Listener Q&A: I Always Want More. How Can I Overcome Jealousy?

Dr. Bonior: How do you really feel about other people's success? Are you happy for them? Does it depend on if they are a true friend or that braggart you went to high school with? What if you feel like you're never happy for others, and always jealous? Today we're taking a listener question about jealousy. The listener feels like they are always jealous and always wanting more. And they feel like a terrible person because they're miserably resentful of other people's success. Even though they play the game of acting like they are a supportive, gracious person. What is to be done when you are constantly jealous? Where might it come from? And is there really hope to change? If you've ever felt the sting of the green-eyed monster, you'll want to tune in to today's Baggage Check. Welcome. I'm Dr. Andrea Bonior, and this is Baggage Check: Mental Health Talk and Advice with new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Baggage Check is not a show about luggage or travel. Incidentally, it is also not a show about whether frogs can have hair. So today we are welcoming a listener question-- where is yours, by the way? You can submit queries of your own either via email or voice memo at baggagecheckpodcast.com. You can also volunteer to be the voice of listener emails like the listener I am very grateful to who lent us her voice today. At Baggage Check, we're here to help, so send us something. In the meantime, let's take a listen to what we're tackling today.

Listener: So I want to talk about jealousy. I have it all the time. I truly think it makes me a not great person. It definitely has gotten worse in the past few years, but I think I've always been this way. When I was growing up, I remember being so miserably resentful of my brother, and I don't know that I really had a reason to be, but it seemed he always got what I wanted, at least from my perspective, and I always wanted what he had. I hate the fact that it's carried on throughout my life, even with my closest friends, with their lives are going particularly well. I can fake being happy for them, but in reality, it often leaves me unsettled. I always compare what they have and ask myself why I can't have it. I know I wouldn't really like me if I knew this about myself. It's my biggest shame with my friends that my smiles are so fake in certain circumstances. Sometimes I can turn it off when we're not really in competition with each other, but other times it's like if they get something, I can't help but resent that I don't have it for myself. This makes me feel like a faker in addition to an awful weak person. They probably have no idea that I feel this way. I'm not sure. And I'm lucky that it's never spilled out because I keep it in check. And honestly, I overcompensate at times. But how did I possibly get this way? I had a privileged childhood. I realized I had a roof over my head, two parents who loved me, and I never doubted that. I wish there was some smoking gun to say, oh, here's why you're this way. Let's fix it and turn you into a more decent human being. But I have nothing to tell in that way. I played soccer, I had birthday parties, I had a nice life, and I still feel like I deserved what other people had. And I guess I still feel that way. I hate this about myself.

Dr. Andrea Bonior: OK, so I have so many reactions, and let's start with the fact that you keep calling yourself a bad person and yet you are fighting a great battle to be outwardly kind, even when you are suffering a storm inside. Sounds more like a good person trait to me. Where's the honor in being supportive of other people? When it comes as naturally and easily as anything in the world? You are doing it despite feeling the urge to do the opposite. Which one is harder? Which one of those is more indicative of character? I think we do this with so many traits. We assume that the real accolades belong to the people for whom those traits make things easy. Courage, for example. We think that being brave means doing scary things easily and without fear. But to me, being brave means feeling that fear and walking through it anyway. Or take sobriety if someone goes without an alcoholic drink at a party, in whom is it more impressive? The person who could take or leave alcohol, who doesn't really care for it, or the person who has fought a ten year battle with alcoholism? Now, I didn't necessarily intend to go off in this direction so much, but my point is that you're throwing all kinds of words around about not being a decent human being, about having so much shame about this. You say you feel like an awful weak person, and again, I see things so differently from that. You've been carrying this secret about yourself for a long time, and it seems to have seeped into your selfconcept in a really serious way. You won't be able to truly tackle this if you view this part of you with such disgust. It's just an emotional pattern that you want to change. We don't have to judge it nearly so harshly. It's a challenge to be worked on. It's not some deep, dark flaw like, I don't know, like you like the Houston Astros or something. I am kidding. So let's think about starting to challenge this, because, honestly, that's why you wrote to me you