How To Deal With Jealousy And Shame

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The two basic affects with which modern narcissistic reality is oversaturated are envy and shame. A fair of vanity and perfection triumphs on social media. Beauty, thinness, success and efficiency, the demonstrated well-being and feigned fun in a mere mortal and imperfect person give rise to a lot of emotional response, which is sometimes rather problematic for him to contain and digest.

What to do, how to cope with emotions caused by someone else's ostentatious perfection? To begin with, I would like to note that the emotional capture of someone else's success and the habit of comparing oneself to someone grow up on the fertile soil of narcissistic traumatization. That is, not all people without exception feel constant pressure, meeting with someone else's irresistible success, and not even all concentrate their attention on this, inevitably falling into the zone of not enough good, loved, famous and beautiful. In order for a person to feel that his self-worth is threatened due to the success of some other people, he must form a habit of comparing himself with others and looking for flaws, weaknesses, wormholes and blind spots in himself.

Comparison is usually not in their favor, because the objects for comparison are selected according to the principle of “the successful son of a mother’s friend,” when a person unconsciously focuses on people whom, according to some visible criteria, he objectively loses. Because this focus is formed in early relationships and reflects a traumatic experience, it grabs all of the person's attention, forcing over and over again the feelings that hurt the child's self-esteem and destroy self-confidence. Attention narrows, one's own imperfection becomes convex and tangible, someone else's infallibility - too, and now you want to sink into the ground out of shame and at the same time bite into the throat of the beautiful antipode in order to somehow help yourself in the experience of unbearable envy.

If feelings are at such a toxic high level, then, as a gestalt therapist, this first of all tells me that a person is deeply frustrated in his most important needs, which through these feelings try to become noticed and recognized for a person.

What needs does it talk about ENVY? The energy of envy is aimed at appropriating to ourselves the value that we saw in another person. There are 2 feelings in envy: desire and anger. The second gives energy to achieve the desired. The problem is that many of us have been told since childhood that envy is bad. As if you can consciously choose what to feel in a given situation. And then many people cannot admit to themselves their own envy, thereby depriving themselves of the opportunity to recognize their need, which is behind this good and friendly experience. All that remains is anger at the one who is good at it, and this anger poisons a person, and sometimes his environment, not advancing either one step to happiness or satisfaction. For satisfaction, you need to allow yourself to want what the other has and allow yourself to receive it.

There is another pitfall here that can be dealt with quite effectively if some attention is paid to it within the framework of psychotherapy. Since few people are taught to be aware of their needs, a person does not always understand well what exactly he is jealous of. Behind the envy of wealth may be the desire to be successful with women, or simply - with a particular woman. Behind the envy of youth can be the desire for human attention and the suffering of loneliness. It happens in general that what a person envies - the other does not. And there are only projections of the envious, from his strong deficit.

To cope with envy globally helps a good understanding - what exactly am I missing when I look at this beautiful picture of someone else's success. What in my life am I not doing in order to experience this feeling, the value that I see in another as my own? How can I provide this for myself in my own individual style? Not trying to repeat the feat of the “son of my mother’s friend,” with whom I was endlessly compared in childhood, and not for the sake of the “feat” itself, but for myself, so that I feel good about it. Asking yourself such questions, sooner or later it will become clear what exactly I am missing so much and how I can get it.

And the ability to experience sincere admiration for someone else's success helps to cope with envy, without trying a self-deprecating comparison not in their favor, but just like that: because a person is cool, and the ability to give him this recognition. But for such a position, it is necessary that one's own hunger for recognition be more or less saturated. When a person is in contact with his healthy narcissism and knows well what he is doing, cool and generally handsome! Then recognition to another is given easily and freely, and with it, envy is expressed, and not hidden and suppressed.

But if someone has been told all his life that only “the son of a mother’s friend” deserves love and approval, you need to learn to focus on your merits and strengths, to look at yourself with approving eyes. Be your friend where no one has become your friend before. Sometimes it takes time and non-judgmental, supportive eyes before you can look at yourself that way.

SHAME - an exclusively contact, social feeling that regulates the adequacy, fit of human behavior into the socio-cultural framework of the group to which he belongs. Shame is a natural regulator of a person's size, the place he occupies in a group, the social acceptability of his manifestations, and the distance between a person and the environment.

The tendency to excessive toxic modesty is also formed in early childhood against the background of non-delicate parental treatment of the child's fragile intrinsic value, during the period when he lived his own psychological autonomy. This process itself is painful for the child, filled with the experience of rejection and some humiliation, through which the child is forced to realize his real place in the world and the life of his parents, saying goodbye to his infant grandeur. If in this not simple process the child was not provided with enough support, leaving his emotions unattended, or the gap was sharp and painful, as well as vice versa - the parents did not allow the child to meet his real size, indulging his grandeur, all these outcomes form a narcissistic vulnerability, and a tendency to experience toxic levels of shame in adulthood.

Ashamed when too good, ashamed when not good enough, ashamed that someone might think that they are not good enough, ashamed when someone else is good, without reference to whether I myself am good at this moment, ashamed admit that you are ashamed, and so on. Shame stops working on its direct task - to regulate the border of contact with the environment, and turns into a total stop of arousal, because almost any body movement can become ashamed if you look at it with a sufficiently critical eye. Criticism, not approval, and sometimes just lack of interest, not enough praise, admiration and servility can be perceived by a narcissistically traumatized person as total rejection, plunging him into toxic paralyzing, or causing intense rage, shame, which is sometimes accompanied by the same intolerable envy. The second side of toxic shame is complete shamelessness, when the sensitivity to shame is simply cut off from the intolerance of its excess, and a person begins to do the devil, flaunting how he can do everything, and how he does not care about someone else's opinion.

A person is ashamed in two cases. Either this experience signals to him that he is doing something wrong, that he is acting unworthy, inadequate, inappropriate to the situation, or not identical to himself, and here shame gets rid of naturally - through the correction of his own behavior. Or, getting into a traumatic experience, a person does not allow his excitement, any living impulse, to be realized because of a strong fear of meeting someone else's rejection and not being able to check it out in a relationship. Such shame is cured by returning to one's own vitality. Because it is always called upon to stop some forbidden excitement, which a person cannot afford to realize due to the painfulness of an early experience. When the realization of that childhood arousal, that need met with rejection and not enough empathic attitude in the sensitive period.

Overcoming shyness is best in a safe, accepting relationship. Since the degree of retraumatization in narcissistically vulnerable clients is very high, and also, insensitivity to other people's boundaries, as a consequence of insensitivity to their own, entails inevitable mistakes that are much easier to perceive by a specially trained and inclined to support you, as a client, specialist. than the usual environment, from the reaction of which it is very easy to hurt.

With a tendency to experience toxic emotions, the first thing to do in therapy is to teach the client a self-compassionate attitude. Because a large percentage of the discomfort in which he has to live is formed by his habit of looking at himself with that very criticizing, rejecting, comparing and devaluing gaze. And it is very important to learn to give up such an attitude towards yourself in favor of a more supportive, friendly, approving and warm one. When such a habit is formed and a person begins to stop himself at least one thought, where he scolds himself, and consciously find support for himself, half of the job has already been done!