S1 EP20 – What Causes Jealousy And How To Heal It

Transcript

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. And today I want to talk about what causes jealousy and how to heal it because I get so many emails, people writing to me, people asking me my clients about their jealousy. So I think this is a really important topic because a lot of people do feel jealous.

Do you feel jealous? Do you feel fearful that your partner’s going to find someone that he or she finds a more attractive, more lovable, more worthy, more intelligent, more interesting than you. So, as I said, jealousy is a very big problem for many people. And I hope in this podcast that you can discover what you’re doing. That’s causing you to feel jealous and how to heal this, this very challenging issue you actually can heal jealousy.

So here’s an example. This is a fairly long example of a typical question. It’s been almost two years since my ex and I broke up after a three year relationship, I had felt neutral about the breakup for a long time. Until recently my sister told me she contacted her for reasons that have nothing to do with me. And it spiked my feelings of jealousy. I’m in awe. As I feel, I just went backwards in the progress I already made throughout the years.

It reminded me of when we were together and she would give her attention to others. And especially at the end of our relationship, when that happened at all, he always left me feeling unimportant and left out and heartbroken that she didn’t give me my place as her partner. When she contacted my sister. Recently, these feelings of jealousy just came back. Now I have intrusive thoughts attached to she didn’t respond to my Christmas message, but she did write to her.

She must be with someone else already happier than she was with me. I feel jealousy, anger, powerlessness, and a deep sadness to know that what I dreamed of with her a life together never happened. My logical self tells me it’s okay. If she’s with someone else, I myself dated another person for six months and I know it’s normal and okay, for both of us to move on, it still hurts so much. And I feel devastated as I thought I was already over it is this grief over the loss of someone I love deeply.

What am I not seeing here with this jealousy? I feel, and here’s another one. My wife has become friends with the man next door. And when she talks with him, I feel crazy with jealousy. I don’t think it’s right. That she’s friends with him. She knows it upsets me, but she keeps doing it anyway. How can I get her to care more about how I feel? And here’s another one. I know my boyfriend loves me, but he has a lot of women, friends. I don’t get why I asked to have so many women friends.

I get scared and jealous when he spends time with another woman, I know I should trust him, but I don’t. And I don’t know what to do about this. And again, my wife is a very social person and makes friends easily with both men and women. I keep feeling that one of these days, she’s going to meet a man who offers her more than I do. I feel insanely jealous whenever another man even looks at her, what do I do about these feelings?

So I can’t even begin to count how often both men and women say this kind of thing to me. So obviously jealousy is a major source of conflict in relationships. So jealousy is caused by not knowing who you really are and by who you really are. I mean your true self, your essence, the soul aspect of you, that’s created in the image of divine love.

Your essence is a beautiful and perfect individualized expression of the divine deeply lovable and deeply loving. But if you don’t know your own essence, then you believe that you are your wounded self, your wounded self, which is your ego self is your condition program self. This is the self we developed as we were growing up to try and have control over getting love and avoiding pain or wound itself may be insecure and angry or depressed and anxious, always controlling, actually very weak, even though it may show up as powerful as looking powerful, but it’s really weak and often addicted and quite judgmental.

Our wounded self is generally not very lovable. We don’t actually like anybody else’s wanting itself and they don’t like ours. So when someone loves us, it’s our essence that they love not our wound itself, but while people who love you see your essence, you might not okay if your parents were unable to see your essence because they couldn’t see their own. Then you grew up thinking that your essence is unworthy and that you are your wound itself.

There’s no way to feel secure when you believe that you are your wound itself. So in a zoom session with me, my client, Katie, that’s not her real name was completely perplexed about her jealousy. So she said, as you know, I broke up with my boyfriend, Jared, six months ago, by the time I broke up with him, I was really done with the relationship and I have no desire to be with him.

But last week I found out that he has a girlfriend and I feel jealous. I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense to me at all. I asked Katie to open, to learning with the jealous part of her and aspect of her ego wound itself. Katie’s twelve-year-old wound itself quickly started to talk. I always wanted to be the favorite. I wanted to be mom and dad’s favorite. And I was always upset when my brother seemed to be the favorite. Even though I don’t want to be with Jared, I want to be his favorite.

As long as he didn’t have a girlfriend, I still felt like I was his favorite. When I asked what being the favorite means to her, she answered. It means that I’m better than other people. I always want to be the special one. I don’t like it when I’m with my friends and they pay more attention to their children or even their dog than to me. I know it sounds crazy, but I hate it when my best friend brings her dog along. When we get together, I feel upset about the attention she gives her dog.

Now don’t forget. This was the twelve-year-old wounded part of Katie talking, but Katie was not valuing herself. Her jealousy was a symptom of her own inner abandonment. What her inner child, that’s the soul part of us, that inner child, that feeling part was saying to her, I don’t feel at all special important to you. I’m not your favorite. You don’t think much of me. You rarely pay attention to me.

So you see her 12 year old wound itself was projecting out onto others. What was really happening on the inner level, the self abandonment that was happening on the inner level. So when we’re not loving to ourselves or ego wound itself looks to others for confirmation of worth to our ego wounded self, who may constantly compare us to others being better than which may be determined by getting special attention from others that validates or invalidates our worth.

Because Katie had spent most of her life making others responsible for herself worth by trying to get their attention and approval. Her inner child felt abandoned and worthless. Of course she felt jealous. How could she feel any other way with that level of self-abandonment? And she would continue to feel jealous in many different until she felt loved and valued by loving adult Katie. In other words, Katie’s inner child needed to feel loved by her own adult, rather than always looking to get it outside.

