#280: Why You Feel Jealous About Your Partner's Past (& How to Navigate It)

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1:33In today's episode, we are talking all about navigating jealousy in relationships and in particular retroactive jealousy, which is a term describing jealousy about the past and generally jealousy about a partner's past. And this is something that a lot of people struggle with, particularly people with anxious attachment patterns, who we know, and as we'll talk about today tend to experience a baseline sensitivity to any threats to the relationship. And that can really naturally manifest in experiencing a lot of jealousy and perceiving those threats everywhere you look, including in a partner's history.

2:13But all of that is, of course, made more complicated by the fact that the past is the past. There's nothing we can do about it. And so oftentimes we're grappling with this simultaneous comparison and insecurity about something that happened before we knew our partner, but equally we have an awareness that we can't reasonably have a problem with that because it was before our partner had any loyalty or obligation to us. And so there is this sort of irrational fear coupled with an awareness that we're maybe being unreasonable. And so that can lead us to experience a lot of shame and self-doubt while still being preoccupied with whatever the object of our retroactive jealousy is.

2:53So in today's episode, we're going to unpack some of those pieces, why you might really struggle with this, what might be sitting underneath it and what you might look to focus on within yourself and within your relationship so that jealousy and retroactive jealousy doesn't have such a chokehold on you. because I know it can feel really overwhelming and can really undermine your sense of security within the relationship to be in that mode of constant comparison and feeling like you have to gather all of this information about your partner's past and that there are threats everywhere, including in their previous relationships or their previous encounters.

3:31So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get into today's episode, a quick reminder, perhaps if you are newer to the podcast or to my work that I have a whole host of free resources on my website, including free trainings on how to heal anxious attachment and finally feel secure in life and love. I have a free breakup training. So if you're going through a breakup or you've been through a breakup recently and you're struggling to let go and process, I have free downloads. I have a free quiz, all sorts of things. If you want to dig in a little deeper to this work, that is a great place to start, obviously, in addition to the almost 300 podcast episodes over the past four and a half years.

4:09So feel free to check that out. It's all linked in the show notes, or you can just head to stephanierig.com. Okay. So let's talk about retroactive jealousy, why it's there, why it can feel so all-consuming for some of us, and what you should focus on if you want to shift away from feeling so overrun with this jealousy about a partner's past. Now, I always want to offer the disclaimer in any conversation about jealousy, whether it's retroactive or your present day jealousy, that if there are actual known breaches of trust, instances of secrecy or other inappropriate things going on in the relationship, then I think we have to put that in its own category of jealousy in the sense that jealousy is a really natural and even healthy emotional response to the existence of genuine threats to the relationship or things being kept from you or your partner not being honest or forthcoming about other people who might be on the scene and any blurred boundaries around that.

5:11So if that's the situation that you are finding yourself in, maybe even with respect to a partner's ex, if they've still got quite a close relationship and that feels uncomfortable, that's not really what I'm talking about today. I think that's more of a trust and a boundaries problem than it is a retroactive jealousy problem that resides with you. And so what I'm going to be talking about today is more of the chronic background, constant jealousy that you've experienced probably across different relationships that feels like it's just a near constant companion and that you sense is maybe more to do with your own insecurity than it is anything that your partner is doing or not doing.

5:52So it's not to discount that kind of jealousy. It's just to put that in a separate category because I will invariably get people who say, but what if my partner's doing all of these things? And I would never want to suggest that you just have to focus on your own stuff and ignore if there are actual boundary breaches or other inappropriate behaviors going on that need to be addressed. So just offering that caveat or that disclaimer at the top of the episode so that we're all on the same page about what we're actually talking about. So with that being said, what we're actually talking about is, as I said, that kind of chronic background jealousy, that sense of monitoring and surveillance and comparison just lurking beneath the surface for you.

