Is Jealousy Killing Your Relationships, Career, and Creativity? 

You begin to wrestle with dark and difficult feelings.  You find it so hard to talk about. If people found out about these feelings they  would think you’re crazy. Talking about this would expose your insecurities, which you work so hard to hide

What is this feeling you don’t want to admit? Jealousy. You feel intense envy for what others have achieved, how they live, and who they know. You harbor jealousy for their status, possessions, or looks. At times, it becomes an obsession, and you feel like it’s  driving you insane.

What does envy do to you? Does it help you? 

The more you feed this envy, the more you’re stuck in your insecurities. It doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. It actually makes you feel “less than,” not enough, incapable, and small.

As much as you recognize this is a waste of your time and emotional energy, you can’t help it but to ruminate about others. Jealousy controls you.

These feelings distract you from developing yourself and your skills. When you’re consumed with jealousy, you’re disconnected from your life energy and the source of your creativity.

Envy interferes with the genuine relationships that could help you, inspire you, and empower you.  Not only does it erode your connections with others, but it also diminishes your connection to yourself, your talents, skills, and what you want to create and accomplish. 

Jealousy keeps you small.

You want relief from these  feelings, but you’re also scared to face them. Will releasing your sense of jealousy take away your competitive energy? The answer is no. It will actually help you use your competitive energy in healthy ways as you’re freed of this old toxicity. 

What really hides behind your envy?

Jealousy is part of life. We all feel jealousy at various points. It’s part of being human. We all want to be successful, important, loved, seen, and appreciated. But, when we’re consumed by envy, it’s a sign of childhood emotional trauma.

Perhaps you felt unloved or unimportant, undervalued, unseen, or unheard.  Maybe you felt like people weren’t there, fully invested in you. You might have grown up in a family where one sibling was the favorite and you were the “black sheep.” Perhaps you were never a priority or you had to compete for any little gesture of affection or attention.

Any of these early childhood wounds can be at the root of your difficult feelings of envy and jealousy.

But what is the difference between healthy, normal jealousy and unhealthy jealousy? 

Healthy jealousy propels you to assert your needs and put your energy into accomplishing your own goals. You’re mainly driven by your own interests and passions. When you do feel jealousy, you can be curious and ask yourself: What is this feeling telling me? Do I need something I am not getting? How can I put my energy into bringing more of what I need into my life?

Ultimately, you don’t compete with others, you compete with yourself. You observe what others are doing and you see them as role models. You surround yourself with people you admire, want to be friends with, and who will support you as you support them. When they accomplish something your response is, “That’s possible, and I can do it too!” You can learn from others and be inspired by others instead of being fixated on what they have and who you think they are.

But, could you? Could you make friends with people  that you envy? Could you learn from them? Could you let yourself be influenced by their beautiful energy, by what they create and accomplish? Could you benefit from what they bring to the world? Could you  support and inspire  each other?

If you’re still entrapped by childhood wounds, as much as you may be aware how this unhealthy envy energy impacts  you, you can’t change it.  You tell yourself “you know better, stop!”  But you can’t help it.  You go to these dark places and wallow in envy.

This can look like social media fixation, stressing over how many likes you get, and obsessing over others’s successes.

You can find freedom from this toxic jealousy, even if it feels this will never change 

EMDR, also known as Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, is a highly effective approach to trauma therapy that can help free your mind from a fixation on envy.  EMDR is also highly effective at helping you win yourself back so you can once again access your inner power and confidence so you can fully develop and access your skills and talents.

While EMDR is vital in this process of recovering from jealousy, an emotionally attuned therapeutic environment is necessary to heal the complex traumas of your past. Offering EMDR as well as more “traditional” forms of talk therapy, I help my clients along the emotional journey of reclaiming  themselves from old  stories that can entrap people.

Clients come to me with the same questions running constantly in their minds : Why am I not getting what I need? Why is someone else always the queen or king? Why I don’t matter? Why am I not enough? We can work together to change this inner narrative so you can live and create with a sense of true emotional freedom. 

When you understand the origins of your feelings of jealousy, you can shift the way you feel

If you struggle with persistent feelings of envy and jealousy, remember that such feelings are not your fault. They’re showing you that you grew up in an emotional environment that did not meet your needs. Being ignored, treated as second best, or made to feel as if something was wrong with you was not your choice. You did not choose to stuff your emotional needs inside your heart and keep them quiet and repressed. You did all this to survive in a place where you could not be loved and supported.

You’ve been emotionally deprived or neglected in the past, your unmet needs can now be met and healed with EMDR and an emotionally attune psychotherapy journey.

As a trauma therapist who is emotionally present with you, I can “take you back” and help you let go of the emotional defenses’ that protected you as a child. Through this process, you can allow your authentic, vulnerable self to emerge.  In an emotionally attuned and empowering environment where your needs are seen, acknowledged, and emotionally fulfilled, you can begin to heal and recover from these old patterns of envy and jealousy.