Why do we get jealous?

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0:42I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast on the BBC. Last week, tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco streamed into Ceuta. It ignited a political storm in Europe and even here in the US. But who's really to blame? For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Complex, the psychology podcast that untangles the thoughts and feelings that shape our lives. I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a counselling psychologist and in today's episode, I'm exploring jealousy. Now, jealousy is an emotion none of us want to admit to. Jealousy is uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing.

1:32But what if jealousy isn't the villain we think it is? I've invited psychotherapist Jennifer Cox to stare the green-eyed monster in the face with me. So let me be your guide from the mouldy malt loaf of misinformation to the freshly baked baguette of understanding.

1:56Welcome back to the Complex Studio, Jennifer. Thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We have had some very excellent conversations about gaslighting and most recently about embarrassment. and listeners can find those episodes in the complex feed. So Jennifer, tell us a little bit about your work. So I am a psychotherapist. I present podcasts. I write books. And my favourite thing in the world is feelings, especially ones that are maybe less positive. A little tricky. Tricky, complicated, ones that don't necessarily have a great reputation. and if you don't mind when was the last time you were jealous that's a brilliant question I think women especially struggle with jealousy because I think we don't have as many straightforward outlets for feelings of competition so when I struggle it's feeling as if I haven't done my best work and I look at someone else and they, to me, seem to be doing great stuff out there.

3:11And I think that's where I feel a bit uncomfortable. Thank you very much for sharing that. I think this is going to be a very good conversation.

3:27before we go any further you know i love a definition let's talk about what actually is jealousy yeah i think it is important to define it because i think we get it muddled up a lot with envy but i think there's a sort of basic difference which is jealousy is maybe something a bit more territorial about a thing, an aspect, a facet of the self that you own, that you're worried someone else could take from you. Whereas envy is more about admiring something that belongs to another person or that is a feature of another person and maybe wanting to aspire to it. And both of these feelings, and of course we're focusing on jealousy, but we find them very uncomfortable, don't we?

4:15We really struggle with accepting them in ourselves. Yeah, we definitely do. There's something of shame around them, I think. Jealousy is quite a sort of embarrassing emotion to have to admit to because it does seem to give off some weakness and insecurity, even as you articulate it. I think that's a really good point. And it's actually a lovely moment for us to bring in our listener email. So this is someone that we're going to call Alex. I'm going to read out Alex's email. And Jennifer, of course, I'd love you to have a listen and tell me what you think. So Alex says, Hi Kimblee, I absolutely love the show.

4:57It's helped me in so many ways. I wondered if you'd do an episode on managing jealousy, or is it low self-esteem or competitiveness? The zero-sum game that maybe a lot of women experience. I love my friend. They are amazing and supportive, but I can sometimes feel jealousy and anger towards them. We have similar interests and are both creative. This should be a good thing, but I find it threatening. I like creative writing, and if I find out that they've been doing creative writing too, I instantly get a sinking feeling in my gut that whatever they have done will automatically be better than what I've done.

5:40This is the case over a lot of things. I never let them know and I always support them verbally but inside I'm angry. Jealousy is such a rotten feeling I feel slightly embarrassed writing about it. I just want to be wanting the best for everyone and at the same time minding my own business oh alex alex thank you so much for sharing that it's a really open and generous email yeah jennifer what feelings came out for you when you were listening to that it was so relatable i agree with you i think she was so brave and generous to write it because i know so many especially women are really going to relate to that um i think there's something particularly in the sort of creative fields, I think, where this can be very, very rife, because it's a really kind of subjective experience.

6:37But I think there is something about what she says in desperately wanting the other person to do well. It's not about wanting to kind of beat them, but it is about feeling really kind of thin-skinned oneself and not very sure of where we are and what we're producing. And that means that we kind of look at what the other person is doing, compare it and just find ourselves wanting. And so what I would say that this kind of takes us to is for me, this really important point about jealousy, which is, it's always about us. It's always about how we feel ultimately about ourselves, how secure we are, how valuable and valued we feel we are.

7:24And when we're feeling more bolstered and more robust, I don't think we're as plagued by it as when we're feeling less certain. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And that feels like a perfect starter for 10 for us to jump into the complexity.