want to change. And so, as first steps go, I want to explore where did this begin? There could be any number of things. Even if, yes, you had the perfect soccer and birthday party upbringing. Maybe you even had soccer birthday parties, but those things don't tell us much about what you were really feeling inside. It's wonderful that you never doubted your parents love, and I'm sure they were great. I have no interest in raising potential bashing of them here, but there could have been any number of dynamics in your family or your early schooling or with your peers. There really could have been so many things that affected you and created some sort of insecurity about your place in life, or some sort of competitiveness, that success was a zerosum game, and if others got a piece of the pie that was less for you. You used your brother as a single breezy example, but I'm guessing he could be pretty central to the origin of this. Interestingly enough, you don't mention if he's older or younger, but I work with a lot of people in therapy that have some lasting bruises from the emotional dust ups of sibling rivalry. In fact, I've often felt that writing about sibling drama for adults would be my next book, although by the time I feel like I have the energy to take that on, I'll probably need to write about the role of spaceships in our lives instead. Seriously, sibling stuff is no joke. Whether you are 5 or 75, I hear it all the time, and yet we don't talk about it that much. We assume that whatever happens in childhood is ancient history and that adults have left the sibling drama behind. And yet I cannot tell you how many people I've worked with in therapy over the years about this. Sibling estrangement, sibling relationships freezing over, siblings that don't get along with each other's partners, siblings that have never been close and are totally different people, and then are thrust into a stressful situation together, like caring for aging parents. Siblings that play out the same dynamics as used to happen in the back seat of the station wagon. Siblings that used to be close and no longer are siblings that want to be closer, siblings that still feel wounded that their parents or caregivers seem to like the other one best siblings squabbling about money. Seriously, the list is long and it's intense, and maybe your brother is Man of the Year, but that doesn't automatically mean that there weren't some dysfunctional patterns that got ingrained, even if it was as simple as him coming home from the hospital and you feeling slighted and never quite being able to get away from that feeling. And so every future discrepancy between the two of you in terms of how you were treated, maybe you kept looking through that lens of hurt, and it became a self fulfilling prophecy to just get more and more jealous and to feel like things were more and more unequal. Here's the thing, though jealous feelings are human, and almost all of us have him at some point, even towards people we cherish the jealous feelings intensity, their frequency, and how long they last. Those all exist on a spectrum with some of us experiencing them way more than others. Obviously, for you, they seem to be getting in the way. So I do think it's time for you to potentially get some support in exploring this. I can hear the groans now, is this lady always going to recommend therapy for every single question? And I promise I won't. But this is something that could really use a professional for a couple of reasons. One being that it's unclear what's causing it. So that alone needs some discussion. And a skilled psychotherapist could help investigate and uncover the why. But the why is pretty insufficient because you need part two, which is how do I take steps to actually change this pattern? And you could definitely use the accountability of a therapist for that. But I know you're probably thinking, hey, I've got a therapist talking to me right here, so give me something. I'm thinking the changing part is going to have several components itself. First, the looking realistically at your life component. Really looking at where you are in the here and now, it's very likely that you aren't feeling great about something or a lot of some things in terms of the way that things are going for you and your present existence. Are you stuck in an empty job? Have you been wanting more in the dating or relationship scene than you've been able to have? Is money a constant struggle? Even people who love their lives can still get jealous. But usually those are pains that leave pretty quickly rather than pervasive ever present patterns. Often the more constant jealousy is a longing, a warning sign, like the check engine light that enjoys showing up in my car just to make sure I'm paying attention, just for fun. But jealousy can be a warning sign that something else in your life needs to be attended to. And you say that it's gotten worse the past few years, which is really important, and lends credence to this idea that maybe right now something about the way you're leading your life feels like it's falling short. Because if you don't feel like you're on the right path or that you've been checking boxes all your life without actually listening to what you truly want, or that there's some