Relax, Jealousy is Normal
30:36 Share

There's a reason the Sleep Number smart bed is the number one best bed for couples. It's because you can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. Firmer or softer on either side, Sleep Number does that. One side cooler and the other side warmer, Sleep Number does that too. You have to feel it to believe it. Sleep better together. And now save 50% on the new Sleep Number limited edition smart bed. Limited time. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you.

See store or sleepnumber.com for details.

Welcome to Chasing Life. Sibling rivalries, competitive co-workers, even love triangles. Yeah, the green-eyed monster has gotten to all of us at one point or another. It's a tale as old as time. What's so great about Caesar? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody, huh? Because that's not what Rome is about. We should totally just stab Caesar!

Jealousy. It's been the subject of Greek dramas and literature, even a cinema classic like Mean Girls. And no matter how much we'd like to think that we've evolved over time, jealousy is still probably a very real part of our lives. But today's expert says there's probably a lot about jealousy that we're getting really wrong.

You could make an argument that it is glamorized. Like, take that Carrie Underwood song, for example. There was an idea that this was somehow empowered, right? That she's bashing in his headlights and she's slashing his tires because she sees that he is being infidelitous. Is that actually empowering? Is it? That's research psychologist Dr. Jolie Hamilton. I mean, the Beatles songs don't even get me started. I'm born with a jealous mind.

It's just as horrible as you can imagine. And this is actually a thing that plays out. We hear these words.

that if I can't have you, no one can. And although jealousy is a timeless emotion, Dr. Hamilton says that nowadays the concern is it is easier to find than ever. People all over the place are experiencing jealousy because their partner is clicking too many hearts on the wrong person's profile. We start measuring this, hey, are they paying attention? Is this a threat?

But here's the really interesting part, and the reason I wanted to talk to Dr. Hamilton today. She makes a pretty bold claim that jealousy doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It is something that we could embrace, something we could befriend.

I was looking for, what's the research? What do they tell us? There was just so little on jealousy. Not nothing. And when it came time to write my dissertation, I was like, I'm sticking with it. I've got to stay with jealousy. She really wants my attention. Today's conversation with Dr. Hamilton, I'll tell you, pushed me a little outside my comfort zone. Made me rethink my own relationship to jealousy. So...

This Valentine's Day, we're getting real about a messy emotion, something all of us face at some point or another. And of course, we're going to tackle the science behind why we feel it in the first place. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life. Is jealousy inherently...

bad, inherently good, inherently neutral? How would you sort of describe it? Well, I actually struggle with this because if you go type in and look for the APA, the American Psychological Association's definitions, you know, jealousy is listed as a negative emotion, like right there at the start of the definition. But they don't say that for anger or sadness, right? We just talk about them being an emotion, an emotion that's informational. It's telling us something. It's a detection system, right?

But there is a bias against jealousy that says, let's put jealousy completely into the bad box. Except when we actually dig into it, jealousy is there to protect us. And we can find evidence that there is jealousy as early as six months old. Siddal Hart's research on this is beautiful. It's talking about how jealousy can show up in infancy and therefore we could see it as protective. It's trying to keep us connected to our valued others more.

When we're infants, that's life or death. And then when we're adults, it can feel like life or death. So of course, it's easy to put jealousy into that category of

Can I just never have to feel it? It's just bad. It's yucky. But if we get closer to it, it can actually be incredibly helpful and can even build intimacy with ourselves and between us and our partners. That's really interesting in how young in age we can experience this. It really is. I have three daughters, and I do remember when my oldest was six months old. She was displaying traits of jealousy everywhere.

toward my wife to me, meaning she wanted to cuddle up with me. And if she saw my wife cuddling up with me, she would kind of come in there and kind of push her away and things like that. And I remember talking to someone at the time, is that just normal behavior? And they said, no, it's a little bit of jealousy, which I thought was interesting. I mean, jealousy from a romantic relationship, I think, is how people often think about it. But

Is there a correlation with envy, with sibling rivalries, with things like that? Right. Well, I would say that sibling rivalry is a combination, and that's what the research tells us. It's a combination of behaviors. There's competitiveness, there's jealousy, there's envy, and these are all distinct behaviors. We can sort out jealousy from envy, for instance. They're both important, but they are distinct. Maybe it would be

great to sort out jealousy from envy because those are the two people often confuse and conflate.

Jealousy is a triangle. There is myself, if I'm the jealous one. The jealous one, the beloved or the valued other, and then the interrupter or the perceived interrupter. So I have self, beloved, interrupter. In a childlike relationship, in a childhood relationship, we're talking about the self, the child, and the parent, the caregiver. That's their valued other, and then their rival, right?

