Let's Talk About Jealousy

Along with anger, jealousy is probably the most misunderstood human emotion. We're simply not "supposed" to be jealous. Ever. If we are, we're considered crazy and bad dating material. But, of course, it's never that simple, and jealousy exists as an emotion because it's trying to tell us something. As someone who has always struggled with jealousy, I know firsthand how damaging it can be, so I'm not advocating just letting our jealous streaks run roughshod over our relationships, but I think jealousy deserves a better, deeper understanding.

At its core, jealousy is fear of loss. The common wisdom is that it's about insecurity, which may be true in some cases, but deeper than that, jealousy is about the fear of losing something you value.  If you think about it, jealousy is never even that unfounded, because, given the rate of divorce, and the fact that in non-marriage relationships, breakups are even more common than in marriages, at some point, we will most likely lose our partner. So jealousy is about fear of something that is almost inevitable. Whether we will lose our partner to that person he's talking to at the party or not, eventually, we know, we will lose him, even if only to death.

In a letter I once wrote to an ex-lover, I explained how my feelings of jealousy, deep, deep down, were rooted in a fear of death, a fear if being obliterated, of winking out like a quenched candle flame, to be replaced by someone else. The fear of literally not existing anymore, at least in the mind and imagination of my beloved. This might seem overwrought and dramatic, but if you're someone who's felt intense jealousy, remember how it feels in your mind and your body. It feels like terror, like looking down into an abyss.

Humans are meant to connect, we, quite literally cannot live without one another. When we're adults, we can survive without others, but we can't  live. People in solitary confinement, if they're not careful to engage their minds, go crazy. Even if they do manage to come out of it with their sanity intact, it was never a pleasant experience. We need each other. Period. In jealousy, our deep fear of being obliterated in the mind of someone we love is about the fear of losing our connections to others, about being unimportant, rejected, banished by our tribe to wander the desolate wastelands, alone. Jealousy taps directly into the well of the most intense, uncomfortable, difficult-to-sit-with emotions that humans can experience. It's no wonder it's so hard to deal with and makes us so crazy.

In a jealous moment, can we feel what's under our reaction to that one person, that one situation, and come in contact with this seething mixture of terror, fear of abandonment and rejection, fear of loss? Can we open our hearts to it, a little bit more each time, and feel compassion for it, knowing that we share these deep fears with every other human being? Once, in the midst of a terrible, anxiety- and jealousy-ridden night when I knew someone I loved deeply was with another, I had a sudden, split-second opening where I felt love for this person, a love and care for his well-being that knew no possession or boundaries. It was like I was hovering over the bed with them and my heart was open, blessing them. I knew that who he was with wasn't important, because the love that was there would not be changed or lessened by any other bond he might form. I wanted, in that moment, nothing but good for him, and hoped he was happy. It didn't last long, but it gave me some hope that somehow, with attention and openness, I might make room in my heart for all the textures of love, including welcoming the messages that jealousy sends me without doing damage to the relationships I form.

 Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I have a cynical edge to me; I don't buy all this "happy, happy, joy, joy" business, this almost mandatory (these days)push to find bliss, enlightenment, and eternal happiness, this implication that if we feel a difficult thing, that we're simply not trying hard enough to be happy, not practicing enough gratitude, or just need to do more yoga or watch less TV. That little tweety birds and butterflies will flit around our heads and beautiful flowers pop up wherever we step, if only we could find the answer to the mystery of How to be Happy. Happiness, to me, though a wonderful emotion, is a fleeting experience, as are all emotions.

Let's just say that, though I am actually a died-in-the-wool hardcore romantic, I am very, very, painfully, intimately aware of my Shadow.

In the last few days I've felt a relief from what had seemed a relentless blanket of dread, sorrow, and grief that was attached to a particular situation in my life, or seemed to be anyway. For some reason it lifted. I could speculate as to what about the situation has changed for me to feel this way, but that's not important. I feel stronger these days, more confident, less obsessive. I don't ruminate as much. I don't cry as much. I enjoy things. I sleep better. I've even, for the most part, managed not to get obsessed and terrified over wondering when the crippling darkness will come back, as I know it will.

In thinking about this state of affairs, I realized that there's something at the root of it that feels like an emotion we're told is bad or negative. Something that self-help books tell us to control, something that Buddhists tell us is part of suffering. Something that positive psychologists and happiness researchers measure to gauge whether their subjects are happy or not. But for me, this is an emotion that has energy and movement in it. When I feel it, if I don't let the story behind it take over my brain, I get more done. I feel stronger and stand straighter. Are you ready?

That emotion is Anger.

