Jealousy
might not exist
I just returned from a Human Awareness Institute workshop called Loving Yourself, the second in a series. As it happened, my ride there seemed a bit preoccupied with each other, come Sunday, so I ended up hitching a ride home with another fairly recent acquaintance. We spent the next hour and a half talking workshop takeaways, relationships and other hearty matters. Conversation flowed, via how the social conditioning about relationships work where we each grew up, to how we independently found we enjoy relationships that come from a place of freedom of choice (the foundation all the HAI workshops build upon) rather than from commitments that resemble ownership structures.
Many topics later, I found myself describing a subtlety about how any concept with a commonly understood name gets a kind of implicit legitimacy, a trap in human language. Much like how not all questions are legitimate and meaningful to think about, I think we have many really well-known concepts that are lazy cop-outs, like how it would be lazy science to “explain” any not yet understood phenomenon with “it is God’s work”. My belief is that jealousy is one of these cop-outs.
In my view, jealousy is a territory, not a feeling — a range of emotions that have a definite quality of unpleasantness to them — and as such, are a tempting matter to run away from without further introspection about what is under the lid. By labeling it, it gets easier to pretend that we’re done here — nothing more to see or understand — “it’s just jealousy”. And in typical Christio-western culture at large (especially if you just look at its portrayal in media, like in movies or soap operas), it is commonly even disowned by the person feeling it, externalized and blamed on whatever person or situation that was the trigger for the person feeling it. Somebody Else’s Problem, in other words — “I feel jealous when you do X, so you should not do X”.
I think I sometimes feel what people call jealousy, but I don’t settle for a cop-out explanation about a feeling that causes me discomfort. Unlike a scientist’s theory about some natural phenomenon that lets us make predictions like “if we do X, we should observe Y”, having named some uncomfortable feeling “jealousy” does not help me go to the source of it and address the problem to resolve the discomfort, or maybe even avoid having it show up again, next time whatever happened happens again. Naming things mostly just lets us convey our pain, at best to seek comfort and support around it, at worst to just dump it on someone else, as if it was their problem to fix for us.
I can’t think of a time in my life when my jealousy could not be traced to an unmet need of mine. Feeling needy is just one of those things we are trained to feel ashamed about, and isn’t it much nicer to stop at just being jealous, rather than being needy? Needy has a very bad rap, but a little jealousy, that might not even be our fault, right? Much comfier.
Needs make us human. Understanding, owning and meeting our needs is the process of growing up and becoming a high-functioning, adult, human being. This requires tools, work and diligent practice. Just the kind of work and tooling we practiced during this weekend workshop.
And then my driver, just off the cuff, not necessarily contending my theory, offered another speculation about jealousy, which never had occurred to me. What if jealousy just is what flows from ownership?