7:45Jealousy, it's worth saying, is probably as old as we are. Even Shakespeare was writing about jealousy at the very beginning of the 1600s. And he's the one that actually coined the phrase that we use so often when we're talking about jealousy. Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. So jealousy and our feelings about it, our observations of it, are absolutely not new. and he knew that there was something kind of embarrassing or shameful about it as well and I just find that that observation so interesting oh it's so interesting yeah and I think maybe one of the things that makes it so difficult as an experience is not actually feeling comfortable to share it so you're battling something in again inside of yourself and I think the really useful thing to take from that is that if we can treat it as something going on in us as kind of first instance, although we're targeting it towards the other person and our feelings onto the other person, actually we need to bring them back and kind of scoop them back and really interrogate them within ourselves.

8:57What is this actually about? What is this actually telling me? And the research that we found shows that actually there's an age element to it. So younger adults especially experience particularly high levels of jealousy partly because of social media but especially around relationships and friendships so what do you think is going on there i think this comes down to the sort of feelings of insecurity essentially that maybe those times in our lives are at their most rife yes we're particularly anxious about our kind of place in the world, our sense of belonging, our risk of rejection, the opinions of our peers at that point in our lives.

9:41Yeah, it's definitely kind of a heightened time for that. But I think in general, we're susceptible to that our whole lives long. And there are definite times when it's worse than others. Yes. And we know that some people are more likely to feel relaxed and secure. but who are the people who are more likely to feel jealousy intensely? I think it probably has to do with our sense of self ultimately and if we have been lucky enough to have an upbringing that really engendered confidence and a kind of sense of stability and worth in us, like no matter what we were producing or doing or like how we were behaving, but just a sort of very low-key, understated championing.

10:36Are we entering the world of the secure attachment? That general sense of feeling kind of secure in the world, there is a place for me and we understand that that is set up by having a consistently caring, affectionate, responsive early life experience with parents and caregivers. This is the sort of subset that you would hope maybe wouldn't feel the kind of insidious tendrils in quite the same way as other people. Or maybe at points it's familiar to them, but they recover and they find themselves and it's not a sort of permanent state. And if we're thinking about Alex, who asked the question about, you know, is this low self-esteem or is it competitiveness?

11:20What is this jealousy kind of telling me? I do think that there's something about deprivation that sits in the middle of jealousy in a couple of ways. So either I have this precious thing, you know, the creative writing or the baking or the singing or whatever. And I don't want anybody to take that away from me. and then the flip side of that deprivation is that sense that someone is coming to come and take that from you like it makes me think about you know the mother-in-law who wears white at the wedding i mean this is the reality isn't it sometimes they are coming for that and i guess this is where it's not a crazy emotion it can be helpful but i think what Alex is talking about and what you're referring to with the idea of a sort of yeah privation around something internal something deep something that feels as if it's not been met with and and is hungry still I think it's probably something of a combination that she's experiencing because if it was to do with a sense of competition then then kind of fine I think it sits somewhere a bit differently doesn't it because it's something very endemic to her identity isn't it it feels as if it's dangerous somehow if that goes or if it's threatened or if someone else comes and makes that seem valueless then who is she really and that's what we want to find out and i think that's what she would want to find out.

13:11And of course, though, there is a dark side of jealousy. You know, if we guard what we have very tightly and we're very anxious and frightened about losing it, you know, maybe that's manageable if it's a new bag or a new umbrella or something that we don't want to share with somebody else. But it's not okay if that's a romantic partner or something like that. Yeah, I think we do need to watch for this. In the first instance, if we are with any strong feeling, bringing it straight back to us and sort of putting it through the filter of who is this really about what is this really touching on why is this umbrella slash person so absolutely intrinsic to me and my feeling of worth and my identity why is it that I feel without them or if their presence is threatened to me I might not survive it ultimately as I think this is where the dark side comes in is that it can feel that extreme, can't it?