Yes, I feel, at the root of this strength, something that feels a lot like anger. In this anger is an acknowledgment that I am important, that my needs are important, and that the messages I get that something is wrong with me are more about the person who judges me than they are about me.There's righteousness there; a sense of having the right outlook. There's self-protection there, as if I'm a self that deserves protection. There's no aggression or need to hurt or lash out at anyone, but there's a cynical long view, a squinting of the eyes and a lack of trust in anyone but myself. There's an understanding that people do shitty things, although not much judgment there. People do shitty things for their own reasons. There's a sense of being alone, but not lonely. Alone like the Lone Ranger, alone like a Clint Eastwood cowboy, and not like the sad and scared little girl that I experience so often.

Is that bad?

Last night, I went to a talk by a woman* who spoke of the importance of emotions, of acknowledging ourselves and other humans as emotional beings first. She talked about being a spiritual seeker for years, but of continually getting the message that she was too emotional and that it was the reason she resisted Enlightenment. Later, she decided that her emotions were there for a reason, and were not something to be ashamed of or to try to "bliss" away. They were there for a reason, they were giving her important messages, and it wasn't wrong or immature or unenlightened to feel them.

This is something I've thought for years, and one reason why I've never committed to studying any particular spiritual path. I've always felt like most spiritual paths ask us to think of emotions as diseases or afflictions that we just need to bear or breathe away. That our goal is to live in an absolute, peaceful, blissed-out, serene fog.  But to me, emotions, by their very existence, are real and true, messages from our soul and subconscious no less than our dreams. They are important. Even the difficult ones. Perhaps especially the difficult ones.

This isn't to say that we should let our emotions control our actions, but only that they are there to feel, to tell us things, and with practice, we can begin to feel them without acting in ways that cause harm. 

And Anger, to me, is a strong emotion, is a vitalizing and vibrant emotion. If I use it correctly, it gives me energy and stops me from devolving into a crying, blubbering mess every time someone does something I don't like. It inspires me to protect myself, it tells me stand up for myself. The righteousness is a relief from the grief and despair, which told me that I was not OK, that I was lacking. And so I welcome this hardness, this anger, this righteousness, as a way to move into my life in strength and with a realistic view of the world and what can happen in it.

*The woman I saw ended up being somehow connected to a shady, cult-like organization. I never could get the full scoop on her. But I still liked what she had to say :-)

Today, to a recently ex-lover, I wrote:

Some talk of heartbreak, and I was thinking this morning that for me, it's worse than heartbreak. I feel my soul has shattered. Is there such a term as 'soulbreak'? You're right, I shouldn't feel this way, I should feel totally secure and whole in myself and never need another person to mirror my wholeness to me. I shouldn't need, I shouldn't want. But I do. It's real and profound, not something I can decide not to feel. What do I do with that?

I realize that this is how I am: I fall deeply, quickly, madly in love. Then the separation crushes me. But isn't the crushing simply the natural other side of the coin from feeling such love, giving so much of myself? Then should I not feel the love so deeply in order that I not feel the pain? Is that the answer? Why? Why should I not feel this deep, deep love for another, such that I would give him my soul, my everything? Is it really bad to feel that way? Is that why I've met so few men willing to open to me deeply? Because they're so afraid of this pain? The message we get is we shouldn't feel this way. But I do feel this way, it's who I am. I am so utterly giving that I give everything - even the bad stuff, even the insecurity and the fear and the anger. I hold back nothing. And isn't that the essence of all this enlightenment stuff? That if we are to be totally accepting of everything, that means EVERYTHING. The love and the laughter and the breakfast in bed, AND the sadness and the night terrors and the rage. I always thought of myself as not very passionate. But what if I am, actually, VERY passionate? I give everything, can hold nothing back.

The people around me seem so dead, so closed down. You weren't like that when we first met, and that's why I was so smitten with you. You allowed me to see your soul. Being closed off from it now is excruciating. it's like someone shut the blinds in a room on a bright sunny day. I understand why, but I miss the sunlight on my skin.

In writing this, I realized something profoundly. That my gift - also, my curse - is that I give so deeply of myself that I open myself up to deep wounding. That I give so deeply of everything I possess, even when it's painful or dark, that I can hold nothing back. I simply can't. It's not in my nature. In my realization, I felt the deep, very faint stirrings of true acceptance and love of myself.

I always thought of myself as a bumbling idiot on the path of love, not very passionate, not well-schooled in the art of love, not giving enough or confident enough or sexy enough or manipulative enough to find and keep a partner, and as a mind-blind person with very little psychic ability, and as someone so self-obsessed that others tend not to respond to me, tend to not want to connect. I always figured I'd have to get used to being alone, though my deepest wish has always been to have a life partner, a partner on this path.

