Jealousy- in two parts. (2)

Catharsis

I saw him next, fully armed with my self-righteous anger. And my immediate instincts were to ignore him. To visibly show my displeasure. To make him feel, somehow, even a small part of the pain and the hurt. He approached, with what seemed to me, an air of guilt and deceit around him. He spoke to me in his usual honey sweet way but for some reason, this time, it nauseated and cloyed my mind. My heart flared up with disgust. And then the strangest thing happened.

I saw it in his eyes. It stopped me mid-charge as I rushed to make him feel my pain. I saw…hurt. I had succeeded before I even realised it. He could sense that something was wrong and his usually bubbly state was reduced to an anxious gaze and a slightly forced smile. Unfortunately for him, his decision to tell me even more ‘bad news’ resulted in my anger taking over again. And I automatically assumed (imagined) that he was lying to me. Once again, no proof needed. I successfully ignored him for the rest of the hour. When he came up to say goodbye, purposefully coming close and touching my arm gently, to force me to look into his eyes, I turned a cold glare and a stone smile on him.

Bad idea.

My heart broke. Those golden-hazel eyes bored right through me and the realisation of my stupidity flashed through my mind in a million disjointed pictures- like a giant mash-up of all the shit that my jealous imagination had fed me. And I realised that I, by myself, at the command of my jealousy, had created the very monster that I claimed to be fighting. I had completed the self-fulfilling prophecy. My actions towards him had hurt him and he had put his guard up. He erected those walls between me and him because he was being attacked. And now they became real. They moved from the realm of my imagination into his feelings and his very real reactions. I imagined them, and they came to life.

So you see: jealousy is creative. It builds castles in the sky and then makes you pay the rent in pain and suffering. But how to defeat the green eyed monster? To kill the demon within?

I firmly believe it begins with the realisation that your feelings are your own. No person can ever put their feelings inside of you. You are the gate keeper. You are the one who decides how you will react to each and every visiting emotion. And there are ways in which you can do this.

Self-reflection is one. It is the longest and the most difficult process of the lot but it is more rewarding and stable than all the others put together. It begins with questions. Honest questions to your heart and your mind. Questions that make you look at yourself from a perspective other than your own instinctual nature. Why? How?

Relinquish control of the outside world; it is only an illusion of control. You cannot physically make anyone love you. You cannot bend their emotions or their will. But you can mend your own. You can decide how you will react, and how you will feel. You are the master of your own ship. When you so firmly enmesh yourself in the imaginings of your jealousy you are giving away your power to that emotion. Those ideas in your head are fantasies. They are not real. They can never truly represent or understand what is actually occurring. So put them in a glass box. Examine where they come from. Why do you feel jealous? What is the cause of the jealousy? What is the purpose of the jealousy? How is it serving you right now? Realise that you cannot control the act of feeling jealous in the first instance. Something sparks it off and only then do you become aware of it. But now that you are aware of it, you can choose how to react.

What would have happened had I chosen to react differently? If I had tried my hardest to put aside my feelings and genuinely greet my friend? That hurt that he experienced would not have been caused by me, and he would not have retreated to behind his walls. And my jealous imagination would not have been validated. It would be disproved, giving me back the power. When we engage in this kind of conscious thought we can build strong, beautiful relationships because we make others feel safe. We allow them to learn to love us because we make them feel that we are a safe haven for their love and respect. Focus on what you’re doing instead of what you think they are doing.

Here’s a question for you to think about:

Are our emotions the consequences or the causes of how we are thinking?

Jealousy- in two parts. (1)

Genesis

Jealousy is probably the most creative emotion any human can conceive of. Even more so than love. It’s like a hot spark softly landing in a bed of dry sawdust. It smoulders for a second and then ignites- flames rapidly rising and consuming everything until there is nothing but ash and soot and choking smoke. And that’s how it always starts with me. A tiny spark.

I am no stranger to jealousy because it has a long history with me. We are like old opponents, wary of each other but comfortable in the other’s presence, that is, until we join battle again. But this time it surprised me. I can’t even remember clearly what the spark was. Being left out again? Or the idea that I had been lied to? No proof, but none needed. The flames are doing their work. And it’s oh-so-beautifully creative!! What started out as a slight disappointment grew into a simmering anger. And a simmering anger grew into a cold frustration, which grew into a desire to lash out.

