Jealousy: Slaying The Green Eyed Monster (Part 1 of 2)
Imagine this familiar scenario. You're at a party with the guy you've been living with for over a year. Suddenly, a good-looking blonde approaches him. The blonde completely ignores the fact that you are attached to your lover's hip and starts to flirt with him. You sense your lover's attention drifting from you.
"Is he staring at her breasts?" you wonder with indignation. To express your disapproval, you let go of his hand. He lets go of it gladly ... to light her cigarette. "What the heck is going on here?" To make things worse, this goes on for about an hour, and your lover doesn't meet your eyes, until later, when you're in the car, and the color of your own peepers has changed from brown to bright green.
Or how about this one? You're lying in bed with your girlfriend. Suddenly she starts talking about her ex-boyfriend. She sounds a bit too sentimental about this jerk, for your liking. "Didn't he leave her for her best friend?"
You try to resist unpleasant thoughts, but you can't help but wonder if she's comparing yourself to him. Even though you don't really want to know, you start grilling her, asking her questions because you feel compelled to compare yourself to him. You are now rivals, even though he is long gone. The next thing you know, you're going through her things behind her back, looking for old pictures of him and accessing her voice mail messages to make sure they are not in contact.
Or the worst scenario of all. You've been dating someone for three months. You have developed a routine where you talk to the person first thing every morning and the last thing every night. You've gotten to know his or her's daily pattern. Then one morning, he or she doesn't call. In the late afternoon you call and get the roommate. The roommate says "Oh, sorry ...he (or she) got in really late last night and is still asleep!"
Your mind starts racing: "What did you do and with WHOM last night that would cause you to forget to phone me as usual this morning!" you silently scream to your absent lover. Your heart starts to pound. You feel sick to your stomach. You feel fear, anxiety and a sense of rage. Uh, oh... you're jealous.
You start thinking, "How did I get into this?" and: "How do I get out of it?" You feel like you can't live with yourself one more minute until you find out what is going on... Suddenly, the potential threat that you may be imagining to the relationship becomes the most important thing in the world —more important than eating, working or concentrating on tasks at hand. More important — than living life itself.
According to Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Irving Walkoff... [Continued: Jealousy 2]