And yet there are always the few people who do respond to me, do seem to see me as a valuable being, who respond surprisingly and don't seem put off by my fear of closeness, my constant emotional turmoil, my sometimes distance. I've never understood what those people see in me. Maybe my emotional generosity  is the answer. Maybe the part of me that I always thought of as overwrought, overly emotional, pathetic and childlike is what people respond to when they respond to me.  And maybe the fact that the people I connect with are few and far between is actually because in our culture, deep emotions and deep honesty are frowned upon, seen as self-indulgent, too uncomfortable and too potentially painful. But maybe that's my role: to feel and express deep emotion, to give everything, even the dark stuff, to practice not holding back, even when all the messages I get in our culture is to hold back, to move on, to get over it, to be happy and peaceful, to seek contentment, enlightenment. Maybe my attempts to pretend everything is OK even when everything is decidedly not OK, because that's what I think people want,  is actually the wrong instinct.

What if my ability to feel this deeply, to be wounded in the heart over and over and yet to continue to open, is a gift and not a curse?

The Deep Ocean of Emotion


It occurs to me sometimes that maybe I feel things too deeply. I asked a lover this once if this were true: Am I more sensitive than other people? He said he thought so. I think so, too, but then I wonder about the flip side: why is feeling or expressing deep emotion, particularly intense sadness or pain, pathologized, stigmatized, and marginalized in our culture?

I look at other blogs, read books and articles on love, relationships, awakening, enlightenment, and find so little emotion there. The voices are mostly so calm, so reasoned. Be mindful of the moment, they say. Breathe. Sit with the suffering. Get out and connect, exercise, find a hobby. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Invite a friend for tea. This all seems so reasonable and healthy, of course. I have no problem with it. But there are very few voices describing how it feels to be in the midst of suffering, pain, loss, loneliness, disappointment, jealousy, those most integral and normal of human emotions. It's as if it's wrong to feel these things, or maybe just something we don't talk about in polite company.

When I'm in the midst of my suffering, I could no more bake cookies or sit with a friend over tea than I could jump off the roof and start to fly. In those moments, I can barely breathe, can hardly move. People looking at me probably think I look normal, maybe a little sad, but inside, a fire-breathing dragon has taken control of my insides and I feel like my brain is roasting, like someone near me could smell the smoke. It's a very painful place to be in, one I almost never see reflected around me.

When I hear people talk about their lives - their families, relationships, gardens, home renovations, jobs, commutes, vacations, I find myself always looking for the emotional subtext. I imagine myself in those situations, and imagine how I'd be feeling with that family, that relationship, those hobbies or projects, on those vacations, and I know that I'd be feeling something intensely. I wonder if they do, too. They talk about those things in such an offhanded way. Like they're such normal things to be doing, with no emotions involved at all.

So often, in the media, women who experience deep emotions, particularly the so-called negative ones, are almost always portrayed as crazed psychopaths, addicts, or suicidal artists. I think of Penelope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" or Salma Hayek in "Frida". (Don't even get me started on the "hot, fiery latina" stereotype, like we white girls don't feel passion!) Feeling deep, painful emotion is almost never portrayed as something positive, something to be valued and welcomed as a growth experience, even something normal.

And then, of course, as my friend at Waking Heart reminded me, there's the pathologizing of intense emotion in psychology. Medicate it away! Treat it! If you're sad for six months over the death of a beloved spouse, you have complicated grief and should be in treatment, they say. It couldn't be that losing your best friend, lover, partner, and soul mate might make you sad and might make you feel bereft and lonely, set loose in a new, unfamiliar world, floating on an ocean of pain. And that that might be, in fact, a normal response to such a loss.

I don't want to be in pain so much of the time. It doesn't feel good. But as I continue to learn new ways to cope with the world, and to let the pain open me, to teach me to let in - with love and equanimity - the world in all of its complexity, I still wonder if I am really the only one whose heart cries regularly, who struggles to stay balanced and sane in a world where safety and tenderness are fleeting and hard to find. I know I can't be the only one.

Tidal Wave

We were at a friend's concert, my Very Affectionate Friend (VAF) and I. Right from the start, I didn't feel right; I felt unbalanced, awkward, slightly sad. Mutual friends had gathered there with us, but, as is sometimes the case with this group, I felt excluded by them. They've known each other for years, while my friend and are relatively new to the group. It reminded me of high school, us hanging around on the outskirts of the circle while the rest of them chatted and laughed, rarely ever looking our way. At the time, I wasn't aware of what had triggered me that night, but looking back on it, it was that sense of being left out, of not being accepted into the "popular"group.