And that rival, we still see the triangle, right? So there's the jealousy triangle. That's how we know it's jealousy. And that's distinct from envy. Envy is about a dyad. It's me and the other. I want what they have or I want to be what they are. So envy can be motivating in a way. You know, if I see someone who has

who has something I want, who is a way that I want to be, I can transform my life, right? I can move toward that thing. I could find it motivating. Whereas jealousy, generally speaking, is about a threat response. I'm afraid that this other is going to interrupt my valued relationship. And it can put us into a very helpless feeling state, like I don't know what to do. But if we think about it, since we can spot jealousy as early as six months old, right?

Well, if we are cast back into this infancy, this infantile reaction, and then we find ourselves in a grown-up relationship, we've got some problems because all of the behaviors, crying and wailing, generally not going to help. But in fact, jealousy does still inspire that kind of behavior. And that doesn't actually help us bring our partner closer. It does help us move the emotion through our bodies and can be very helpful.

So I just want to make sure I'm clear. Is jealousy necessary to some extent? Like if you just look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, if it's something that we developed so early in life, do you make the argument that there's an evolutionary benefit to it? Yeah. Jealousy, far from being the unevolved emotion that people often think it is, it's actually exactly an evolved emotion. It's there because it served a purpose at some point.

And yet now it often causes a lot more problems than people would like it to. So in your modern day experience, just because it was evolved to protect you doesn't mean that your experience of jealousy is actually protecting you. So we got to dig into that. Sometimes jealousy is helpful. Sometimes it's extraordinarily damaging. That's the thing, right? Even in preparing for this conversation, I was thinking, okay, and I talked to my wife about this and I even talked to my girls, jealousy, just your initial feeling

reaction to that. And it has a bad rap. Yeah, it has a bad rap. And I think part of it, I think what you're saying is that it can go from maybe being helpful to some extent to being highly destructive. Right. So I don't know how old you're, how old are your girls? Almost 20, 18 and almost 16. Okay. Yep. My kids are in the same age range there. And it's so funny to me. I studied jealousy a

They know I study jealousy. And still, when I talk with them about jealousy, yeah, they still want to run in the other direction. There is this like, oh, do I have to deal with that? But I've asked thousands of people, hey, what did your parents teach you about jealousy or envy?

So far, I have never received an affirmative, yeah, my parents really sat with me, really walked through what jealousy is, really helped me understand how to work with it and how not to overreact and get into a position where I'm being aggressive, possessive, or violent. Instead, I hear, I don't know, I wasn't really told anything about it.

And then we find ourselves adults and we just think, I should be able to deal with this. Does it decrease or diminish over your lifespan? I mean, I'm closer in age to 60. My kids are closer in age to 20.

Does that change over time? No. In fact, I've only seen that people who experience a lot of jealousy, the only thing that seems to diminish it is if they start interacting with their jealousy, normalizing the fact that they feel jealous and deal with it. Because some of us are really sensitive to jealousy-inducing behaviors and some of us are less so. Some of us have a high threshold for it. The one thing I could say is

if you're in a long-term relationship that feels secure over time, monogamy does sort of make this promise that, well, if everything's secure and everything's going well, you won't have to deal with jealousy. Now, we know that in fact, I mean, the divorce numbers alone tell us monogamy is kind of right in checks it can't cash there because monogamy itself doesn't protect us from being cheated on. I wish it did, but

but it doesn't. And so I don't see any differences in the, like no reduction of jealousy. And in fact, when I studied monogamous people versus non-monogamous people, their responses to jealousy were different because monogamy

Non-monogamous people expected to have to deal with jealousy. So they were pre-gaming. They were preparing themselves. They were getting ready. They were thinking about jealousy. And their community talks about jealousy. It's much more normalized to say, well, yeah, jealousy is going to come up and you're going to have to deal with it in productive ways.

So we could actually take that and apply it in monogamous relationships and say, yeah, what if we increase our conversation, normalize the fact that it comes up and remember that just because I'm jealous doesn't necessarily mean my partner is doing anything wrong.

But they also might be. This is why it's tricky, right? Is that suspicious then? I mean, so we've talked about the overlap between jealousy and envy. There's a component of shame. I think that goes with jealousy. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the different kinds of jealousy.

So there's rational jealousy. Rational jealousy is when I know my partner is over there. I see them interacting with someone. I see all the signs of romance like there. I see what's happening. Now, they may deny that there's any sort of feeling or any inclination, but I see it and I can point to where my suspicions are coming from. But there is such a thing as simply delusional jealousy. I am inventing it from nowhere and

To me, so I studied Jungian and archetypal psychology, which means I really care a lot about the stories that come out of your childhood, that come out of your whole life, right? You exist as a person who's had an entire life

If your experience as a child was that you were abandoned, you were not receiving differential treatment from your parents, your caregivers, it's really easy to imagine forming a sort of core wound that makes jealousy really easy to imagine, right? So suspicion might be a really common experience for that person. Whereas another person who had a different historical background may feel like, no, unless I see a threat coming,

actually playing out. And when I go to my partner, they're evasive and they give me all these dodgy answers. No, I'm fine because their baseline level of feeling secure in their relationship is different. The suspicious mind is a real thing for a vast majority of us. Most of us have a sense of like, ick, that can just come out of nowhere. Not everybody though.

