18
Jealousy and envy are separate emotional states, yet they carry similar messages: jealousy arises in response to unfaithfulness or deceit in an intimate relationship, while envy arises in response to the unfair distribution of resources or recognition. Both contain a mixture of anger (including hatred, so check your shadow!) and fear. Both attempt to set or restore lost boundaries after they’ve intuitively assessed an authentic risk to your security or your position. If you can honor these two emotions, they’ll contribute tremendous stability to your personality and your relationships. If your jealousy flows freely, you won’t appear obsessively jealous or possessive; rather, your natural intuition and clear boundary will help you instinctively choose and retain trustworthy mates and friends. Similarly, if your envy flows freely, you won’t appear openly envious or greedy; instead, your internal security will allow you to celebrate the gains and recognitions of others (even when they’re undeserved) without ignoring your own need for gain and recognition. However, when you dishonor your jealousy and envy, you’ll have trouble identifying or relating to reliable companions, and you (and everyone around you) will be disrupted by your disastrous attempts to bolster your self-respect and security by denouncing everyone else’s, and grabbing everything you can get your hands on.
I call jealousy and envy the “sociological emotions” because they help us understand and brilliantly navigate our social world. Very few people share this view; our culture pathologizes most difficult emotions, but jealousy and envy seem to be targeted more universally than others. People who express these emotions are rarely honored; they are often called “insanely jealous” or “green-eyed monsters,” which throws these emotions into the shadows. That’s never a good idea, especially in regard to emotions that carry intuitive and protective information. Both jealousy and envy arise when you’ve detected a risk to your social and personal security. Shutting them down is like throwing a noisy smoke alarm out the window instead of finding out why it went off! When you stifle your jealousy and envy, you not only lose your awareness of the situations that brought them forward, but you lose your emotional agility, your instincts, and your ability to navigate through your social world and your relationships.
Many psychologists and laypeople have classified jealousy and envy as “primitive” emotions more suited to Neanderthals than to modern-day people. This is yet another example of misusing the intellect to pigeonhole and disrespect an emotional state. When the intellect is allowed to wage war on the emotions, the village inside us destabilizes, and functional intelligence decreases alarmingly. Classifying jealousy and envy as primitive and obsolete ignores the fact that the need for jealousy and envy hasn’t declined in any population since the beginning of human history. If these emotions were truly obsolete, they would have disappeared by now. Since they haven’t, our job as empaths is to find out why they’re necessary. We’ll start with jealousy.
Imagine yourself and your lover at a party. The two of you are entering into a committed relationship, you’re appearing in public as a couple for the first time, and you’re looking forward to the evening. As your lover moves off to get you a drink, he or she sees an ex-mate and smiles with such joy that you feel a sharp pain in your heart. You immediately push this pain away, and paste a smile back onto your ashen face in case someone is watching you. Next thing you know, your lover and the ex are hugging and kissing each other in ways that make you wonder if it’s truly over between them. When your lover disentangles and returns with your drink, what do you do? Do you repress your jealousy and present a happy face? If you do, your lover will probably appreciate it, but a little bit of your soul will collapse (and you’ll probably fall into inadvertent sulking or brooding for the rest of the night). Or do you express your jealousy in its mood state and accuse your lover of betrayal? If you do, you’ll gain the upper hand, but you’ll damage your lover’s self-image and reputation (there may have been no improper intentions). If these were your only choices—to hurt yourself or castigate your lover—jealousy would deserve its terrible reputation. Luckily, there is another option. If you can understand why jealousy arises (and what it brings to you), you’ll be able to channel this powerful emotion honorably.
In the situation above, your free-flowing jealousy allowed you to read the situation accurately, because there is clearly a strong connection between your lover and the ex. Jealousy is a combination of intuition (fear) and self-protection (anger) that arises in its mood state when your most intimate and important relationships are threatened. Intimacy, and security in intimate relationships, is incredibly important to your health and well-being, so much so that you’ll actually feel physically threatened when you sense betrayal from your mate. This sense of threat can certainly be traced back through our lineage to more “primitive” times when mate selection and retention ensured physical survival in harsh climates. However, our intimate survival issues have not lessened in importance over the course of evolution, because each of us still faces present-day threats to our health, security, and well-being. Even when you’re surrounded by creature comforts, you still require intimacy and security in your relationships because dependable mates still help to ensure your social and material status. Dependable mates still nurture and protect your children and your family, and they still provide intimacy, love, security, companionship, sexual communion, friendship, and protection. Healthy and committed relationships are vital to your social and emotional well-being, and in truth, to your very survival.
