Today, I’d like to share this with you, which is my journey through dealing with envious/jealous feelings.
It all started when my mom compared me to someone else.
I was probably 11/12 yo, and one of my dad’s friends came to visit, who had 2 daughters.
We were playing, and my mom made a comment about how I should cut my hair short like the older daughter.
My mom really likes short hair, and always wanted me to have short(er) hair. (Even now, whenever she sees me, she’d ask me when I’m going to have my next hair cut).
And funny enough, I wrote about it in my journal, and she found it, read it, and dismissed it altogether.
Simple innocent comparison?
Maybe?
But at that moment, as a 12 yo, I felt like my mom approved of her and loved her more than me.
That was how the seed of jealousy was planted for me.
Ever since, I’d been “battling the demon of jealousy”.
It wouldn’t matter what the other person’s background was, or what they were going through, if I saw the other person doing better, I would immediately start comparing myself.
I could totally be comparing apples to oranges, but it wouldn’t matter.
Right after feeling envious of the other person, I’d start beating myself up, believing that I wasn’t good enough.
They were very dark, all-consuming, exhausting battles.
I remembered so many times I wrote in my journal, begging God or someone or something to take it away.
Because it was poison running through my body, and I had so much hate and resentment inside of me.
I literally had to shield myself away from other people, because I couldn’t tolerate the amount of hate I carried.
It was only after I started working on myself, did I start loving this part of me.
It hasn’t fully gone away, it still comes up from time to time. But I feel so much better and lighter!
If you have ever felt jealous/envious before, this is what I learned:
Nothing has gone wrong. It’s a super normal reaction.
It is a part of you, it’s the wounded part of you, so you can’t push it away. In fact, it is the part of you that needs the most love.
And you have to learn to recognized it instead of letting it consume you.
What I mean is, many times, instead of being aware of it, we react to it.
You reactions may include:
- Gossiping about people
- Intentionally being unkind to them
- Being snappy at others
- Judging others/ Criticizing others
- Keep one-upping yourself, so you feel you’re better than others
- Beating yourself up
- Hiding from others
And you may have your own version of it.
So the first step is to recognize it.
The second step may sound really simple, but it’s the hardest thing to do.
You have to love it. You have to feel it and accept it.
What does this mean?
This is a process I do with my clients, which is to feel the feeling.
It is through feeling it and not push it away, can you start accepting it as being a part of you.
We’re so used to seeing these negative emotions as bad, so we push them away because we don’t want them.
We think being jealous is a sign of being a “bad girl”. It’s unacceptable, so we try our hardest to cast it away.
But the more we reject, the more it builds up in our system.
To deal with it, we have to do the exact opposite.
We have to look at it, and see it in its rawest form, so we can accept it and love it.
Loving this jealous part of me lifted the heavy weight off.
The best part is I could finally celebrate other people for who they truly are, and feel so happy and proud of them.
All because I could fully love myself.
I am so much more joyful than before.
It changed me so much, and I hope that you’ll get a chance to enjoy this for yourself too!
