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 Was there something you did or liked to do for which affection or love was withdrawn?

What Jealousy Offers

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.

Jealousy and the Other Woman

“The girl wants the mother and feels shame with her jealousy for wanting the mother. The father is the fulcrum in the triangle of the girl reaching for her mother.”

--from The Mermaid and the Minotaur

I found this in a file dated 1996. I was struggling with jealousy in some relationship then and trying to understand it. What is striking about this idea is that it explains something I have felt and been unable to articulate and that is the complexity of jealousy for women. Women’s jealousy about another woman gets confusing because there is an element of desire for the other woman even as we wish to kick her out. A woman not only wants her man to give up or quit the other woman but she also wants the other woman. This explains how anger gets misdirected in infidelity and affairs. It explains the obsession with “her”. There is a taboo being activated and some dark homoerotic lust/revulsion pushing up from down deep in the archetypes.

I have felt this before and I have been the object of this quality coming from other women’s jealousy toward me. I have certainly felt this confusion about John’s ex-wife, and I have been ashamed of these feelings in myself.

We are not simple creatures and so it means we must—and I must—be gentle and self-forgiving.