If your mate is unreliable, or your position as the primary focus of your mate is threatened (as it certainly was in the scenario above), your psyche will pour forth emotions and messages to help you face this very real threat to your security and well-being. There is no pathology in this—it’s a natural and healthy response. However, if you don’t listen to and honor your jealousy, it will tend to drag you into a feedback loop that can make your life very uncomfortable. If persistent jealousy is a major stumbling block for you, please look into David Buss’s excellent book on the sociological and biological necessity of jealousy, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. It is an incredibly eye-opening book that defends jealousy as a natural and accurate emotion—even while it chronicles the horrific abuses caused by the repression and incompetent expression of jealousy. One fascinating finding Buss presents is that follow-up studies on couples who entered therapy to deal with one partner’s “pathological” jealousy uncovered clear instances of hidden infidelity in an overwhelming percentage of the cases (and clear instances of crippling amounts of internal insecurity in the rest). In each case, the jealousy was pointing to a truly endangering situation of external or internal insecurity and acting exactly as it should have—to alert its owner to serious threats to intimacy, mate retention, and social well-being.
Remember that all emotions are true, even when they’re unpleasant or filled with seemingly hazardous intensities. When jealousy comes forward, it does so for a valid reason. Your task is to acknowledge and welcome it rather than pretending you don’t require security in your most important relationships. Jealousy is an important part of love and loving connections. In fact, true and abiding love, which opens your heart and soul in profound ways, will often call forth your jealousy. When you truly let another person into your heart, you essentially drop all of your boundaries—which means your psyche will need to protect this relationship that has now become a part of you. Jealousy plays an important role in this protective strategy.
The key to working with your jealousy is to identify when the sincere risks you perceive come from a betrayal by your mate, and when they come from your own sense of unworthiness or insecurity in the relationship. Just as it is with every other difficult emotion, there is no real alternative to channeling jealousy; the only way out is through.
Jealousy contains anger, so you should send it into your boundary to help strengthen it after the shock-damage it has experienced. Jealousy usually feels rather fiery, either flaring and intense, or simmering and steamy; in either case, channeling it out of your body and into your boundary will reestablish your personal space and calm you so that you’ll be able to get focused again. Setting your boundary with your jealousy will address your anger meaningfully, and from within your revitalized sacred space, you’ll be able to address your shock and diminishment with renewed strength. Then you can access the fear-based instincts and intuition your jealousy brings to you.
If you attempt to take action (which is the correct response to the fear inside jealousy) before you restore your boundary with the anger, you’ll most likely overcompensate and explode, or undercompensate and collapse. However, if your boundary is strengthened and stabilized first, your actions will arise from a position of grounded strength. When you create sacred space for yourself, you’ll have full access to your intuition and your instincts, which means you’ll have dozens of ways to respond (instead of the usual two: explode or collapse). You may decide to study the situation more carefully (“What has been betrayed?”), search your memory for any other incidents of betrayal (this is a brilliant use of the intuition inside jealousy), speak respectfully with your partner about your honest concerns, examine your own sense of worthiness and security (“What must be healed and restored?”), or perform a contract-burning session in order to become aware of the agreements you made as you entered into the relationship (faithfulness may not have been one of your original concerns, though it clearly is now!). Whichever action you take, you’ll act as an upright and emotionally resourced person instead of a powerless victim. If you listen to your jealousy, it will increase your awareness and your ability to honor yourself and your mate.