So jealousy comes from the fear that you’re not good enough that you’re not attractive enough. You’re not smart enough. You’re not successful enough or from the false belief that there’s something essentially wrong with you. And many of us grew up believing that we just were not good enough when we didn’t receive the love we needed from our parents or other caregivers. We may have falsely concluded that it was because there was something wrong with us, rather than because they just didn’t know how to be loving.

We all absorbed so many false beliefs about our adequacy and our lovability from our parents and peers and teachers and religious leaders and the media. Most of us didn’t receive mirroring for our beautiful, true soul self. The spark of divine love that is within each of us are parents and others projected on to us, their judgments of themselves.

So they couldn’t see us and value us. If you’d been seen and deeply valued and love for who you really are in your soul essence, you would deeply value yourself and you would know why your partner loves you. So, as Katie began to devote herself to practicing inner bonding, she started to recognize her own beautiful qualities and to take care of her own feelings.

The more she did this, the more loved and special her inner child felt one day. Her inner little girl said to her, I know you love me. I know that I’m your favorite. And I love you too. Katie tearfully reported to me that she did indeed love her inner little girl. And that jealousy was no longer an issue for her. Sure.

So feelings such as jealousy are always a symptom of inner abandonment, jealousy insecurity, neediness, fear of rejection. These feelings are not the issue. They’re the symptom of the fact that we are abandoning ourselves through self judgment, not paying attention to our feelings, ignoring them, using addictions, to numb them out and making others responsible for our feelings of safety and lovability and worth.

And no other person can ever take away these painful feelings. No other person can make up to you. The lack of valuing you might’ve experienced as a child, no matter how much others love and value you. As long as you are not loving and valuing yourself, you will feel unsafe, insecure, or jealous. The power of inner bonding is that through a lot of practice, you learn to give yourself what you didn’t receive as a child and what you always wanted and always needed.

This is what heals jealousy, as well as heals insecurity, neediness, and fear of rejection healing occurs. When you learn to see who you really are in your beautiful soul, rather than defining yourself, but your looks or your achievements or your performance, as long as you make others responsible for defining yourself worth, you’re going to feel threatened when your partner gives attention to someone else.

So how do you know your own essence? We can’t see our essence through the eyes of our wound itself or wound itself sees ourselves through the filter of other’s perceptions of us. So we may end up seeing ourselves in the distorted way, our parents or other caregivers or siblings or peers or teachers or religious leaders or relatives may have seen us as children. So in order to know your own essence, you need to be able to see herself from a higher perspective, from the eyes of your higher self, your inner, why self your older wise self.

So right now, imagine an older, very wise part of you that can see the truth of who you really are. Imagine this part of you looking at you as a small child before you developed your wounded self. So I want to encourage you to try this exercise, sit in a beautiful place out in nature, or imagine being there, if you can’t be an actual nature, use your imagination to smell the flowers or the trees or the ocean.

Imagine an older, wiser part of yourself, your higher self. And imagine that you’re with your older, wiser self in the beautiful place in nature. And imagine that you can see yourself as a little child through the eyes of your older, wiser self before you decided that you were not good enough, who is this child?

What do you like? Good. I’d have to go back to seeing yourself as a baby, or even before you came into the world, go back. As far as you need to, to see the essence of you, the truth of who you really are. And as these words come to you, write them down words, such as playful kind, sensitive, caring, intuitive, generous, outgoing, extroverted, introverted, alive, fun, loving, sweet, funny, smart, loving, quiet, thoughtful, lovable, intense, curious, honest bright-eyed, whatever pops into your mind, write it down inside and see that these beautiful qualities are still there, but they might have been squashed down by the experiences you had growing up And by the ego wounded part of you who decided that you really are not your soul essence and that your soul essence just isn’t good enough.

If you had a child who was just like you were as a child, how would you treat him or her? And now think about how you treat yourself inside. Are you giving yourself the love, the attention, the caring that you need, or are you abandoning yourself with your self judgements and numbing out with addictions and making others or your partner responsible for your feelings of safety and worth and lovability your inner child, your soul essence, your feeling self lets you know, through feelings, whether you’re loving yourself or abandoning yourself.

When you feel jealous, your inner child is letting you know that you’re abandoning yourself in various ways. When you decide to learn to love yourself, rather than judge yourself and abandon yourself, you’re no longer going to feel jealous. When you learn to see and value yourself, you’re going to know why your partner loves you. You’re going to be able to stop trying to control your partner or others into giving you what you haven’t been giving to yourself.

And you’ll be able to feel your partners and others love for you as well as your love for your partner. You’ll find yourself no longer competing with others, for your partners or others. Attention. If you practice inner bonding and you learn to embrace the truth of who you are and you begin to treat yourself as you would treat any lovable and cherished being such as you might treat your children or a pet, you’re going to start to feel much more lovable and secure when you do this long enough and consistently enough, you’re going to discover that you no longer feel jealous when you treat yourself as someone you love, jealousy will no longer be a problem for you.

So I encourage you to go to inner bonding.com. If you don’t know the inner bonding process, please download our free seven day course and begin to learn it. And there are so many courses, books, free articles. The courses are not free of course, but the articles are and free help on the website. But there’s so many ways that you can learn inner bonding.

We have many trained facilitators. I work with people on phones, zoom, and Skype, and our trains facilitators do also they’re extremely well trained and you can look under facilitators, find a facilitator on the website. There’s just many, many ways to learn and practice inner bonding and be supported in your process. We have a wonderful community and our bonding village where you can join and get the support your need.

You need to start to truly love yourself. So I hope you spend time at innerbonding.com and take advantage of all the resources we offer. I have a wonderful course called love yourself. A 30 day course, an at home course, which is a very, very deep course. And you will learn to love yourself when you take this course. I send blessings to all of you.