6:34And anyone who you interact with, who your partner interacts with, whether it's their colleagues, whether it's their exes, you feel this sense of sizing people up and watching how your partner is around them and how they are around your partner and comparing that to yourself and almost examining everyone in the field through this lens of threat detection and assessment. And that is oftentimes a function of our own patterns, our own insecurities that tell us that our partner will leave us at a moment's notice if they have an opportunity and that tell us that we are less than, that we are inadequate, that we are unlovable, that we are not enough or we are too much.

7:17And when we really struggle to see our own value, then naturally we are prone to comparison and those comparisons tend to look really unfavorable for us and we put everyone else on a pedestal and then we can't understand why our partner's chosen us. We can't really take in their love and we struggle to trust them and we certainly struggle to trust others. So the combination of those factors, that fear of abandonment, that sense of unworthiness, those pieces can collide and create this very combustible combination that is jealousy. And a lot of people with anxious attachment patterns will experience fairly crippling jealousy.

7:52I certainly used to. When I was in my early twenties, in previous relationships, I used to struggle with this a lot. Everything that I've just described, a feeling like everyone was a potential threat that I couldn't really understand why my partner would choose me if they were given the choice and could choose someone else. And so I was very wary of anyone that either of us came into contact with. And there was this sense that I really had to keep an eye on those things, even in the absence of my partner doing anything wrong or untrustworthy, that fear really lived within me. And it was very hard to shake.

8:29And in the context of retroactive jealousy, I would obsessively compare myself to my partner's exes. I would find out everything I could about these people that my partner had loved and been intimate with, because that felt like not even a hypothetical threat. It's not like taking a second look at the person making your coffee and trying to figure out if your partner finds them attractive. This is a person who you know that your partner has found attractive, has loved, has wanted to be with, and particularly if that's been for an extended period of time, if they were in a long-term relationship, it makes sense that your threat detector sees that person as particularly dangerous.

9:08Even if there's no ongoing relationship, even if there's nothing untoward, there can be this sense that that person is a verified competitor to me because I know that my partner loved them. And that can feel really uncomfortable. The idea that your partner could love anyone else, could be attracted to anyone else, could want to be intimate with anyone else. Naturally, that person emerges as someone that you are going to compare yourself to if you struggle with this in this way. I think there can be some other extenuating factors as well, which were present for me in that pretty much all bar one of my long-term partners had been with many more people than I had.

9:50And so there was this asymmetry in experience and how many partners they'd had. And that felt again, threatening to me because when I was starting from this place of self-doubt and insecurity and low self-worth, there was this fear that they were going to want to continue to have casual relationships or that they weren't going to want to fully choose me because they would want to keep their options open. Again, there was nothing in the relationship to suggest that that was true at all, that that was my insecurity and that scared voice within me that felt threatened by the fact that they'd had those casual encounters in the past and, you know, fear that they would want to have them again.

10:30And that just sat there as another potential threat to my relationship with these people. So I offer all of that in part to validate that I get it. If this is something you struggle with, and I know that a lot of people do because I receive questions about it all the time, then it makes sense because it does really touch into, and as I said, like create a bit of a cocktail of a lot of our deeper insecurities and fears. But I think that's part of why we've got to look at it through that lens and realize that this is an inside job and it's not something that we can solve in isolation because people will always ask, well, how do I solve or how do I stop being jealous about my partner's past?

11:10And treating it as a siloed issue that exists separate from all of the other bits and pieces that you might be struggling with in your relationship, that's just not realistic because it is a branch off the tree. It is an extension of those other deeper wounds and fears that you carry, that you are not good enough, that your partner doesn't really love you, isn't really choosing you, that they're not really committed to you. And again, going back to that caveat, if there are other pieces within the relationship that would reinforce that story, if there is uncertainty, if there aren't healthy, open conversations about the future and all of those things that might contribute to a sense of fear about whether you're being fully chosen, that all make sense.

