Learning How To Not Be Jealous

Changing the emotional reaction of jealousy and learning not to be jealous requires addressing several reactions stemming from several beliefs. Not everyone’s mixture of emotions and beliefs will be the same, but there are some belief programs that are consistent. You might not identify all these beliefs as some of your beliefs might still be unconscious to you. Solving the problem of a jealous reaction is easier when you break it down into smaller problems. Each supporting belief and emotional cycle is a smaller problem. Here are some of the dynamics of Jealousy that can be addressed in the Self Mastery course process for changing beliefs and emotions.  

Click here to read more about How not to be Jealous of Your Friends here. 

How jealousy begins – the mind projects an imagined event

If you are trying to learn how to not be jealous you must first understand that jealousy has a projected assumption in the mind. The mind is assuming and creating an imagined scenario. In that imagined scenario your partner is cheating, or will cheat. The emotional to this imagined scenario can be so strong that it acts like a magnetic field pulling you into feeling. Once in the field of emotion you are experiencing the scenario like it has already happened. The strength of the emotion acts to warp perception and make it difficult to discern what is real. Imagined scenarios now “feel” real.

Where is this jealousy coming from? Here is a possible source. 

One of the key elements of changing the jealousy reaction is to pull yourself out of this magnetic field of emotions. What is the part of you that is in this magnetic field now unable to discern imagined scenario from reality? It is your attention and your perspective. An important step for change is to get control over your attention, and point of view. You want to be able to see this projected story in your mind from a neutral observer perspective. From an observer perspective you will see it as something your mind is generating and not as reality.

When your perspective is in an imagined scenario, and you feel the emotions of that scenario strongly, it will feel as if the imagines scenario is real. When your perspective is in this emotional point of view, the imagined scenario will also look real.

Emotional pain as an outcome

The emotional system responds the same to an imagined scenario as it does to a real one. The imagined event of being cheated results in emotional responses and pain. This is just from imagining your partners attention going to someone else. The emotional mixture will vary by individual. There may be varying feelings of abandonment, fear, rejection, hurt, anger, and insecurity. It depends on how many conscious and unconscious beliefs are injecting meaning into the event. If your mind adds the element of comparison to this other person, there may be a feeling of unworthiness or feeling “less than”. There may be a feeling of betrayal as a commitment or trust of monogamy feels like it is being broken, even if the scenario is only imagined.

Fear from various beliefs

Jealousy usually has an element of fear. You may fear your partner will cheat or is cheating so much and you fear the emotional pain you would respond with. You might also fear how you could appear to others by “looking like a fool.” This fear comes up fast and can be part of your fight or flight defensive warning system. This natural fear response is being hijacked by the imagined projection scenario. Again, the emotional response is the same for imagined scenarios as it is for the real thing.

Here is one of the reasons for fear. The mind functions with a predictive mechanism trying to imagine possible futures and warn us if we might get hurt. It projects possible outcomes so that we can avoid them. “It imagines stepping out into the street and getting hit by a car. It informs us of pain and gives us a fear of this painful outcome.” The result is that we don’t step out into the street. The painful outcome has been avoided and it has done its job. This is good for survival and has kept us alive as a species until now, but it may not be working correctly in a jealousy situation.

The fear the mind generates is not based on reality. The fear and emotions may be so big it feels like our life is in danger when in fact our partner is completely faithful. It is important to note that the amount of emotional reaction you feel is not a measurement of reality. Emotions are created from imagined events as well. We experience emotions when we watch movies, read books or dream at night. It’s one of the reasons we enjoy movies, we have emotional experiences from the movie projection. The projection on the screen, or in your mind isn’t real, but the emotions you create as response are real.

Building your self-awareness will give you the power over your perspective and attention to discern when your mind is projecting a false scenario.

Anger or some type of controlling behavior

Once the mind has projected the scenario, the emotion and nervous system respond as if it has happened. Those emotional pains cause your system to invoke a response to defend against the pain. You now must protect yourself against this pain, or stop the event causing this pain from happening in the future. In the survival fight or flight state we use the primal methods of control such as anger. This anger and controlling behavior are often directed at your partner. The drive to control him or her is usually equivalent to the amount of emotional pain we are imagining for our self.

