Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [54]
Dossie, when she first started thinking about and challenging her jealousy, felt an almost intolerable sense of insecurity, along the lines of “nobody will ever love me because something is wrong with me and I’m unlovable.” She discovered this about herself in the early years of feminism, so it fit perfectly with her feminist explorations to go to work on her self-esteem and build a foundation of security that didn’t need to be granted by another person and that no one else could take away. You can probably figure out how valuable a lesson this was and how many more uses she has found for feeling secure within herself. Thank you, jealousy—without this lesson she wouldn’t be confident enough to be writing this book.
If you experience your jealousy as insensate rage, then you might want to read something about anger, how other people are thinking about it, working with it, dealing successfully with it; perhaps you can take a course in anger management. Maybe you can come to terms with your anger. Maybe you can get to a place where you and your lovers need never fear your anger again. Wouldn’t that be worth working on?
Many people find forms of jealousy in themselves that are actually pretty easy to deal with—nagging doubts, bits of nervousness about performance or body image. Others find themselves falling into a whirlpool of terror or grief, difficult even to look at, much less to tease apart into separate feelings like fear of abandonment or loss or rejection. Why do we sometimes feel this way? Dossie the therapist has a theory about this, based not only on her own experience but also that of many clients she has worked with on these issues.
Jealousy is often the mask worn by the most difficult inner conflict you have going on right now, a conflict that’s crying out to be resolved and you don’t even know it. Because it’s rooted so deeply, it can be incredibly difficult to stay aware when jealousy peeks over the horizon: we twist and turn and writhe in our attempts to not feel it. This is when your emotions are most likely to bring you to grief—when you believe that you need to avoid feeling them at any cost.
One way to not-feel a feeling is to project it onto your partner. Projection is a psychological defense that involves trying to move a painful feeling outside yourself by running your emotional movie on someone else, as if that person were a screen for your fears and fantasies and not a human being. It may be that this is the only real definition of jealousy: it’s the experience of projecting one’s uncomfortable feelings onto one’s partner.
But here’s some good news. If you recognize yourself in any of this, then some part of you has decided that you are strong enough to acknowledge the underlying emotion, and that means you’re in an excellent position to do some healing right now. Use your jealousy as a signpost: “Work on this feeling here!” Take a class, join a group, find a good therapist, start practicing meditation—go to work on yourself. You have a golden opportunity, so make the most of it. You could get a whole lot of bang for your buck if you do the work that’s presenting itself now: heal old wounds, open up new possibilities, gain health and freedom from fear … and somewhere in there, almost as a bonus, you get to grasp your sexual freedom as well.
Sometimes what we perceive as jealousy is actually something else. Think through the details of how jealousy works in you. What bothers you the most? Is it that you don’t want your partner to do those things with someone else or that you do want your partner to do them with you? Jealousy might actually be envy, and envy is often very easy to fix: why not make a date with your lover to do what you have just discovered you are missing?
Sometimes jealousy is rooted in feelings of grief and loss, which can be harder to interpret. We have been taught by our culture that