In objective terms it starts with a perceived insult. It can be real or imagined, but your ego thinks that it has been hurt. You’re ignored or passed over for another person. Perhaps you’re not feeling wanted, or not feeling wanted enough. Perhaps you want what another is getting. And even, possibly, you want what you had before. But all of these wants share one thing in common- creative embellishment. Jealousy takes the mundane and makes it magical because in order for it to thrive it needs to make you think that you are inferior to the ‘other’. It needs you to believe that you are somehow being cheated of something you really want and need.

I wanted the attention. I wanted the love. I wanted the admiration, the time, the respect, the feeling of being wanted. I wanted to feel important to him. But he chose to spend his time with others. And my imagination filled in the blanks. In truth, he has every right. I do not have a sole mandate on his time, or his attention. He is another human with another life that is fully his own. And my imagination lied to me. When he went out, for a day- a single day in his whole span of life, in my whole span of life- my jealousy told me that he had chosen. It told me that all those things that I wanted were being given to another, to use or waste as they pleased. And my imagination told me that he was doing it because he really wanted to give it away to someone other than I. And my jealousy made up these wonderful fantasies of smiles and laughter and love between him and another- all because my jealousy took over my imagination. And my ego cried out in pain. And when it could cry no more, it rose up with a steely look in its eye and it went to sharpen its knife. It went to make plans of war. It sent out spies and it built a fort of hurt around it. And when it was ready it marched out to battle…

. . . To witness the bloody fight see part 2- Catharsis. . .

Love Thy Self, but not too much...

Sometimes it happens. Things come along that confuse you. For no particular reason you’re thrown into a world you don’t recognise. Its familiar but it’s not. As one character says in the film War Boys:

“It’s like I’m walking down a street, and I know it so well that I don’t even have to think about where I’m going. I’ve been down it a million times before. And then suddenly I realise that I’m in someplace new. Someplace I’ve never been before. But it feels like I’ve been here my whole life.”

And that’s exactly it. It’s that unknown that becomes your reality. It’s the natural change that happened of its own accord. And it scares you and intrigues you at the same time.

Things change between my friends and I. Sometimes it’s for the worse and sometimes for the better. But things do change. And at one stage I was afraid of that. I was afraid that it would mean the end of something or that the change would bring about a new way of being that might not live up to its past. But experience begins to teach me otherwise. Relationships are living organisms. They grow and mature. Sometimes they get ill and sometimes they recover from illness. Other times they die. But most importantly, they are alive with possibility. They happen at the level of change.

Probably hardest to deal with is the fact that a relationship is an interaction where both people can grow separately but not drift apart. My personhood, my identity, is not up for consumption by the other party. Nor are they my slave. I can only exist in a relationship if my boundaries are flexible but still present. The minute someone seeks to have a symbiotic relationship with me, they have lost the battle, and the war. I am one person and you are one person. I cannot know what you are thinking and you will never understand my motives completely. And this is not a sign of a failure but rather the sign of a healthy respect for the fact that you’re in a relationship with me as another human being. Symbiosis is essentially being in a relationship with yourself, which is pointless. When someone says to me ‘I know what you’re thinking’ or ‘we always think alike’ it reflects to me the notion that this person wants us to be symbiotic. It does not in any way represent reality. It represents their desire to be merged. An understandable desire, to be sure, but it is nothing more than a subconscious yearning to achieve personal validation. What better way to feel that your own opinions are justified than to find someone who completely agrees with you?

The inherent flaw in symbiotic relationships is that they are generally one-sided. One person gives and one person takes. One person becomes the emotional donor that sustains the other. One person wants to be completely in tune with the other in order to feel validated whilst the other tries their hardest to fulfil the role because they want to be needed. But in the end, the donor burns out. They cannot long withstand the constant demands on their energy, their personality, their essence or their love. And the partner is left wanting more.

Well, I have reached just such a stage. And I’d love to find a way through it that doesn’t involve running from the problem. I’d like to find the path of greatest growth, for both myself and my friend. And through it all I only hope that we can come to share a deeper love and a greater understanding of where we fit into each other’s lives, as individuals and on our common ground. And most importantly, I hope that in every relationship you and I come to realise the value of our own identity as well as the value of being able to love someone else for their own individuality. Because at the end of the day, the person you love should not be you.