14:19And I think there's something a little bit insidious when we come to thinking about relationship jealousy or what some podcasts are calling mate guarding. You're kind of coming back to the kind of evolutionary psychology and saying, these are natural behaviours. You guard your mate, you guard your partner because it's natural and because other animals do it, that it's a normal behaviour that doesn't need to be modified or thought about or interrogated. And I think that's quite dangerous because it adds a level of justification to a behavior which is actually, I think, fundamentally harmful. You know, we need to have relationships of trust.

15:01We need to allow people to have other relationships and not to convince ourselves that, you know, our jealousy is justified because of some ancient evolutionary script that we're still reading from. Yeah, I think you're really right about that. There's a reason we have a prefrontal cortex, right? Exactly. It's in order to put a break on these sorts of behaviours and allow us to think long term and in a thoughtful way. Yeah, I agree with you here. And I think part of that thinking, again, needs to be refocused on the self because I think it's all too easy. yes there's the kind of territorial guarding aspect but there's also this idea of what's this other person that is out for my partner what what is their kind of architecture and i think that level of distrust and sort of suspicion again has to say more about us and what we're feeling maybe towards our partner what we're projecting onto this person as a imagined view he's so attractive or she's so attractive.

16:06Imagined or even kind of historic. So, you know, when people say, oh, the reason I'm jealous in this relationship is because I was betrayed in a previous relationship. And yes, it is devastating. It is heartbreaking to be betrayed. And it's incredibly painful and it's important to process, but it's not okay to project that onto a new person and make them responsible for processing or reassuring you out of something that you haven't kind of worked through from a previous relationship. That's so right. And what you say there about responsibility, I think is key with jealousy, actually, because it would be very easy for us all to go around sort of calling other people names and deciding that they've got malicious intent.

16:57Much easier to do that if that kind of part of our brain is the thing that's guiding us but actually if we if we try to click on the prefrontal and use that to maybe check some of those reflexes and you know even as Alex did sort of question and and put it through a bit the mill of our own mind and what what is this really saying it's it's more interesting apart from anything else

17:29so if we were to put jealousy on a scale at what point does jealousy stop being a normal healthy emotion and start becoming damaging i think maybe it's to do with amount of time you're spending in those zones of functioning okay so at the healthy end Healthy end, it's fleeting. We can't avoid it. I just think it's there partially like any feeling to signify something. So a little twinge of jealousy might be quite useful as a signifier. Okay, maybe I need to work harder. I need to buckle down if I want different outcomes. Where I think it stops being so useful and edges towards this unhealthier sort of area, I think it's when we're mostly just saying it's everyone else's fault and they're the problem.

18:24Because it becomes so consuming, you know, you're preoccupied with the thing that's going to be taken away from you and then how you're going to try to prevent it being taken away from you. And then all of your resources end up just being focused on this tiny part of your world and it's almost as if everything else kind of fades to black. It's so true, isn't it? And it's such a, I mean, I don't want to say waste of your life, but it could become that way. You can see how if it really got kind of gnarly and very concretised, it would be something to hide behind. And also just sucking the joy out of your life.

19:08And yes, they do say, don't they, that comparison is the thief of joy. I think there is definitely something beyond useful once we're getting into these stakes.

19:22Okay, so let's say that there's someone listening who is grappling with their jealousy. What do they actually do? Because it's not quite as easy as saying, just try not to feel so jealous. I think, see it as an opportunity, actually. It's a moment to pause and really deep dive inside of you where this is coming from. Why is this your response? I think a decent self-interrogation can work wonders at points like this. You also have to be open to the possibility that what you're feeling is jealousy because it's one of those emotions that is so looked down upon and so shameful. And, you know, sometimes I think we kind of talk ourselves out of those sorts of emotions.

20:19It's too grubby. It's too grubby and dirty and beneath me to be jealous. You're right, actually. And a couple of times I've found personally that it can be really useful to tell people that you're feeling a bit jealous of. Of them? Yeah. Is that such a renegade thing to say? Convince me. It obviously depends on your relationship with them. But I think if it's a close friend, for example, I think it's kind of fine. I really encourage a kind of internal monologue anyway. But I think if we're really good and get better at digesting and identifying our own feelings, then actually we also get better at finding words for them.