If you throw your jealousy away by repressing it or exploding with it, your ability to identify and respond appropriately to faithlessness will deteriorate. Then the relationships you choose will most likely be so incompatible and destabilizing that you won’t have the peace of mind you need to take care of yourself, balance your life, or examine your deepest issues. But if you can honor and listen to the brilliant information your jealousy brings you, you’ll be fully able to withstand the often harrowing journey you must take to reach the core of any troubling relationship issue. At this core, you may discover not just information about your current mate, but foundational beliefs you hold about your self-worth and the worth of others, the familial programming you’ve ingested in regard to love and belonging, the contracts you still carry with your parents or caregivers (your first love relationships), or perhaps the ingenious tricks you’ve used to protect yourself against loss by unconsciously selecting incompatible people with whom you’ll never truly be able to connect.
With the help of your honored jealousy, you may uncover intimacy contracts related to peer pressures, family rules and inconsistencies, media brainwashing, and just about anything else. If you can place those trapped and entrapping messages on nice big contracts and take a look at them, you’ll begin to understand why relationships and jealousy have been stumbling blocks for you. Then you can use your jealousy to set yourself free. When you can roll your contracts up and wrap them tightly, you can encapsulate and enclose them as a way to separate yourself from their influence (now that you know what your contracts contain and why you agreed to them). Then when you can throw your contracts away from you and burn them with whatever intensity you feel (jealousy can make blazing bonfires out of those contracts!), you’ll be able to take full advantage of the power of your emotions instead of being overwhelmed by them. Your psyche will be cleansed, your awareness will be expanded, and you’ll retrieve your definition, your intuition, and your resources. Maybe the relationship that called forth your jealousy will continue, now that you’re able to be a more conscious partner in it. Maybe it will fall away if your mate is untrue, or if you discover your own untruthful reasons for being in the relationship in the first place. Maybe you’ll unearth serious feelings of inadequacy that require healing before you can truly commit yourself to any relationship. However your story unfolds, your honored jealousy will enable you to protect your heart and the heart of your mate. Don’t treat jealousy as if it were an unwanted houseguest. Invite this guest in and embrace it fully; there’s powerful healing knowledge inside jealousy.
If you’ve spent a lot of time in your life suppressing or exploding with your jealousy, you may find a world of emotions trapped behind it—especially angers and fears. You may find shame, hatred, rage, and anger bubbling up, or you may feel anxious, panicky, or confused. You may drop into apathy or depression, or you may move into sadness, despair, or grief. Don’t pathologize these feelings! All emotions will move through you if you simply welcome them, channel them, and honor their brilliant information. If you need to, you can turn to the chapters that deal with whichever emotions come up for you, but know this first: increased movement and flow means you’re doing everything right! Stand upright and congratulate yourself; your flow has returned! Use your multiple intelligences, feel your body, connect with your vision, and remember: you have emotions, but you aren’t made of emotions alone. Emotions aren’t your tormentors; they are your tools, your guides, your protectors, and your allies.
When you’ve moved through the contracts your jealousy can identify right now, please refocus yourself, refresh your grounding, brighten your boundary, and rejuvenate yourself as soon as possible. Jealousy helps you uncover and dislodge enormous amounts of information and old behaviors. This extreme change in your psyche will alert your stasis tendencies immediately—so you should rejuvenate every part of yourself right away. Refilling yourself intentionally makes your movements toward stasis as conscious and deliberate as your movements toward change. When you’re done, thank your jealousy and let it know it’s totally welcome in the future to help you choose, maintain, and watch over the most important relationships in your life.
Persistent and unrelenting jealousy is rarely pathological. It’s disruptive, uncomfortable, and often embarrassing (shame and jealousy often travel together, because both help you monitor your behavior and your relationships), but it rarely comes out of nowhere, for no reason at all. However, the raging-rapids form of jealousy is often so distressing (and hard to share with others due to jealousy’s bad reputation) that it becomes easy to think of yourself as disordered. Though all of the skills in the jealousy practice above will help you move through any amount of trapped jealousy, this emotion is so powerful (and has been so powerfully dishonored) that approaching it may feel daunting and even impossible. If so, it’s time to reach out for support. Traditional therapy can be very useful, as can cognitive-behavioral therapy. The most important thing to remember, though, is not to allow anyone to attempt to erase your jealousy in favor of some “nicer” emotion. Your sacred task in the territory of jealousy is to restore your boundaries, your intuition, and your ability to choose and maintain devoted relationships—not to forever rid yourself of the incredible healing force of jealousy.