The shortcut of a jealous reaction is that you could get angry at your partner for smiling at someone, laughing at their joke, or looking at someone else as they walked by. The movie of abandonment and betrayal in your head can be played in fractions of a second. Your survival system fighting to stop the pain directs you to anger before you realized your beliefs projected painful rejection and abandonment into your unconscious.

The conscious part of your mind doesn’t see how the unconscious projected the internal scenario and created its own pain. It doesn’t register how much of the scenario played out internally and was that the pain was self-inflicted. If you are unaware of these dynamics in your beliefs and emotions, you assume your partner caused the pain. You noticed their behavior, laughing or talking with someone, and you notice your emotions. You assume their behavior directly created your emotions. It wasn’t direct. Your belief system, conscious and unconscious inserted meanings of rejection, abandonment, other meanings to their behavior and flashed some painful emotions.

Without the understanding of how the internal beliefs create emotions there can be a rationalization that the anger is appropriate or justified.

Insecurity – a false identity

Running scenarios in the imagination that cause jealous responses in your emotions can start from a feeling of insecurity. Such scenarios also result in a feeling of insecurity. In a way you end up at an exaggerated emotion of what you started with. In the virtual world in your mind you are being left, rejected, and disrespected. It is important to understand this is happening in your internal world of beliefs and emotions. You are not only creating strong emotions and narratives of a story, but also creating a false persona of your identity in the jealousy narrative. Your mind falsely projects your partner as a villain who is hurting you. Your mind your false identity as inadequate to generate insecurity. It can also project your identity as a victim that is hurt and powerless.

Your mind is casting you as a victim identity and your consciousness can be tricked into believing you are this identity. Again, these are perspective and attention issues to be addressed. It is somewhat like being hypnotized by your mind with this suggested scenario of jealousy. The result is that you don’t feel like yourself, and you don’t think in the same rational way you would in other areas of your life. This hypnotized state of beliefs causes you to feel, think, and behave as a victim and as an angry person. This means amplified feelings of fear, powerlessness, and hurt. The Self Mastery course helps you work through these false persona’s by becoming the witness observer of them using specific exercises.

The false persona you see yourself as may have different qualities and emotions. Read more on our article “What is wrong with me?”. 

Self Judgment for Overreacting

After you have done an emotional cycle of jealousy, whether it is just a suspicion, or you went to full blown anger, there is often the rational part of your brain that will watch your behavior and know that you are overreacting. If you have a lot of awareness, you will be able to observe and know this while it is happening. If your awareness is not yet that strong, then you will have this observer rational perspective later in the day, or the next day.

After this rational assessment occurs, the Inner Critic (Judge) takes that information and turns it into a self-criticism. This might be very harsh, or it might not. One of the results of self-criticism is that it can create feelings of shame and guilt. If the Judge condemnation is very strong and berates you suffer more emotions of unworthiness, shame and guilt. When you feel this down on yourself, it is hard to imagine that your partner, or anyone, would want to be with you. From this victim perspective and emotional state, it is easier to imagine that they would want to be with someone else. This victim identity experience of insecurity from self-judgment and can feed into the next jealousy cycle.

While the Judge might claim that it is berating you for overreacting and acting like it is somehow helping you get better, it isn’t. It is driving your psyche to an insecure victim state of mind that is often a precursor to more emotions of jealousy. Self-judgment in any aspect of this process adds to the jealousy cycle instead of helping.

Jealousy is an emotional cycle

As you can see the jealousy cycle isn’t a single thought, belief, or emotion. It is a system that loops back to the beginning and reinforces itself as a stronger belief and emotional reaction each time it is not addressed with adequate awareness and perspective.

To effectively address jealousy and be rid of it you will want to these various elements of the jealousy pattern. The Self Mastery course exercises will effectively walk you through changing all these parts of your mind including the perspectives, sense of identity, attention, emotions, beliefs, and negative thinking.

Struggling with the exercises? Here is some advice.