21:09And that means that when we're trying to speak honestly to good friends whose relationships can take it or a partner, I think it can feel really quite easy to let that system of functioning cross over into the world of the relationship and share more than you might have previously you're not convinced no no no i'm coming i'm literally like playing it out in my mind and one of the things that happens isn't that we we think we're the only one struck down with these difficult emotions these embarrassing shameful emotions and it's actually as soon as you open up about that little vulnerable part of you yeah someone says oh no me too and i've like loved your hair since we've met and and suddenly it just takes the intensity out of it yeah it takes the power it does that's what it does yeah and I think it could actually be a really lovely foundation for deepening the trust and I'm trusting you enough not to um use that against me to kind of shame me for it to belittle me for it no I think I think you might be onto something I It might be, might not.

22:19And I think if you say that, if you begin that conversation, then it also, it paves the way for you to take responsibility ultimately and say, it's uncomfortable because you are kind of the focus of where this is sitting for me. But I do understand that it's a me problem and I need to sort it out in myself. But as you were talking about sharing, I could hear a collective intake of breath from listeners. The horror. The horror. So if that's not appropriate, available, or you just don't want to, I think it's also worth saying that I think you can come back to two of my favorite skills, which are distress tolerance.

22:59You know, can I sit with this uncomfortable feeling? Yeah. This less attractive part of myself. Can I tolerate it and integrate it into a broader image of me. It doesn't make me a bad person. It just makes me a human grappling with the idiosyncrasies and confusions of the world. And then can I apply some self-compassion? If Shakespeare was talking about this 400 years ago, then I'm not the only one to be going through this. And so maybe I can just cut myself a bit of slack. Kimberly, that was actually so beautiful. And I completely agree with you. The need to sit in the uncomfortable and tolerate it, bear it, that is part of the human condition.

23:46That is humaning. We're stuck with it. Why not, in a way, find some humor in it? And I think there's something about that shared experience of jealousy that actually is quite bonding. And even if you're not saying it to the person it's about, you can say it more generally with other people who get it. So be open to the possibility of these more tricky emotions. Identify them. Yeah. We're thinking interrogate them in some way. And maybe that's internally. Maybe that's in your journal. Maybe that's with some maybe a therapeutic intervention like CBT. And then depending on the quality of the relationship, as long as it's safe, as long as it kind of feels appropriate, you might venture upskill bonus points if you can share that piece of information about yourself with someone.

24:44Thank you, Jennifer. What I love about a conversation like this is that we dive in to the murky parts that for the most part, we want to just ignore, pretend don't exist. But there's always this aspect of ourselves. You know, none of us is 100 % shiny, bright and perfect. but what we can aspire to is a little bit of honesty a little bit of introspection and I think the end goal of that is integration where we can be honest and accepting yeah of who we are all of ourselves and I think if you can get to that point actually it is so freeing yeah I agree be curious about it be interested in it

25:34Thank you, Jennifer. It has been a pleasure as always. Thank you so much. I've loved it. And thank you to everyone listening. We love to hear from you. You are part of the conversation. So please email us your stories in a paragraph to complex at bbc.co.uk. But do note that I can't answer you personally. So if you have a concern about a medical or mental health issue, then I strongly urge you to seek expert help. And if you want details of further support with some of the issues raised in the podcast, you can find them at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line. And the link is also in the show notes on BBC Sounds.

26:16And that is it. Thank you again to my guest, psychotherapist Jennifer Cox and to Alex. Thank you very much for your email. And lastly, thank you to the lovely production team at Loftus Media.

26:58I'm Kimberly Wilson. Thank you very much for listening. Take care and go gently.

27:29With a team of all-female detectives, I'll explore the lives at the centre of some extraordinary courtroom dramas. Asking, has the justice system truly changed? Lady on Trial with Lucy Worsley from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

27:51President Trump has described the surge of migrants into Spain as an invasion. But what really happened in the tiny Spanish enclave known as Ceuta? I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast on the BBC. Last week, tens of thousands of migrants from Morocco streamed into Ceuta. It ignited a political storm in Europe and even here in the US. But who's really to blame? For more, listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.