When we all filed upstairs to the stage area, the larger group all found tables up front but there were no seats available for us, so we took a table in the back. In hindsight, I realize that nobody was purposefully excluding us. We could, as VAF pointed out several times, have pulled up another table or chairs and sat with them. I was in that space where everything felt dark and foreboding, nasty and brutish. Everything sucked.

We waited for the show to start and I did my best to pretend to be happy, light, and fun. The opening band was pretty crappy, but once the music started, I did start to have fun, even if just to joke about how bad the band was. Our friend came on, and then I really got into it. She performed wonderfully; the band rocked out. We even danced a bit.

Some more mutual friends came and joined us in the back. Eventually, I went to the bathroom. When I came back, something happened that sent me into a tailspin of anger and fear. What happened isn't really important, but in a split second, I was off balance, like a speeding car that has lost a wheel.

It starts with a sinking feeling in my gut, and something that feels like tightness and coldness at the base of my throat. Then I can no longer think; my threat response is screaming at me to fight or to run.

I sat there for a minute or two, in silence, just trying to process. Then I felt strongly that I needed to be away from this person, so I got up and went to the other side of the dance floor to watch the band. I thought about leaving and going home by myself, but we had driven together and I had no way to get to my car without his. I stayed there, leaning against a pillar, trying to get back into the music. But through it all, my brain was creating stories, passionate stories, about what had happened. Once again, I was left out; once again I didn't know what was going on and had to cope with a rude surprise; once again, my VAF had put himself - and potentially, us - in danger; once again, my needs weren't taken into consideration; once again I would have to be the one to be responsible, to take care of things if anything went wrong. It was a tidal wave, and my sea wall was cracking under the pressure.

I looked in the crowd for the other person who I felt had fomented this situation, had encouraged it, and simultaneously had left me out of it. I couldn't see him anywhere, but I felt such an overwhelming rage towards him that if I had seen him at that point I may have hit him. And I'm not a violent person.

Eventually, thinking I had calmed down, I went back to my seat. And there he was, the one I was looking for. He smiled at me and I just ripped into him. I can't even remember what I said, but it wasn't nice. Later, VAF told me that he had never seen anyone move so fast as my target scooted away from me on the bench seat, like he had just touched a hot pan. My eyes and voice must have carried all the rage and pain I was feeling.

After the initial burst, I just felt weak and hot. My senses returned, and with them the knowledge that I had just lost it. I stopped myself, sat back, bowed my head and covered my face with my hands. I think my hands were trembling; I was holding back tears and just trying to take deep breaths to calm myself. I had done it again; had lost it again in a public place. All the stories came flooding in: Why am I so crazy? Why do I keep doing this? What is wrong with me? Did I just ruin my standing in this group by going insane? How would I make up for this? How could I recover? Maybe I should just never have friends again, to protect them against my craziness.

Then I felt a hand on mine. Our friend, the girlfriend of the man I had just barked at like a rabid, crazed dog, put her hand on mine and told me it was going to be OK. What? It was the last thing I expected. She had every right to scream right back at me for attacking her man. But she squeezed my arm, put her other arm around me, sought out my eyes, and told me it was going to be alright.

Her compassion stopped my stories, and in that moment, anchoring myself with the feeling of her cool hand on my hot one, I was able to step away from my emotions and to observe. I felt so low, so humiliated, but somehow, in the space that was created by her touch, I understood that she was right: everything would be alright. It was hard to do, but I reached out and took her hand. I felt like I didn't deserve her compassion or kindness, but I did it anyway because she was offering me a lifeline.

In the moment that it took to reach across an abyss of pain and take the hand of someone, who, by all rights, should have been attacking me back, I understood how it is to stand in a turmoil of pain and to make a decision that is based on the desire to open to the moment, and not on self-protection or fear. Normally, I would have turned away from her in shame, or yelled at her even more because I was afraid of her love, or didn't trust it. But I made the decision to open rather than to close, and I took her hand and learned, firsthand, how compassion can change everything.

On Patty's blog, Why Not Start Now? I just read a post about accepting our own contradictions. That night I once again had to face the contradiction that, even with all my studying, reading, and meditation about Buddhism, awakening, compassion, kindness, and intention, that I am still a human being who, deep inside feels, flawed, broken, and rejected. And that I have a temper that scares people. My friend's hand, reaching for mine, was a validation that love can co-exist with imperfection. I am so grateful that she was there to teach me that lesson.