Jealousy Explained
Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from http://www.ThrivingNow.com(and founder of http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com) discuss the different aspects of jealousy and how understanding the “8-arms” of jealousy can add ease and deepen connection.
To learn more: http://www.thrivingnow.com/8arms-jeal…
Cathy: This is Cathy Vartuli from http://ThrivingNow.com. I’m here with Reid Mihalko from http://ReidAboutSex.com. We’re talking about jealousy.
Reid: This is video three. There are two other videos if you have not seen them.
Cathy: They stand alone, but you’re welcome to watch them — they’re fun!
Reid: Watch all three.
Cathy: Yes. I never knew that jealousy had eight arms. Could you explain that?
Reid: This came out of a conversation with a good friend of mine who is a psychologist who teaches other psychologists, we’ll call her Dr. Beth. We got to talking about jealousy, she was somebody who would experience it a lot. We really started geeking out and she was also a research scientist so she started researching other studies on jealousy and found that there were these basic — all these studies were different and created differently and they were starting to fall into different patterns.
Some would study sense of loss. Some would study jealousy around a sense of insecurity. Other people were making distinctions between jealousy and envy and feelings of inferiority and all of this stuff, and she realized that there were basically about eight categories that jealousy was falling into, because in the science world jealousy was a conglomeration of a bunch of different emotions.
Cathy: And if you don’t distinguish different aspects, we always talk about with tapping, if you don’t go to the specific aspect it’s very hard to untangle it.
Reid: Yes.
Cathy: So if you’re lumping everything together it’s going to be harder. It’s going to be a mess.
Reid: It’s going to be very complicated and overwhelming, because you can’t sort out what’s actually going on.
Cathy: And it’s harder to identify your own needs about it.
Reid: And it’s way harder to identify your own needs when you’re in the emotional soup that’s happening. And this is why I think in our culture because we don’t talk about jealousy enough, and we try to avoid it because it’s so monstrous, this is why nobody can get any traction, any headway, because when it comes for you is the only time you really think to work on it, and once it’s got you, you’re screwed. So the idea of breaking jealousy down into these eight different categories, and in my genius moment I thought, “It has eight arms, it’s an octopus.”
Cathy: Octopus kind of pull at you and entangle you and that’s what jealousy does.
Reid: When you start figuring out what the arms are, and not everybody gets pulled on by all eight arms, sometimes it’s only three.
But once you start to figure out what those arms are, and then you look under those fears and needs, you’ll think, “How can I lessen the fear? How can I make it safer? And then how can I get those needs met.” Then the arms will let go of you.
The idea that most people — if all your needs are getting met, in a relationship, at work, whatever, family member, because jealousy is not always a romantic thing, when you have all your needs getting met, it’s rare that you experience jealousy. But we don’t walk around thinking, “Wow, I’m not feeling jealous today. This is amazing. I wonder why I’m not feeling jealous.” What happens is we’re thinking, “La la la la,” — jealousy, RAWRRRR!!! And we’re, “AAAHHH!” And you can’t figure it out then.
Cathy: If you can identify what your triggers for jealousy are, you can tell your partner, or your boss, your friend, what you need. Instead of them flowing around saying, “I don’t know what you want.” You can just say, “You know, Reid, you did a great job today, I really appreciate that.”
Reid: Then I feel reassured and my sense of security is restored and then I can celebrate the fact that my partner at work got a promotion. It might still sting, but then I’m realizing, “Oh, that’s envy, not jealousy,” and then you’re halfway through deactivating it.
Cathy: If you can tell people in your life what you need, if you’ve identified that, it makes it so much easier for them to feel like a success and for you to get what you need.
Reid: Yes. And then basically jealousy becomes like an asthma attack, you can stop the attack, and then when you’re really good, you get your needs met ahead of time, and you can avoid your triggers, like those of us who have asthma, you can avoid your triggers and then the black belt version is once you learn how to avoid your triggers, which we’ll talk about in the calls, you can start inoculating yourself and deactivating those triggers. And that’s where tapping is super awesome.
Cathy: Right. So come back for the next video.