Daniel felt that jealousy took over his mind. He couldn’t get away from these thoughts, he felt stuck, as if someone had started a conversation with him on an airplane. He couldn’t just get up and leave, and the flight went on for hours.
When you have a jealousy thought, have you ever tried yelling at yourself to snap out of it? “Stop!” you might say, “Enough!” If you’ve done this, has it worked? In psychology, this is known as thought stopping, and psychologists used to even give people rubber bands to put around their wrists. When they had an unwanted thought, they would snap the rubber band against their skin to literally try and “snap out of it.” But the idea behind thought stopping implies that thoughts are to be feared and must be avoided. The problem is that unwanted thoughts keep coming back—they rebound. No one can be snapping all day and all night. And it can even convince people that they can’t live with unwanted thoughts—that they must get rid of them.
If you are doing something similar with jealous thoughts, you’ll find that you need to pay attention to the thoughts to suppress them. You look for more jealousy thoughts and—presto—you will find them. But what if you were looking for something completely different? What if you were looking for the clouds in the sky, the sound of rain on the roof, the colors of the books around you, or were trying to notice your breathing as it goes in and out? You can acknowledge and accept the jealousy thoughts, but shift your attention to something outside of you—something else. Notice what you are focusing on, and ask yourself if there is something else that might be more important, more relaxing, more peaceful.
In this chapter, we will go over ways to live with unwanted thoughts so we can get on with our valued behavior—regardless of the background noise that seems to bombard our minds.40 We don’t have to chase the ambulance we hear in the street, we don’t have to listen to the conversation at the next table, and we don’t have to take every telemarketing call we get.
In the same way, rather than snap at yourself when you have a thought, you can use a wide variety of powerful techniques to live with the noise. Just because a thought appears in your mind doesn’t mean that you need to spend the whole day with it. You have a choice. You can acknowledge it, say to yourself, “I see that thought right there,” and then get on with other things. It’s like noticing a small mailbox on the side of the road as you drive past. You don’t stay and rummage through it. The same approach works with jealousy thoughts—you can notice them, point to them in your mind, saying, “There it is again,” but then keep going with what you are doing. Allowing them to simply be allows you to live with them for now—without being controlled by them.
During the course of any day, you experience thousands of thoughts and images. But at the end of the day, you are likely to forget almost all of them. Pause your reading for a minute, close your eyes, and try to recall what is immediately around you, wherever you are sitting.
I am sitting in my study. With my eyes closed, I can imagine the monitor to my right, a window in front of me opening to a cloudy sky, a pile of files in a basket on the floor, a chair stacked with books, and a cat at the door hoping to come help me write. But honestly, except for the cat, I really didn’t notice these things when I first started writing this chapter. I was focused on the thoughts in my head, the words on the screen, and my urge to check email again. In other words, there are a lot of thoughts, images, and sensations floating in and out of our temporary awareness, but—unless we pause to really pay attention—we will forget about them.
Certain kinds of thoughts appear in our immediate awareness that we give more attention than others. Some of these thoughts may be pleasurable, like the thought of talking to my friend and his wife at dinner tonight. But other thoughts may be disturbing, like jealous thoughts. If you are prone to jealousy, you may have a lot of these disturbing thoughts: thoughts about your partner flirting with someone, thoughts about your partner’s former lover, or thoughts about your partner cheating on you. When these thoughts appear in your awareness, you quickly become concerned. It’s as if your mind says, “Put everything else aside and pay attention to these thoughts!”
These are known as intrusive thoughts, because when they occur in your mind, you have a sense that they are unwanted and negative. You activate your strategy about jealous thoughts. What is the strategy? It’s a series of steps your mind takes that turn a rather neutral occurrence of a thought in your mind into a major life event. Here’s what you think about your intrusive thoughts:
Let’s look at each step in this sequence. Starting with the thousands of thoughts and images you have throughout the day, you are suddenly treating certain thoughts as more important than other thoughts. A jealousy thought becomes quite important—its simple occurrence is important to you. You don’t brush it aside. You don’t say, “That’s silly” or “That’s just a thought,” like you do with other thoughts. Instead you say, “That’s important.” Because it’s important, you then feel you need to pay attention to thoughts like this. So you begin focusing on any occurrence of a jealousy thought and, of course, you find what you are looking for.
