Dealing with Jealousy and Comparative Thinking

I’ve always prided myself on being completely free of jealousy. I believed that everyone had their own path and their own dharma… she had hers and he had his and I had mine.

In fact, I spent so much time with my clients helping them not to make comparisons of their bodies and their hair and their dating lives or lack thereof to their friends and I felt completely immune to jealousy and envy. I didn’t think I had a jealous bone in my body. 

And then something snapped inside of me. 

Sometime in the last two years I’ve become a total jealous woman. And I’ve had to work on that a lot. 

You see, my Mom passed away 12 years ago, and my stepmom of 32 years passed away almost two years ago. And I live with my husband and my kids without very much extended family at all. With no one to help us unless we pay them, no one who is totally obsessed with my kids like the way a Grandma would be, no one to spoil them, no one to go to Holiday dinners with, etc. I’ve been in a really bad place about it for months. 

Jealousy broken down into its core components are anger at someone because you believe that they are stealing something from you. 

And my jealousy became rampant. When I saw my friends or my cousins kids with their grandparents on Facebook I’d have to close my computer. When I saw grandparents picking up their grandchildren from pre-school I would feel sad. I was jealous and I was angry.

I was jealous of other girls’ mothers. 

And so I’ve had to work on that quite a bit. And I’ve begun to embrace my grieving process as grieving two very difficult losses. However… the work that I’m doing made me realize that my losses don’t take away from what I have. That the more I focus on what I don’t have, the less I focus on what I do have. And what I have brings me joy. Focusing on what I don’t have and being angry about it brings me grief. 

If my mother were to come down from heaven she would say to me, “What you think you’re the first person to ever lose her mother? Get on with your life already!” Because that’s how my Mom was. And she would be right. 

And the truth is… the jealousy has been keeping me back. It has been keeping me from going forward and finding comfort, support and love in other people.  So I am going forward. I am allowing my grief to be grief and I am moving into acceptance of what my life is and finding surrogate moms in all the wonderful women around me. 

Jealousy closes you off to other people. Jealousy makes you extremely depressed.  Jealousy keeps you in a jail of your own because you are angry at the world. Jealousy doesn’t allow you to see that their are other people in your situation and in much worse situations. Jealousy doesn’t allow you to see what you truly have and what you could be grateful for. Jealousy keeps you stuck– when you could just go outside into the vast big beautiful world and see the sky and the clouds and the mountains and the ocean. 

So is there anything or anybody that you are jealous of? 

Are you jealous of someone’s money? Their body? Their girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife? Their house? Their car? How does that hold you back? Do you wind up trying to achieve so much of what other people have that you miss out on your own life? Do you isolate yourself because you can’t bear to see other people having what you want? 

You can change that. 

You can stop this. 

When you notice your head turned toward someone else’s haves – turn back toward your own and appreciate what you have.

Or you could also forget about what that person has and just look at them as a whole person and let yourself be their friend, learn about them separate from what they have. You will deepen and enrich your friendships and find yourself more integrated into the world. 

Jealousy doesn’t serve you and it doesn’t motivate you, it keeps you stuck. 

And here is an old post on jealousy that I wrote before the Green Eyed Monster bit me. Before I lost my Step Mom and before I had my kids. I had a great theoretically knowledge of jealousy. But now I know in my bones what it is. Working through it has been phenomenal and eye opening.

I am grateful that I am given the gift of working through my issues just when I think I’m soooooo damn perfect. 

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