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The past few months I’ve been writing about a topic near and dear to my heart: envy.
Envy is the universal emotion no one seems to have. While there is no language that doesn’t have a word for it and it appears throughout all of recorded history, whether you go back to the Greeks or the Bible, few of us are brave enough or honest enough to speak readily about our envy. We immediately want to squelch the feeling and sometimes we don’t even let ourselves know we feel it, let alone anyone else.
Why is this? Why should a feeling so universal to what it means to be human be something we can’t or won’t talk about?
There are many answers to this question, but I think the primary reason is shame. For me to acknowledge to you that I’m envious of you is to acknowledge that I feel inferior in some way. I’m not as good as you, as successful as her, as competent as them.
I don’t believe we’re mistakes and I don’t believe we have emotions that are mistakes. But how can we access the gift of this feeling if we won’t let ourselves examine it with compassion and self awareness?
Two blogs ago I wrote about my envy of a more successful psychologist who was also a best selling author. For decades I have been envious of people who write books. I had some dim awareness that this meant I wanted to write a book myself but I didn’t believe I could do it or ever would do it. So each time I felt envious – and this happened every time I heard of someone who was working on a book or had published one – I pushed away the feeling instantly. In retrospect I marvel at my ability to go so unconscious so repeatedly. I am a psychologist after all, and I should be able to face some of these challenges if I expect my clients to.
It was actually a client who indirectly helped me shift gears. In one session with one client, I asked him the question: “If you were to die tomorrow, what would be your biggest regret today?” His answer had to do with not starting his own business. But apparently I also asked myself the same question, because I clearly heard the answer in my own head: “That I never wrote a book.”
Parallel to these years of envy I did try to get some answers about the emotion. The things I found were either overly academic for my purposes or superficially moralistic: “Don’t feel envy. It’s a sin.” So after this session with my client I decided to kill two birds with one stone and write a book about envy (it was released last fall: Embracing Envy: Finding the Spiritual Treasure in Our Most Shameful Emotion).
What I propose in this book, as a result of my investigations, research and my own experience, is that envy is a place where God is calling us to grow into larger versions of ourselves. In this instance I just described, that larger version had to do with me getting off my complaining, envious behind and writing a book.
It’s not always a clear one-to-one correspondence, however. That is, this is a clean example: I was envious of people who wrote books so that meant I needed to write one too. But in the past I also used to be envious of famous people. I couldn’t figure this one out. I would be standing in a supermarket checkout line, eyeing the tabloids, and finding myself envious of Britney Spears or some other pop star. I knew I didn’t want to be a pop star, so what could this mean?
It was only in retrospect that I came to understand that my envy of famous people had to do with my need to become more visible in my life. It’s not that I needed or wanted to be famous. It is that I needed to speak my voice more publicly, to share myself more fully with the world at large. The book, this blog, the many radio interviews I’m now doing about envy: all of these are part of me expressing myself more fully in public. I am no longer envious of Britney Spears, or anyone famous for being famous. I’m envious of other things now, which simply means my psyche wants to continue to grow and expand.
My message here is to pay attention to what and whom you envy. It holds a key for self understanding, for what your next step needs to be. Sometimes you will need to look deeper than the surface, as in this last example. But that process is good for you too. So for example, if you find yourself envious of someone’s raise in income, try and dig a little more deeply than to simply conclude “I want more money.” What is it the money would bring you? More ease? More opportunity? More status? A sense of success?
Finally, a wonderful side benefit of developing a more comfortable relationship with your own envy is it will also make your more comfortable with yourself, giving you greater ease in the world and more resources with which to tackle the challenges your envy is pointing you toward.
