want to be very clear about this, jealousy is something you must eliminate from your life if you want your life to be all that it can be. Be very clear about this too: you can't possibly love what you need.

A need is a dissatisfaction at a point in time and in a given context. A need is a negative, something you do not have but want. You cannot love a negative, a non-thing.

If you happen to be on the receiving end of jealousy in a relationship, you have the opportunity to generate compassion for another human being who is struggling with this core survival fear. You also have the chance to look at your own core survival needs and see if they are in alignment with your beliefs.

What works is not to pass judgment and make another person wrong for the mental condition they happen to be in at a particular time. If you resist jealousy, what you will get will be more jealousy.

The work then centers on each coming into wholeness, realizing they are not incomplete as a core sense of trust and inner security is developed consciously. Fears are meant to be used as leverage for growth, not something to try to bury and run from. When you face this core survival fear and conquer it, freedom, security, happiness, stability, and healthy relationships, no matter how few or many, are your rewards. When you are IN a state of fear without contemplation and rectification, your emotions, as well as other people, rule your life and you may not like that particular outcome.

So when next you feel a twinge of jealousy, notice it coming from your base/root chakra place of insecurity, inviting you to plumb the depths of your consciousness and source the true root cause of the grasping, rather than reacting emotionally and blasting transference onto your partner. Express what you are working on so your partner understands you, which gives them the opportunity to admire your bravery and be attracted to your grounded, mature approaches to your feelings.