11:55But I think we do have to look at the big picture and go like, what is my work here? And for a lot of people who struggle with this chronically, your work is building self-worth. And that is why I feel a bit like a broken record, but so much of what I teach comes back to that as the starting point, because it's the thing that makes everything else feel easier, feel more secure and feel clearer. So it's not like building self-worth will solve all of your relational problems, but it will give you a sense of clarity about whether those problems were mainly residing with you or whether there were problems within the relationship that knew your attention.

12:33Your capacity to solve them relationally is going to be vastly increased once you focused on building self-worth. Because if you are coming from this very jealous, insecure, paranoid place, your ability to navigate relational problems is going to be infused with that energy and it's not going to land well because you're going to have this desperate clinging, why won't you choose me? Why do you find that person attractive? You still love them, don't you? And people don't respond well to that, of course. And then we feel a lot of shame because we can kind of see ourselves self-destructing in real time, but we feel powerless to stop.

13:07So for all of those reasons, I really encourage you to start viewing this not as a jealousy problem, but as a self-worth problem. and I use the term problem there but really it's like oh this is inviting me to do some work around becoming a person that I'm proud of being, person I'm comfortable being, a person that I like so that I can really believe hand on heart that my partner sees my value, that my partner loves me and that's not something that I have to question because I'm coming from this place of really not liking myself, not respecting myself and so I can't really believe that anyone else would see me in that way.

13:43And so that is so much of our work because until we can anchor into that felt sense of like, yes, I am a valuable person and I don't have to question why someone would love me because I'm not operating from this place of self-devaluation, then all of the threats to the relationship naturally start to soften because we're not on such high alert. We're not feeling like, oh, my partner's going to leave me and I'm desperately afraid of abandonment and rejection because that would confirm all my worst fears. And I'm not good enough and I'm not lovable and I'm not whatever enough, all of that noise, it might not completely go away, but it stops being so overpowering and it sort of fades to the background.

14:20And in its place is this sense of comfort within yourself that allows you to navigate all of this in a more level-headed way, rather than being so blinded by fear. And from personal experience, I can share that it's completely a non-issue for me anymore. I don't feel at all jealous about my partner's past relationships, it feels completely irrelevant to our relationship. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with anything. It's just part of the journey that my partner has been on. And now we're in a relationship and that's fine. That's not something that I could have said 10 years ago.

14:56I really struggled very much as I said, but I do think that the thing that changed was not, I mean, the relationships changed, but it wasn't because of that. It was me that changed. And I became much more comfortable in who I am such that I wasn't questioning why my partner would want to be with me relative to other people that they've been with. And so I really do think that that's the crux of the work. And that's like where the solution lies. It's not like a direct, how do I fix this problem in isolation? It's how do I tend to the underlying wound that then solves for all of these different expressions or manifestations of that wound, including jealousy and retroactive jealousy.

15:37And I should say, I think I alluded to it at various points there, but shaming yourself for being jealous is absolutely not helpful. Shaming yourself for any expression of your fear is not helpful and will only make it worse because you're essentially beating yourself up when you're already feeling very low and very vulnerable and very insecure. And that's only going to entrench you in those patterns of fear and reactivity. So just to be very clear when I say like, this is an inside job. That's not saying you are a problem or you need to fix yourself. It's just realizing like, oh, this is reflecting back to me some pieces within me that need my care and attention, that need compassion, that need my support rather than I'm the problem and I need to fix myself because that mentality only keeps us stuck.

16:22It only makes us feel worse, more insecure. It only adds to the burden of shame that drives all these patterns in the first place. So don't feel badly about yourself if this is something that you struggle with. Just see it as a trailhead pointing you to what needs your attention. And that's a really beautiful gift that you can give to yourself. Okay. Sending you lots of love. I hope this has been helpful. If you're listening on Spotify, feel free to leave a comment, follow the show on YouTube, do subscribe to my channel. That's super helpful. Anywhere else do whatever you can. Thank you as always for being here and for your support.

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17:52best dressed. Make your move. Order on the Sweet Green app. Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall find fall your way at Ross again next time