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Key points
- Jealousy and envy are often ignored or deeply distrusted, despite the useful information they provide.
- Jealousy can help you identify, choose, and nurture healthy intimate relationships.
- Envy can help you create fairness, equity, and healthy access to resources and recognition.
- Jealousy and envy often work together to advantageously position you—and others—in the social world.
Most of us have been taught to repress, distrust, or even despise jealousy and envy. Tragically, this can have deeply damaging consequences, because these two emotions are essential parts of our social awareness.
Sadder still, we rarely if ever see these two emotions treated as anything but trouble. Jealousy is often called a "green-eyed monster," and envy is literally one of the seven deadly sins of the Catholic tradition. We're invited to look upon these two vital emotions as outdated, unwanted, monstrous, and even sinful. And this rotten training makes developing skillful relationships with our jealousy and envy extremely difficult.
A Grand Unified Theory of Emotion
It is becoming clear that our traditional way of viewing many emotions as primitive, illogical, or unneeded is not only wrong but leads to emotional incompetence and unnecessary suffering.
Researchers such as Antonio Damasio and Lisa Feldman Barrett have demonstrated that emotions form the underlayment of everything we think, every action we take, and every decision we make. Emotions are not primitive or illogical; in fact, they're the means through which we attach meaning to data. Without our emotions, we cannot think clearly or function well.
My applied work, Dynamic Emotional Integration, explores the purpose, value, and particular genius inside each of our emotions, and it is the first grand unified theory of emotions that helps us work directly with every emotion at every level of activation. With this model, we can engage with emotions productively, develop robust emotion regulation skills, and understand ourselves and others more deeply.
We can also learn how to approach unfairly demonized emotions such as jealousy and envy in entirely new and functional ways.
Unearthing the Genius of Jealousy and Envy
As you know, jealousy and envy are two of our most hated and pathologized emotions. Yet when you know how they work and what they do, you may wonder why. Why are we so aggressively chased away from these essential emotions?
I call jealousy and envy our "sociological" emotions because they focus on how we're positioned in our social worlds. Both emotions contain enormous amounts of information about our relationships, our social structures, and our constantly changing place in our multiple social worlds.
Jealousy can help us identify, choose, and sustain our intimate relationships. If we don't have a good working knowledge of our jealousy, our relationships may suffer, either in our choosing or in our nurturing.
We may not know what or who we want in our most intimate sphere, and we may not know how to maintain loyalty and stability in our relationships. Without the help of our jealousy, we may not be well positioned in our intimate relationships, and our love lives will be unstable and destabilizing.
Envy can help us position ourselves and others advantageously in relation to money, resources, and recognition. If we don't have a good relationship with our envy, we may either ignore our own needs and create suffering for ourselves, or grab everything we can get our hands on and create suffering for everyone else. Without the help of our envy, we may not be able to identify or create fairness, equity, or security for ourselves or others.
Creating Healthy Relationships with Your Sociological Emotions
We must learn how to relate directly to our emotions and how to regulate ourselves so that our emotions can help us function optimally. Though many of us have been taught to see emotion regulation as a process of getting emotions to calm down and recede, I instead help people learn how to work directly with their emotions in order to gather the data they provide and the gifts they contain.
To this end, I've developed a series of emotionally respectful questions that support the work your emotions naturally perform. So, instead of trying to get yourself to a place of calm while essentially ignoring the purpose of your emotions, these questions help you key into your emotions and their particular genius. With the help of these questions, you can co-regulate with your emotions and develop strong working relationships with each of them.
The Questions for Jealousy
- What kinds of intimacy do I desire and want to offer?
- What betrayals must be recognized and healed?
Jealousy can help you develop strong intimate relationships that are nurturing for you and your partners. Understanding jealousy's role helps you connect with it in new ways and pay attention to the signals it sends to you. Notice that these questions focus on the gifts of jealousy, which involve love, intimacy, loyalty, and connection.
When people don't understand jealousy and don't know how to work with it, they may act in self-absorbed and suspicious ways rather than accessing the keen relational awareness that jealousy provides.
The Questions for Envy
- What resources and security do I desire for myself and others?
- What inequalities must be made right?
When you know that envy aims to position you in advantageous ways while at the same time making sure that others have what they need, you can approach your envy in new ways. These questions help you focus on the gifts of envy, which are fairness, equity, generosity, and healthy access to resources and recognition.
If you don't understand envy or know how to work with it, you may act in self-abandoning or hyper-greedy ways instead of tuning into the social and interactional genius of envy.
Problems with Emotions Don't Belong to the Emotions
We've all seen people act in terrible ways when their jealousy or envy arise, but this rotten behavior is not the fault of these two essential emotions. Terrible behavior is not at the heart of either of these emotions; instead, terrible behavior is a function of terrible emotional training. And tragically, most of us have had absurdly bad training in regard to these two emotions.
Jealousy and envy have been aggressively pathologized and treated as monstrous, so it's no wonder that many of us have no skills and no way to regulate ourselves in their presence. Luckily, we can all identify terrible training at any stage of our lives and learn new and better skills.
When we can bring jealousy and envy out of the long shadows of ignorance and allow them to do their vital work, they can help us situate ourselves (and others) in our relationships and our social lives in ways that work for everyone.
All of Your Emotions Contain Unique Genius
When you can work directly with your emotions, you can learn how to identify them and work skillfully with their individual gifts and genius. Each emotion is a marvelous world in itself, and all of them work together to help you navigate through your world.
The next time you feel jealous or envious, ask yourself their questions. The answers may not only surprise you; they could also help you develop your own unique social and emotional genius.
Facebook image: Maksym Fesenko/Shutterstock
References
McLaren, K. (2023). The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. Sounds True.
McLaren, K. (2021). The Power of Emotions at Work: Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace. Louisville, CO: Sounds True.
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Buss, D. (2000). The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. Free Press.
Damasio, A. (2021). Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon.
