Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [56]
Many people find that as they develop their polyamorous families, they actually get validation from lots and lots of people and thus become less dependent on their partner’s approval. Their needs and their sources of nourishment get spread out over a wider territory.
Disempowering Your Jealousy
We can’t tell you how to banish jealousy or how to exorcise it as if it were a demon. It may be your inner demon, but it is not a cancer that you can cut out. It is a part of you, a way that you express fear and hurt. What you can do is change the way you experience jealousy and learn to deal with it as you learn to deal with any emotion: work with it until it becomes, not overwhelming and not exactly pleasant, but tolerable; a mild disturbance, a warm summer shower rather than a typhoon.
One woman we talked to had some very good ideas about what you can do about jealousy:
I notice that jealousy comes and goes, depending on how good I feel about myself. When I’m not taking care of getting what I want, it’s easy to get jealous and think that someone else is getting what I am not. I need to remember that it’s my job to get my needs met. I feel the jealousy, but I’m not willing to act on it, so it mostly goes away.
Once you have made a commitment to refuse to act on your jealousy, you become free to start reducing the amount of power you let your jealousy have over you. One way to do this is simply by allowing yourself to feel it. Just feel it. It will hurt, and you will feel frightened and confused, but if you sit still and listen to yourself with compassion and support for the scared child inside, the first thing you will learn is that the experience of jealousy is survivable. You have the strength to get through it.
A large part of our difficulties with jealousy comes from our attempts to avoid feeling a scary or painful emotion. Perhaps long ago when we were children, truly powerless in the world and with a very limited set of tools for dealing with our emotions, we felt something scary and told ourselves, “I will never feel this again, it’s too awful, I’ll die, I’ll kill myself.” So we stick the feeling, and the event that inspired it, into something like a pot, and put the lid on good and tight. As the years go by, whenever something comes along that reminds us of what’s in the pot, that rattles the lid a little, we push down on that lid. “Gotta keep the lid on that pot,” we tell ourselves—we may not even remember why. And the pressure builds and builds, not so much from what’s in the pot as from our frantic struggles to keep the lid on.
When we grow up and we need to take the lid off so that we can deal with our emotional reality as an adult, it can feel really scary. But surprisingly, often when we actually look at what’s in our pot and feel it, it’s much more manageable than we had feared. You can indeed open your pots, look at what’s bubbling away in there, and then put the lid back on. Your old defenses will continue to work just fine when you want them to.
We have heard sluts accuse each other of being jealous as if it were a crime: “See? Look at you! You’re jealous, aren’t you? Don’t try to deny it!” It is particularly important that you own your jealousy, to yourself and to your intimates. If you try to pretend that you are not jealous when you are, others will perceive you as dishonest, or worse yet, they may believe you and see no need to support or protect you—because you’re fine, right? If you pretend to yourself that you are not jealous when you are, then your own emotions may try devious routes to bring themselves to your attention, manifesting themselves as intensely irrational anger, unreasonable behavior, crushing anxiety over anything at all, temper tantrums, crying fits, or even physical illness.
When you deny your jealousy to yourself, you take from yourself the opportunity to be compassionate with yourself,