The reason you find jealousy thoughts is that you are asking yourself, “Do I have any jealousy thoughts?” Simply asking the question means that you must have a jealousy thought. So your mind sets out, looking for jealousy thoughts that you find over and over. Other thoughts are overlooked, discarded, ignored. You are on a search—a thought hunt—in your anxious mind. And you find what you are looking for—more jealousy!
Now that you are looking for jealousy thoughts in your mind—and finding them over and over—you conclude that the occurrence of the thought means something real is going on. The thought is not some random thought; it’s not just noise in your head. You see it as a warning signal, an alarm, that is telling you something. And at this point, you begin to think that simply having the thought means your partner cannot be trusted: “It’s possible that my partner could be looking around—I just had that thought—and so maybe she is. Maybe I can’t trust her.” You are treating the thought as evidence for distrust. It’s like being charged with a crime and the prosecutor says, “Someone had a thought that you are a criminal. That’s the evidence.” And the judge pounds the gavel and bellows from the bench, “Guilty as charged.”
So you begin treating these thoughts as self-protection. They are helping you, warning you of a possible betrayal, alerting you to the possibility of things unraveling. This operates just like an early distance warning system: the thoughts are going to help you see the missiles being launched, before they strike. These thoughts are your protection—with them, you won’t be surprised, you won’t be hurt, you won’t be humiliated. So you don’t want to let your guard down; you don’t want to turn off your alarm system.
All these alarm thoughts are sounding, and now you must find out what is really going on. Is there a fire? Is your partner lying? Is something happening? You don’t say, “Oh, that’s just a thought; I can ignore it.” No. At this point, you say, “That’s a thought I have to do something about.” So you begin looking for evidence—and it’s a biased search. You are looking for clues to confirm the thought: small signs that your partner is losing interest, that she is flirting, that others are interested in her. You even look into your imagination for evidence: “If I can simply imagine it, then it must be true.” So any fantasy or image that you form of your partner talking, flirting, or touching someone becomes evidence of guilt.
You have evaluated your intrusive jealousy thoughts, and you find them to be immediately important, personally relevant, and predictors of what is going to happen. But let’s pause a moment and think this through; let’s think about your thinking. Maybe the evaluations are misleading. Maybe there is another way to look at these thoughts. Maybe you don’t have to get stuck on them, be hijacked by them, let them mislead you, and then go down the rabbit hole of jealousy.
Let’s evaluate your evaluations of jealous thoughts. Look at them again, and then compare them with another way of looking at things. You have been treating the simple occurrence of your jealous thought as an important event. What if the thought is simply a thought?
Not necessarily. Maybe the thought is simply a random firing in your brain. Maybe it’s an old habit of thinking. Simply having a thought does not make the thought important. It’s only a thought.
You don’t need to give a lot of attention to a thought simply because it occurs. You can simply notice it and then let it go. You don’t have to dwell on it. You have thousands of thoughts every day that you don’t dwell on. Letting go of certain thoughts might help you get on with your life.
You have had these jealousy thoughts countless times and many have been false alarms. A thought is not a barometer; it’s not a temperature gauge. It’s only a thought. Thoughts are not always connected to what is going on.
Whether your partner is cheating or not, it is not based on your having a thought—it’s based on his or her behavior. You can examine the evidence later, but it makes no sense to conclude that you can’t trust someone simply based on a thought. Imagine a court of law—would simply having a suspicious thought be sufficient evidence of anything?
You can ask yourself how many times you had suspicious or jealous thoughts and have been wrong. Predicting reality is not based on a thought—it’s based on testing out predictions. Can you find any evidence that you have been wrong in the past with your predictions?
Continually predicting betrayal does not help you, even if your partner were to betray you. You would be upset no matter what. But focusing on your jealous thoughts will only make you feel angry, sad, and anxious—keeping you miserable. If you ever were betrayed, you would be upset with or without these thoughts.
