Does jealousy gnaw at you and you don’t know how to get rid of it? In fact, you’d like to be calmer and enjoy more peaceful relationships. Here’s how to stop jealousy spoiling your relationships.

Understanding the emotion of jealousy

Jealousy is a mixture of several emotions. So, first of all, this means that, like all emotions, it’s born within us and we have no control over it. In other words, we don’t feel it on purpose.

On the other hand, it’s important to understand that, like all emotions, it belongs to us. In other words, it’s not the other person, their behavior or anything else that makes us jealous, it’s the way we perceive and experience certain things that makes us jealous.

That’s why if we change our perceptions, we can stop feeling jealousy. What good news!

So, jealousy is a mixture of fear, shame, anger and sometimes disgust too.

It’s a mixture that’s accompanied by some pretty unpleasant physiological changes.

Fear makes us tense up, while anger pushes us forward.

In other words, when we feel jealousy, it’s a roller-coaster ride inside us.

So how do we get rid of it?

Emotional dependence and jealousy

Jealousy often stems from emotional dependence.

Jealousy means being afraid of losing the other person, and being ashamed of not being good enough for them.

This is why we live in fear, shame and anger, sometimes even in self-loathing.

Emotional dependence arises when you don’t know how to love someone, and when you don’t know how to love yourself.

In a way, it’s a normal consequence of our childhood.

In fact, it’s normal to suffer from emotional dependence as adults. Why is this? Because we haven’t learned to love in the right way. The way that makes us free and happy.

In fact, we’ve learned to love in a way that leads us to feel jealousy, sometimes pathological jealousy, which ruins our relationships.

So, first of all, understand that if you suffer from emotional dependence, you’re normal. It happens to everyone, every day.

Now, this means you need to understand a few things about love and relationships in particular.

Don’t stay that way. Decide to change, because if you don’t change anything in yourself, nothing will change in your relationships and you’ll condemn yourself to one love drama after another.

How to love the other person

So if you want to put an end to jealousy and love dramas, it’s time to learn how to love. To really love.

Because, ever since we were children, we’ve been taught to love conditionally.

As children, we were told that if we did this, then we’d be good boys or girls and we’d get attention and love.

And, conversely, if we didn’t do what was expected of us, we were naughty boys or naughty girls and were punished, shunned, pointed at and ignored.

So we quickly learned to do what was expected of us in order to receive love.

And so, today, we love others on condition that they do this and not that, that they say this and not that.

In other words, we spend our time spying on the lover and punishing him or her at the slightest misstep.

But love is unconditional.

Love is given because we decide to give it. In other words, it’s not up to the other person to make themselves love us, but it’s up to us to decide whether or not to love them.

So, of course, we have to take care to give our unconditional love to the “right” people, the ones who really suit us.

But once we’ve decided to love someone, we have to stop spying on them, keeping score, checking that they’re doing the right things.

Because that’s what jealousy is, it’s not really trusting the other person, it’s feeling like we’re doing the other person a favor when we love them and they have to deserve it.

Find out more about managing your emotions

I invite you to read these 2 complementary articles:

Discover Working on yourself: 10 tips to becoming the best version of yourself
Discover Being happy as a couple: 5 things worth doing

I recommend this inspiring book on the subject:

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz.
The author teaches us how to love. How to love others, how to love ourselves.

Ruiz presents four simple but powerful principles that, when embraced and practiced, can transform the way we perceive ourselves and interact with others.

It’s a spiritual book that I wholeheartedly recommend, because it opens the heart and mind to oneself, but also to others.

Thank you very much for reading this article.

If you liked it, let me know in the comments.

Take care of yourself.