If you can simply help people honor and listen to their jealousy, you’ll perform a great healing service. If you try to argue or shame people out of their jealousy, you’ll disable their instincts and their boundaries. However, if you can welcome jealousy as valid and purposeful, you’ll immediately calm and center the jealous person, which means that his or her boundaries and instincts will return. You won’t need to be a sage or a counselor; jealousy comes complete with its own brilliant information and instincts, so all you really need to do is ask jealous people what they sense. This will help them honor the intuition inside their jealousy and validate the signals that have alerted them to trouble.
If people you know struggle with persistent cycles of jealousy, you can create sacred space by helping them see that their jealousy always arises in response to true threats to their well-being and intimate security. If they are entangled with a faithless mate, you can help them identify the situation by simply allowing them to speak. If the trouble is not in the mate, but in their own sense of insecurity (or their inappropriate choice of mates), you can also help them identify the situation by simply allowing them to speak. However, if their jealousy persists unchanged, you should help them find a good therapist who can assist them in uncovering the buried issues that disrupt their ability to experience healing intimacy. Jealousy is an intense emotion; if it is misused, it will spiral into a feedback loop and drop people into the rapids—which means they’ll require more help than a friend can provide.
Envy is similar to jealousy in that it contains a mixture of boundary-restoring anger and intuitive fear. The difference between the two emotions is that envy uses anger and fear to help you identify risks to your position and your security in your social group, rather than in your most intimate relationships. Envy alerts you to betrayals and affronts to your well-being, but it does so in connection to the fair and equitable distribution of resources and recognition, rather than to threats to your reproductive survival or your value as a mate. Envy is powerful because it responds to powerful threats to your social position and your connection to resources (money, food, privilege, protection, belonging, and status). Envy stands up for you in instances of unfairness or favoritism, or when resources have been (or seem to have been) pulled from you in deference to another.
Envy has been branded along with jealousy as a primitive and destructive emotion, but just as with jealousy, the need for envy also hasn’t decreased in any population since the beginning of humankind. We are an inherently social species, which means that both jealousy and envy arise in order to monitor our social connections, social pressures, and social positioning. Both of these emotions help us function within our social structures. In more primitive situations, envy arose when an individual’s position in his or her social group was seriously jeopardized by interlopers, shunning, or capricious authority figures (“What has been betrayed?”). In such cases, envy contributed the strength to reset boundaries and the intuition to understand which actions (among hundreds) should be taken to restore social position (“What must be healed and restored?”). If the individual’s position had been destabilized, or worse, erased through banishment from the group, the strength and information inside envy would have given him or her the capacity and intuition needed to survive and perhaps seek a new group.
In the modern world, threats to our social position and our ability to gather resources haven’t decreased in any way whatsoever. We now require more money, more resources, more things, and more infrastructures just to feed ourselves than our ancestors ever did. This means that the power and intuition in envy—which help us connect to and monitor our sources of material and communal security—are still incredibly necessary for our survival. Our key task is not to erase envy in favor of a more pleasant emotion, but to understand (and take full healing advantage of) its important intuitive and boundary-restoring capacities in our massively resource-dependent modern lives. Envy has a crucial protective function; it exists to keep us safely connected to the social structures and support we need to live and flourish.
Imagine this scenario: You’ve been at your job for six years, and you’ve worked your way up slowly. You now understand the structure, the hazards, the allies, the troublemakers, and the rumormongers. You know how to read your supervisor’s moods, and you know when and how to suggest changes in ways most likely to be implemented. You enjoy your work and you’ve got a lot of vision, but you don’t sense an opening for your vision to be fully supported. You think of leaving, but you couldn’t match your salary or your accrued vacation at another entry-level position, and you’ve just reached the level of dental insurance where you can finally have your long-needed bridgework done at 30 percent of the cost. All in all, it’s not a bad job.