If there is overwhelming evidence that something bad is happening—yes, you should check it out. But simply having a negative thought doesn’t mean you need to turn into a detective. It only adds to your misery and will lead to more conflicts in your relationship.
Here is a clear way to contrast problematic and helpful ways to think about jealousy thoughts.
We have thousands of thoughts and images that come to mind every day. Most of them are fleeting images and ideas that pass by like the wind, so we have stopped noticing them. But when it comes to jealousy thoughts—“My partner might lose interest and go off with her” or “I wonder if she found her ex-boyfriend to be sexier than me”—we get stuck on them. We spend a lot of time hanging out with these thoughts, engaged with them, entangled in them, and we can even feel trapped by them.
Daniel felt that jealousy took over his mind. He couldn’t get away from these thoughts, he felt stuck, as if someone had started a conversation with him on an airplane. He couldn’t just get up and leave, and the flight went on for hours.
So let’s look at how you can cope with spending a lot of time focused on these thoughts, worried and ruminating.
I make a distinction between productive worry and unproductive worry. For example, a productive worry is something that I can take action on today—it’s on my to-do list. If I can do something today that will substantially advance toward a solution to this problem, then it is productive worry. For example, a productive worry might be, “Do I have a flight reservation for my trip?” I can check this in five minutes and answer that question. If I don’t have the reservation, I can make it today. That’s my to-do list for today. It’s productive because there is something to do.
An unproductive worry might be, “When I give my talk, will people find it boring?” There is not much that I can do today to solve that problem. No matter how much preparation I do, I can’t guarantee that people will find my talk interesting. So the thought is unproductive.
Ask yourself whether your jealousy thoughts are productive or unproductive. If you have the thought that your partner might be flirting with someone at work, is there really anything that you can do today to solve that problem? If not, it’s unproductive.
What’s the problem with unproductive jealousy worries? Simple. Ask yourself how you feel when you engage in endless worries about your partner. Do you feel anxious, sad, angry, helpless? That’s the cost of spending a lot of time dwelling on this stuff. It just makes you miserable. Because dwelling on these thoughts will not lead to productive action, you are wasting your time and doing something that will only make you miserable. Once you realize this, what can you do? You can start with accepting those thoughts. But how do you do that?
You may have noticed that when you have a jealousy thought, you set off running after evidence, asking questions, and looking for clues. It’s as if the jealousy thought appears as an unwelcome guest and starts ordering you around. “Go find out!” “What is really going on?” “Who is he talking to?” “Does she still find me interesting and attractive?” You don’t just accept the thought and let it be. No, it’s something you engage in, try to figure out, and obey.
One way you can get around this is to think about your jealousy thought as a visitor. You can imagine that you are at a holiday dinner. You notice that, at every holiday dinner, there is an eccentric aunt or uncle who shows up. Maybe her views on politics are a little extreme for you, or maybe he goes on for too long talking about a trip to the shore. And you simply feel bored because, if you are smart, you have learned that arguing with him or her is pointless. You have now learned, after many holiday dinners, to simply compartmentalize and think, “Well, that’s Uncle Jay going on again. I guess I will just sit here and listen.” I suggest turning yourself into an observer of Uncle Jay, and just watch him go on, accepting it for now. His banter is not relevant to you and what he says is not important. After all, it’s just words.
So think of jealousy thoughts as visitors—guests—who show up, talk a lot, but what they say is not important. Accept these thoughts for the moment. Let them have their say. Recognize that they are harmless. Let them bounce around as you sit back, observe, and simply let them be.
Ken was at a party and his girlfriend was talking with a handsome young man who seemed very friendly. Ken noticed he had some jealousy thoughts. “Maybe she finds him attractive” and “I think he is flirting with her.” He decided to stand back and accept these thoughts—to recognize that these were natural thoughts to have when his attractive girlfriend was talking with someone. He just accepted the thoughts and decided not to do anything. He didn’t go over to talk with her and interrupt her conversation. He just accepted his jealousy by thinking, “I guess I am having some jealousy thoughts right now.” He then went over to some friends of his and started talking, allowing the jealousy thoughts to lurk around, hang around, have their say. And he decided to do absolutely nothing. Later, he felt less anxious as a result.