other life that you should be living, well, that quite commonly shows up via the kind of jealousy that you're talking about. You can get a head start on thinking about this yourself by seeing if there's any theme to the jealous feelings. Maybe they hit harder when other people have certain types of success. Are, uh, there specific achievements or statuses or news from others that hit you the hardest that can tell you something? Another part of what therapy could do, of course, is to help you think about some of the ways that you could change your own life to get more meaning, to align with something deeper to give you a sense of purpose that feels more fulfilling, that could help address this potential emptiness that might be there. Getting in touch with gratitude can be helpful for this. And it doesn't have to be in a cheesy way or the way that your great aunt always scolded you about counting your blessings when you said you didn't want to eat the tomato aspect at the dinner table. But simple gratitude exercises actually do have a lot of data behind them as being helpful emotionally. Even writing a thank you note to someone is a significant mood booster, especially if it's about the way they've made a difference for you. And it helps get us away from the I want, I want, I want. Helping others in general can help us get away from this too. So you might build a plan to have more meaningful work that you do for others. Even just some small projects, some low commitment volunteer activities. They can help you make a dent in some of the jealousy because they give you a deeper sense of value about what you have to offer the world, what you really mean to others, besides just all the petty things we want to compare ourselves about in terms of what status we've achieved. And then it's time to look at your environment. We live in a comparison culture that is basically a jealousy feeder. So I'd have you examine your habits to see if they're making your jealousy worse. It's definitely harder to not fall prey to jealousy in this generation than it has been in the past. And we're seeing that play out in the data with people's insecurities because in the past, we weren't walking around all day with the ability to every single moment just from something we carried around in our pockets. The ability to figure out who had a bigger house or a nicer car or more perfectly wellbehaved kid. Or should I say supposedly wellbehaved, like we do now. The comparison is constant. The data about other people is ever present. And if there's a hunger in you and a tendency to feel slighted by other people's success, then some of your habits can take that tendency and fuel it to grow even bigger. There could also be anxiety or depression here that are serving to create something of a vicious cycle. Those types of negative thought patterns of anxiety and depression, they can cause jealousy. And of course, severe jealousy can make you miserable and anxious and depressed, so it might be going in both directions. There's also probably some anger and resentment under the surface too, which again could be both a cause and an effect of jealousy. Some additional mental patterns might entail a ton of all or nonethinking. The idea that if you have any jealousy at all that you're a terrible person. So that's going to make you even more sensitized to jealousy. Kind of like, well, I've already done this bad thing. So I might as well just let the rest of it go unchecked because I've already crossed the line into the dark side. There's also probably some shoulds in there. I should feel this way when my friend gets a promotion. I should be 100% happy for someone else in X, Y or Z circumstances, not to mention the shoulds of whatever things you're comparing yourself about. I should be this far in my career like this other person. I should have this type of life. I should have achieved this particular milestone. I should have actually bothered to tape the trim before I painted the room, even though I thought, no worries, they've got these special brushes now and I'll just keep a really still hand, I'm sure it'll be fine. Sorry. Anyway, a skilled therapist can help with the shoulds too. The bottom line is that admitting this is a huge first step and the fact that you want to work on this makes you anything but a bad person. You are primed to really learn a lot about yourself. If you are willing, might there be some reason that you want to keep thinking of yourself as awful or weak? Those words you used that something about that is more comfortable than actually viewing yourself differently and taking steps toward change. That's the heart of self sabotage right there. But if you are really willing to look at this, I think there's so much powerful growth ahead of you, and you truly deserve to have that. Thank you for joining me today. Once again, I'm Dr. Andrea Bonior, and this has been Baggage Check with new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Submit your voice memos at baggagecheckpodcast.com, and if you have that quirky friend who likes podcasts about thought-provoking issues, please let them know where to find us. Music is by Jordan Cooper, cover art by Danielle Merity, and my studio security is provided by Buster the Dog. Until next time, take good care.