Suddenly, a bright young man is hired on, and as you watch open-mouthed and envious, he learns to deal with your supervisor and even the troublemakers in ways you’ve never imagined. If you don’t know how to work with your envy, you’ll probably make one of two ineffective choices. If you repress and stomp on your envy, you may look more professional, but since your envy has arisen in response to a very real threat, it will have to return (most likely in sneaky ways that will embarrass you). When your squelched envy sneaks back in, you may find yourself sniping at the newcomer (or your boss!) without meaning to, “forgetting” important work assignments, or making completely avoidable mistakes for no apparent reason. Repressing your envy will topple your boundary, decrease your intuition, and reduce your effectiveness to the point that you may actually endanger your position at work all by yourself. This new man may even be called in to help (or supervise) you! Repressing your envy takes you out of commission at a time when you need to be focused and completely able to think on your feet.
Your second ineffective choice is to express your mood-state envy in subterfuge or sabotage. You might engage in open sniping at the newcomer, secret alliance-making to maneuver around him, or subtle snubbing behaviors to force him out of the loop. Here’s the problem: each of these warlike maneuvers will hurt and degrade you and the newcomer, disrupt your work environment, and perhaps disable the entire business—all of which will threaten your position in far more insidious ways than this newcomer ever could. If the newcomer is seen by higher-ups as your victim, you’ll immediately lose face and become the grandiose and selfabsorbed “bad sport.” If the newcomer has better social skills than you do, he’ll discover a way around you (which means he may have to destabilize your position at the company just to save himself). If your battles take up a great deal of your time and energy, your work performance will suffer. It’s very easy to see why envy has such an awful reputation. Both the repression and warlike expression of this powerful emotion create nothing but harm to other people, your own position, and your ability to function wisely within your social structure.
Luckily for us, there is a healing third way to utilize the excellent anger and fear that live inside envy. When you honor and welcome your envy, you’ll have the inner strength and intuition you need to reassess your position and the threat posed by this newcomer in valuable ways. Instead of crippling yourself with repression or attempting to cripple your new co-worker with sabotage, you can use the vitality in envy to strengthen and prepare yourself for the many changes this man will inevitably bring to your workplace. When you can restore your boundary and observe the situation from within your sacred space, you’ll be able to withstand the shock of this man’s sudden appearance in your established social group. You’ll also regain the equanimity you need to scrutinize your own modus operandi with the help of the startling new information this man’s arrival has brought to you. If you like him, you can welcome him to the job and learn about his valuable social skills firsthand, and perhaps add to your skill set by adopting (or at least evaluating) some of his techniques.
If you can’t tolerate him, you can do some important shadow work (see the hatred chapter 15), which will give you the strength you need to examine why your job strategies don’t work very well, while his so clearly do. With this new information, you can reassess your job and your career path within the company, and perhaps see for the first time how deluded you’ve been about your ability to work within this corporate structure. This is not a fun experience, and sometimes it’s disruptive, which is why envy comes forward. When your social position and your connection to the distribution of recognition and resources are threatened, as they clearly are in this example, you’ll need an immediate infusion of boundary definition and intuition. You’ll need to be able to think on your feet, act quickly, restore your sense of self, channel the appropriate shame you may feel if your behavior has been less than stellar, reset your boundary, and create and implement any number of win-win scenarios at a moment’s notice. Envy gives you all of this, if you will only use it.
Envy contributes the precise skills and abilities you need to deal effectively with any threat or change to your social status or financial viability. Properly honored and channeled, envy doesn’t make you warlike or submissive; it enables you to understand social structures, to work within those structures or leave them behind if you cannot work within them, to gather and nurture resources and recognition without devaluing others (devaluing others is an exceedingly poor social strategy), and to add to your social survival skills. When you dishonor your envy, you become destabilized, isolated, and endangered, but when you allow it to flow freely, it gives you the internal security and intuition you need to meet and respond to the many threats and sudden changes you’ll experience in your struggle to gather resources and protect yourself honorably in our modern jungle.