I said earlier that jealousy has a mind of its own. It has a pattern of core beliefs about other people and about us, a rule-book about how people should act and feel in a relationship with us, and a set of thinking biases—like mindreading, personalizing, and fortunetelling—that can take us down a dark path of anger, anxiety, and desperation. But a thought occurrence does not mean that we need to be hijacked. After all, isn’t a thought just a thought? Are thoughts real? It’s true that we are really having a thought. But the thought may not reflect the reality outside of our heads. Here are three helpful ways to recognize the nature of a thought.
Close your eyes. Imagine the face of a dog—any dog. It can be a golden retriever or a poodle. Any dog face will do. Get a clear picture in your mind of that dog’s face. Watch it carefully. Once you have that picture in your mind, hold it for two minutes.
Then open your eyes. How did you feel when you had your eyes closed? Did the dog’s face remind you of anything? Did you feel anything? Was it a dog you know—or once knew? When I did this exercise just now, I had an image of our dog Jane. She was a wonderful dog. I felt sad because she died three years ago. We loved her. My feelings were real. Even so, when I opened my eyes, Jane was not here.
Simply having a thought or an image may feel real, making us feel anxious, sad, happy, relaxed. But it doesn’t always point to something that is real, existing, and happening outside of our heads. The same thing occurs when we have jealous thoughts. The thoughts pop into our minds, “Maybe he is flirting with someone,” and we treat that thought as important, as signifying that something is happening or will happen. It’s as if the thought and reality become one: I have the thought, therefore the reality must be there. This is thought-action fusion.
But they are not one and the same. When I opened my eyes, my dog Jane wasn’t sitting here. So what is a thought?
Have you been unfortunate, like me, and picked up your phone only to hear the voice of someone trying to take a poll or sell you something? This is not someone you know; it is a company you’ve never heard of. It’s a telemarketing call.41 I find these calls annoying, but they are going to keep happening.
What do you say when telemarketers call? Do you feel an obligation to talk with them? You might, if you are very polite, but maybe you just don’t have the time or interest. I say, “Take my name off your call list” and hang up.
You can view your intrusive jealousy thoughts as telemarketing calls. You can think, “Oh, it’s that telemarketing call about jealousy. I can just let it ring. I don’t have to answer that. The caller will eventually give up. I have better things to do.” Just because something is ringing in your head doesn’t mean you have to pick it up. Let it ring.
Another helpful way to think of thoughts is to imagine them as trains in the railroad terminal, coming and going.42 You are looking for the one train heading for Peacetown. All the other trains you may see in a given moment are going elsewhere: Anxietyville, Distrust Town, and Anger City. Yes, they kind of look like the train to Peacetown, but they’re headed other places. So if you board the wrong train, you will get lost and have a hell of a time trying to get back. So watch carefully, because hopping on a jealousy thought can be like getting on the wrong train. Observe it, look at it, and choose not to get onto it.
I find it fascinating to watch train cars going by. I like to imagine where they might be going, what the journey is like for the conductor, and what the passengers are seeing as they pass through the countryside. Your jealousy thoughts can be on that train as it goes by. Who knows where they are going? The train is passing you by, on a long journey. You decide not to get on that train. The whistle blows and it disappears over the horizon. You simply decided that this particular train can continue on without you.
You may have mixed feeling about jealousy thoughts.43 On the one hand, you believe that these thoughts might be helpful—you might find out what is happening, they might warn you, they might protect you. Maybe you won’t be surprised. But you also may believe that these jealousy thoughts are out of control, that you can’t concentrate on anything else, and that you need to get rid of them completely. So you have both positive and negative views of your jealousy thoughts: “I need them to protect me and I have to get rid of them.” In your efforts to get rid of them, you might tell yourself, “Stop thinking this way,” but then the thoughts just bounce back—at times, they return even stronger. This worries you because you think, “If I can’t suppress them completely, then I will not be able to cope with them—they will take over.”
