Reid Mihalko from http://www.ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from http://www.ThrivingNow.com (and founder of http://www.TheIntimacyDojo.com) discuss how understanding jealousy can give you more confidence.

Cathy: Good evening, this is Cathy Vartuli from http://ThrivingNow.com. I’m here with Reid Mihalko from http://ReidAboutSex.com. We’re going to be talking about jealousy today.

Reid: The green-eyed beast.

Cathy: We all have jealousy and our society does not teach us how to deal with it well, most of us just taught to pretend we don’t have it and push it away. How can understanding jealousy give you more confidence?

Reid: For people who are reeked with — wracked with jealousy. People who reek of jealousy …

Cathy: Run!

Reid: Learning jealousy and how to deal with it gives you more self-confidence because you’re learning how to interrupt patterns that may be debilitated for you. For folks who don’t get hit with jealousy that often, or maybe have never gotten hit with it, understanding jealousy is really useful when you’re working with somebody in the workplace who is jealous, dating somebody who is jealous, maybe you have a jealous or envious sibling, family member. Just being able to understand those things on both ends of the spectrum are super useful, and understanding that in our culture, because we avoid jealousy at all costs, most people are very underserved, their jealousy muscles have atrophied.

Cathy: They don’t know what to do. If you’ve never looked at something — people that are on our lists are people who like to examine what they’re feeling and what’s going on. If you’re here, you want to understand yourself, you don’t want to push something away in a dark closet where it’s going to come out and leap on you when you don’t expect it.

Reid: Sure. And if you were taught or raised in an environment where jealousy destroys things, why would you want to open up that closet. That’s crazy.

Cathy: I was brought up that if you’re jealous, you’re bad. If you ever admitted jealousy it was a shameful thing, it was “I’m not good enough. I’m feeling something I shouldn’t feel. I’m hurting people.” Of course I kept that closet really shut, and Reid and I are going to be doing some tapping and talking about that coming up. So if you’re curious, if you want to understand your emotions better, Reid has some great understanding there.

Reid: I’ve been very lucky to have some peers and some partners who are geeks like I am. We got in some really interesting conversations about jealousy. I’m somebody who isn’t affected by jealousy often, so when it comes for me, I’m even less prepared, because I don’t realize I’m feeling it. Whereas somebody who is jealous a lot knows that they’re feeling that. Both situations can be equally debilitating and so I have some really useful and powerful ways of exploring and taking care of jealousy.

Cathy: One reason I’m so excited to be able to collaborate with you on this is because listening to what you taught about it gave me so much more confidence, and so much more ease about dealing with people and when this emotion came up, understanding where it was coming from and what it meant. And using the data rather than just feeling awful about it.

Reid: Yes, it helps your sense of self-confidence. It’s a weird analogy, but it’s kind of like knowing CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver. You feel like you can walk in the world a little better, you don’t have to be so afraid, and knowing yourself — not that you can Heimlich maneuver yourself, but the idea that you can handle your own emotions, and the particular way I’ll talk about jealousy also works for other overwhelming complex sets of emotions like rage and extreme grief, and things like that. I’m excited, and again, thank you for saying, “Hey, we should do this.’

Cathy: Yeah, we’ll do some tapping to help you shift your feelings and go back and tap later if you need help.

Reid: Yeah.

Cathy: We’re going to have another video. Come back. We’re going to be talking about jealousy and the law of attraction.

Reid: We want to intrigue you first.

 

More articles about jealousy:

Charming Partner Causing Jealousy Issues and Gossip?

Jealousy As A Signal That Needs Aren’t Being Met