The anger inside envy is powerful, so it should go into your boundary as soon as you feel it. You can even imagine setting your boundary on fire in order to strengthen yourself (and to protect your envy target from harm). When you can honor the intense anger inside envy and move it out of your body, you’ll be able to calm yourself enough to focus and access the intuition envy carries with it. Just as it is with jealousy, if you attempt to take action before you restore your boundary, you’ll overcompensate and explode, or undercompensate and collapse. However, if your boundary is strengthened and stabilized first, you’ll be able to ground and focus yourself inside your sacred space, where you’ll have access to your multiple intelligences, your emotions, your bodily instincts, your vision, and your integrity.
It’s important to be surrounded by your village of resources at times like these, because if you’re not, you may hold on to your behaviors and attitudes as if they were precious heirlooms or vital organs, instead of decisions and strategies you adopted in the past for whatever good reason you had at the time. If you can treat your behaviors as strategies, you’ll become able to explore and amend them (with contract burning) in favor of newer strategies that may fit into your present-day social situation in more advantageous ways. This is not to say that all envy-provoking situations require you to change your demeanor or your behavior. However, envy arises in response to real threats, either from an interloper, from an authority figure who may not have your best interests at heart, or from an internal sense of insecurity that lessens your capacity to fit effectively into your social milieu. The anger inside envy arises to give you strength, but the fear arises to give you the instincts and intuitions you need to make any number of corrective and healing actions. Envy contains both emotions because both emotions are necessary in the situation. This is not merely a time to act (especially not if your boundary is impaired!), nor is it merely a time to restore your boundary and your previous position (your previous position may be in jeopardy); change has occurred, and your envy arises to keep you protected, effective, and agile in the midst of that change.
If you can bring forward contracts with your envy target, with your superiors or the authority structures under which you labor, with your own position or title (in order to uncover the expectations you may have woven into this identification), or with anything else that arises naturally from within your envy, you’ll be able to unearth many of your beliefs and stances. You may uncover core beliefs about your worth and value in social structures; childhood programming about your value to your parents and your family; sibling and peer issues that have been suppressed but are actually still directing your behavior today; and perhaps even the ways you try to assert your independence by refusing to fit comfortably into any social structure.
When your envy is welcomed and channeled honorably, it will help you uncover unhealed issues and traumas that continue to haunt your present-day behavior. When you’ve restored your boundaries, your intuition, and your social expertise, you won’t have to collapse or explode with your envy because you’ll be able to assess and face the threats that brought your envy forward in any number of different (and more valuable) ways.
Please be aware that mismanaging your envy can and does create trouble throughout your emotional realm—especially with your angers and fears. Don’t be surprised if shames, angers, rages, hatreds, apathies, fears, anxieties, panicky feelings, and confusions come tumbling out of you while you’re channeling envy. Any trapped emotion creates a dam in your emotional realm, and relieving it may cause your other emotions to surge forward for a while until your flow is restored. This is certainly an intense experience, but you’ve got the skills you need to raft through any surge of emotions. If you can notice and welcome these emotions (if you need to, skip to the chapters that deal with whatever emotions you’re feeling), they’ll contribute the information and focus you need to heal yourself, and then they’ll move on as they should.
Please remember that your task is not to manage your emotions, but to become a fluid and agile conduit through which emotional energies can flow freely. It doesn’t matter whether your emotions are pleasant, uncomfortable, mild, or intense—what matters is that you use your skills to welcome them, channel them, and honor their vital information. Remember the twin mantras for all intense emotions: “The only way out is through” and “This too shall pass.”
When you’ve examined and destroyed the contracts your envy can identify right now, please refocus yourself, refresh your grounding, brighten your boundary, and rejuvenate yourself as soon as you can. The channeling of envy creates immense changes in your psyche; therefore, you should use your rejuvenation practice to refill every part of your personal territory so that your movements toward stasis will be as conscious and deliberate as your movements toward change. When you’re done, bless your envy and give it an honored place in your emotional realm. It will give you the inner strength and awareness you need to observe and even celebrate the gains and recognitions of others while you nurture your own connections to resources, social support, and recognition.