One technique for coping with jealousy is to set up jealousy time. You can set up an appointment with your jealousy at a specific time every day. It’s an appointment that you put into your calendar. Rather than spending a lot of time with jealousy thoughts in the morning, afternoon, evening, and even in the middle of the night, you can set aside twenty minutes each day for them. For example, at 3 p.m. each day, you will spend time dealing with these thoughts. And if the thoughts pop up at any other time, you can say to yourself, “I will put that off until 3 p.m.” You can write them on a piece of paper or save them in your smartphone. That way, you won’t forget these thoughts. You will have them at 3 p.m. Many people assume that they will be unable to delay thinking about these thoughts. “I have no control,” they say. But in most cases, we are able to put them off until later. What happens when you set aside jealousy time?
So what can you do during this jealousy time? Here’s a simple tool that you can use when you are bothered by recurrent jealousy thoughts. You can use this at any time, but it’s especially helpful during an assigned jealousy time.
Have you noticed that you eventually lose interest in things that once bothered you? Maybe you have lost interest in, or forgotten, that a former boss said something unpleasant to you or the fact that someone didn’t invite you to a dinner party. At one time, you were really upset—you felt angry, you vented, and you thought it was close to the end of the world. But now the topic is boring to you. You reached a state of benign indifference—you just didn’t care anymore.
Imagine we showed you a favorite movie 500 times. Maybe you enjoyed it on the second or third showing—maybe you saw something new both times. But after a while, you got bored. You couldn’t pay attention. Even the thought of seeing it again makes you uneasy. You think it will be hard to sit through again, you’re so bored. You even fall asleep. The dialogue becomes empty. Nothing holds your attention. Even the popcorn tastes bland.
I’ve been using this technique for years, and I call it the boredom technique.44 It’s simple to do.
It’s a simple technique, based on a very fundamental principle in psychology called habituation. Habituation simply means that repeated exposure to a stimulus, like your thought, decreases how much it will elicit a response from you. It’s also called flooding because you are flooding yourself with the feared stimulus. If you have a fear of being on elevators, I would ask you to ride with me on the elevator twenty-five times. The first few times you might feel very afraid—maybe even terrified. After ten times, your fear has dissipated. After twenty times, you are bored. Even if your fear doesn’t subside, in the future your fear will decrease. Thus, simply being willing to face your fear—being willing to do what feels hard to do, over and over—leads to less fear in the future.
How does this work with jealousy thoughts? Each time you had a jealousy thought, you felt the need to do something about it: to find out what is happening, to worry about the future until you had absolute certainty, or to get reassurance. Now that you have the boredom technique, you are intentionally practicing having your feared thought without trying to do something about it. You are not neutralizing the thought by getting information. You are not trying to take control. You are welcoming the thought in, practicing it, repeating it, until you find yourself bored.
Ken practiced the boredom technique every day, once in the morning and once at night, for fifteen minutes. As he repeated the thought for the first few minutes, he was more anxious, but after a while his anxiety decreased. After two months of using a lot of the techniques in this book, I asked him which one was the most helpful. He said, “By far, it is the boredom technique. I know I can do it, I know that the thought will bother me less, and I know I don’t have to be afraid of the thought. I don’t have to really do anything—except repeat some words.”
We all have an ability to automatically ignore background noise, because if we paid attention to every little thing, we would not be able to function. When you are in a restaurant with your partner, if you simultaneously noticed every single sound in the restaurant—the waiter banging around dishes, people walking across the floor, the music in the background, multiple conversations among twenty nearby people, the sound of a fork being placed on a table, the sound of your own eating—you would probably feel you are going insane. So our minds have a gating system that filters out irrelevant noise, keeps us focused on what we want to focus on, and prevents us from getting distracted.
