Everyone’s experience of all human emotions is the same: happiness, sadness, anger, etc, but jealousy feels different in each person. Some common emotions resulting from jealousy are hate, sadness, anger, or any combination of these and other emotions. The reason jealousy feels different to every person is that jealousy is NOT an emotion! This realization is the gateway to your ability to control and overcome jealousy: reject the knowledge and continue to suffer or accept it and learn to understand and master jealousy.
It will help here to distinguish between emotions and thoughts. Emotions are sensations, like happiness, anger, sadness, infatuation, anxiety, serenity, satisfaction, fear, hate, excitement, and embarrassment. When you “feel like a fool,” the emotional component is some mix of anger, embarrassment, and maybe sadness. The fool part of it is a thought: I realize that I’ve been tricked.
Similarly, jealousy is also a blend of many thoughts and emotions. Dissecting it will give you the understanding that you need to fight it, but be forewarned — it’s not easy getting that one sorted out!
Well that’s a very interesting point!
At first, when thinking of it, I find it hard to separate jealousy from emotions… they’re so linked!
It feels like jealousy is a form of emotions made of anger,pain,bitterness… well at least that’s how I considered it so far. But now I read this words of yours, my mind’s boiling! OMG, you might be right here!
(great blog btw! I’ll be back!
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Thank you for the comment, Candy. And the compliment!
You are absolutely right to attribute all of those emotions to jealousy. Those are half of the ingredients; there’s also a jumble of thoughts and decisions that go into the mix. Many or even most of these thoughts and decisions are happening below the surface of your awareness, so the only thing most of us see are the emotions.
To help, here’s a simple analogy: jealousy is not an emotion any more than cake is sugar. Cake contains sugar, yes, and a bunch of other ingredients. They must be combined and processed in certain ways in order to get the cake (dumping the ingredients into a bowl does not make cake).
Likewise, jealousy is a word that we use to describe the final product, after mixing and processing the ingredients that make it. Learn how it’s made and you can stop it from being made!
ohhh the analogy cake vs sugar makes it really clear! **taking notes** I love it!
So… ok, once you learn how the cake/jealousy is made… can you really prevent the ingredients/emotions from mixing together ? anger, sadness, fear, etc… it’s pretty hard to prevent them (lol I think I have to read your book!)… like take sadness, how can you avoid sadness. hm I gotta think about it!
A thinker, you are! Yes, the key is prevention, as damage control can be almost impossible at times.
I’ve decided to revisit this topic in the near future, with more depth and illustrative analogy. In that post I’ll address your questions and thoughts.
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis and feedback!
Randall