If envy is a huge stumbling block for you, and your envy doesn’t move at all after you’ve tried to channel it a few times, you may need to call upon the support of a therapist. Trapped envy is powerful, and it can throw you into the rapids. I’ve noticed that serious and persistent envy often relates back to parental inconsistencies or sibling rivalries that were never dealt with properly. When a child experiences constant injustice and threats to his or her sense of entitlement as attention and resources are continually diverted to others, there can be serious boundary impairment. The opposite is also true, in that there can be serious boundary impairment in children who were raised with too much entitlement and, therefore, never developed a healthy sense of what constitutes enough. The unstable behavior that inevitably follows this boundary damage will then disrupt each of the child’s other emotions and his or her social skills.
If the child grows to adulthood with no connection to healthy envy, he or she may become a distrustful, self-absorbed, and deeply greedy person who will do anything to best the other guy. The worldwide financial meltdown of 2008 is a perfect example of greed raging unchecked through financial institutions of every kind, eventually creating a vortex that sucked everything into itself, leaving many of us ruined simply because others—many of whom were already ludicrously wealthy—couldn’t control their greed. When people and institutions don’t understand the concept of enough, their envy mutates into rapacious greed and turns them into bottomless pits of unheeding, debased craving. The same is true for politicians and their governments: when politicians and leaders (who so often come from the overindulged upper classes) imbue their governments with their own sense of unearned entitlement, they tend to see every place on the earth as theirs to own or control. Our American government’s warlike, jingoistic, xenophobic, and isolationist reaction to the attacks of September 11 is a perfect example of how unchecked greed for power only works for a little while—and then eventually pulls everything and everyone into hell with it.
Though the techniques in this book can help you heal from a childhood that twisted your envy into greed, you’ll need a skilled therapist in your corner as you work through core issues of betrayal, emotional and financial abandonment or overindulgence, unheeding want, and confusion about what truly constitutes injustice. Reach out if you feel overwhelmed, and retrieve your instincts, your intuition, your boundary, your healthy shame, and your sense of honor.
Envy always arises in response to true threats to social standing and connection to resources and recognition, either in the outer world of social structures, or in the inner world of psychic structures. Unfortunately, when envy moves to its mood or rapids states, it can be hard to work with. Here’s why: Envy tends to run alongside shame in most people because almost no one knows how to channel this tricky emotion. If people have chosen to repress envy throughout their lives, their shame will become uncomfortably activated due to their constant self-abandonment (crushing your envy will sometimes protect your envy target, but it always endangers you, and your shame won’t like that one bit). On the other hand, if people have chosen to express their envy in warlike and self-absorbed ways, their shame will also be uncomfortably activated (your shame moves forward when you dishonor others, not just because you’re behaving badly, but because dishonoring others is almost always a terrible social strategy). As a result, many people feel humiliated in the presence of their own envy.
Another impediment to working with envy is that it’s got such an awful reputation—even worse than jealousy in most cases. We seem to have more permission to feel jealousy than we do to feel envy. If you can buck this trend and make room for envy in yourself and others, you can help to detoxify it and reduce its humiliating aspects, which means it will be less likely to cycle into greed. If you can create a sacred space and honor envious people by asking them what they sense, you’ll help them connect to their own intuition and information again, which means they’ll be able to identify the threats they face, explore their many possible responses, and revive their own instincts. You won’t need to offer advice or be an all-knowing sage, because envy will bring its own powerful healing wisdom to the situation.
If you can support, listen to, and honor envious people by inviting them to speak and explore their perceptions, you’ll help them discover where those threats originated and what to do about them. However, if a person’s envy persists unchanged or cycles repetitively, you should help him or her seek a skilled therapist who can assist in unearthing the issues; when envy becomes trapped in a feedback loop, it can spiral people into intense suffering and/or ravenous greed, which means they’ll require more help than a friend can provide.
Remember to welcome your jealousy and envy in all their forms: as your free-flowing sociological intelligence, as your mood-state ability to identify betrayal or unfairness and then restore and heal any violations, and as the rapids-level intensities that may signal serious threats to your social standing and security. Welcome and thank your jealousy and envy.