Some people have difficulty with distraction, as their attention gets captured by extraneous sounds, sights, and smells. And it may be that you are getting distracted by your jealousy thoughts because you decided that they are very important. You decided you need to pay attention, that they warn of danger, and that if you ignore them you will end up bewildered, betrayed, and devastated. But during most of the day, you are not having these thoughts—especially when you are asleep. Your guard is down, you are not focused on your jealousy, you are letting things go for a while. Why hasn’t the world fallen apart during those times?
When you have another jealousy thought, you might find it helpful to say to yourself: “That’s background noise. That’s not something I need to pay attention to.” And let it go. Try this experiment to get more of a sense for background noise.
What if you were to treat your jealousy thoughts as background noise? Just another sound, another breeze, another passing moment that comes and is gone in an instant. Another insignificant, unimportant moment. Another forgettable experience. You are not trying to get rid of the jealousy thoughts. You are not trying to stop them. You are just putting them into the background.
In the foreground of your attention, you can focus on positive goals—and you can keep the jealousy thoughts in the background. Focusing on positive goals is important, so every day, have a set of positive goals for yourself. This could be exercising, eating healthful foods, being rewarding and supportive to your partner, playing with your children, completing a work project on time. Positive goals can represent your values and advance your life as you want to live it.
You have been plagued by jealousy thoughts, feeling that you can never escape them. They intrude on your mind, take over your consciousness, and seem to be the lens through which you see daily life. You’ve tried to tell yourself to stop having these thoughts, you’ve told yourself that you’ve got to get over this, but nothing seems to work. They are still there. You ask a friend, someone you trust and respect, “How can I stop thinking this way?” and your friend tries to comfort you and says, “Just tell yourself to stop.” That makes you more depressed and anxious because you’ve tried that hundreds of times and it never seems to work for more than a few minutes.
Let’s try something different. Let’s make room for your jealousy thoughts. Imagine that your mind is an enormous room, constantly changing, getting larger or smaller day by day depending on what you focus on and what you do. Now imagine that your jealousy thoughts are in this large room, a room where you will make space for these thoughts.
Think of these thoughts as something you can put in a jar. Put that jar up on a shelf. Once in a while you take it down, spin it around, look at it, open it up, take a taste, think about it for a few minutes, and then put the jar back up on the shelf. The jar is always there; you are keeping the jar. But there are lots of things in the room, lots of things outside the room. The jealousy jar is only one object, one thing. It’s there for now.
Like the cans and jars in your pantry that have been sitting there for years, there is an expiration date. You don’t know what the expiration date on your jealousy jar is, but I can tell you that at some point you simply won’t care. At some point you will think, “I guess I can throw this out.” At some point, it might disappear on its own.
A powerful technique is to imagine that your partner is jealous of you. This turn the tables technique encourages you to imagine what it would be like if he or she looked at all your behaviors from a suspicious perspective.
Jacob was jealous, thinking his wife might be flirting with someone. He was worried that she was developing an infatuation with her boss. He was focusing on her behavior—primarily what he didn’t know about her behavior when she was out of sight at work. He imagined the possibility that she could come up with the same reasons to be jealous of him. We tried a role-play, in which I pretended to be his wife accusing him of flirting, wanting other women, having past sexual relationships. This led Jacob to realize that anyone can build a case. And he ended up laughing at the jealousy.
If your partner could build a case for feeling jealous about you—and you know that you are not up to anything—then it might help you realize that anyone could be a target of jealousy. Anyone can be suspected and we never really know for sure what is going on.
Keep in mind that simply having a jealousy thought, or even feeling angry and anxious, doesn’t mean that anything is really going on. We can notice our thoughts, stand back, observe them, treat them like background noise, recognize that—like the noise from the street—they will come and go, and focus on productive actions that move things forward. We often get hijacked into thinking that our thoughts need to be answered, that we must obey our thoughts, that there must be some really good reason we are having our thoughts right now. But we are bombarded by thousands of thoughts and images every day. So it’s important to know what will make our lives better—and being hijacked is not the answer. Sometimes the answer is to simply not respond to the worrisome questions of our negative thoughts.