We're going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, I'm going to ask Dr. Hamilton for her take on a conversation I once had with my own wife, Rebecca. We'll be back in just a moment. This podcast is supported by Sleep Number.

There's a reason the Sleep Number smart bed is the number one bed for couples. It's because you can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. Firmer or softer on either side, Sleep Number does that. One side cooler and the other side warmer, Sleep Number does that too. You have to feel it to believe it. Only Sleep Number smart beds let you choose your ideal comfort and support, your Sleep Number setting. Sleep Number smart beds learn how you sleep and provide personalized insights to help you sleep better.

The new Sleep Number Climate Cool smart bed lets you adjust up to 15 degrees cooler on either side. It's perfect for couples who struggle with sleeping too hot. Sleep better together. And now save 50% on the new Sleep Number Limited Edition smart bed. Limited time. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.

Chasing Life is supported by Nereva Brain Health. Listening to a podcast, reading a book, or just remembering someone's name. Things that take concentration, reasoning, mental alertness, and don't forget, a good memory. Nereva understands that maintaining optimal brain health is essential to your daily life. With clinically tested ingredients like NeuroFactor, Nereva Ultra can help support up to seven brain health indicators, including memory. When you need to remember, remember Nereva. Learn more at RememberNereva.com.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I remember once years ago, my wife and I had this conversation. We were at some sort of party. We were off and are talking to our own groups of folks. And I saw her and she was doing this funny twirling of the hair thing as she was talking to this guy. And I remember thinking that's something she does as a little flirtatious sort of move. And-

I asked her about it and I said, Hey, you know, and she said she was really nervous. That's why she was doing that. So I interpreted it as sort of a, a flirtatious thing. She's like, nah, I just, that, that was, and I believed her. I think she was just nervous about it. But,

It was a rational thing sort of crossing over into delusional. Also, what if, what if it was a little flirtatious? This calls into question a really important piece of the puzzle. What counts as flirting? And what's okay for each of us? Because there is actually no standard definition. The important thing is you were able to go to your wife and say, hey, you know what? This brought up some stuff for me. Talk about it.

Even if her answer had been, yeah, you know what? I think I fell into a little bit of flirtatious behavior. I'm sorry. Did that hurt you? Now we could do repair. We can do immediate wound care like right away. And then we could talk about, okay, what are our expectations? Is that something that should be outside of the boundaries of our relating?

There's so much gray zone. Most of us don't actually know exactly what constitutes a jealousy-inducing behavior in our partner until we see it. True relational safety is built through having explicit conversations about what we both want, what we need, how we actually want to create the boundaries of this relationship, how we want to protect it, and really importantly, what are we going to do

if either of us finds ourselves outside of the bounds, what are we going to do next? Because if we don't have a repair plan, then jealousy could lead us down a path straight to demise. Like it could crush the entire relationship. If we have repair plans in place, then we could potentially come back from a jealousy inducing situation. I think that this is probably one of the really important points here is that first of all, no one is immune to this. Maybe not even at any age, any culture, right?

And given that, you should have a repair plan in your back pocket. That requires conversation at a time probably when you're not in the throes of jealousy. Are there techniques that you have instructed your patients to deal with jealousy? No one wants jealousy to destroy their lives. It sounds very simple, but jealousy.

If we just remember that jealousy, we want to unpack it. We want to get to know it. We want to befriend it. I ask people first to treat it as something that is entirely happening within them. So it actually requires just at least a moment of...

of realizing that no matter what your partner's behavior is, the feeling that's coming up in you is yours. So I ask people to get to know the sensations of their jealousy first, literally the sensations in your body. What's the weight, the heat, what's the texture of this jealousy? A lot of people will describe to me knots in their tummy, constriction in their chest, their throat feels tight, they'll get tingles at the back of their head, or they'll feel like their extremities go numb.

I asked them to do this because in my research studies with people who were dealing really well with jealousy, they reported that they could identify jealousy early. They knew that it was happening. So they were able to do some things much earlier. So if you identify your sensations, okay, that's my jealousy sensation. We can all do that right now. We can just remember a time when we were jealous. What did it feel like in your body?

If you know that, you've got at least a basic stance for, okay, I can take responsibility for this feeling, for tending myself, for tending my nervous system, for helping myself to come back into enough regulation that I can move through the rest of the steps. This idea of naming the emotions as you're experiencing them, that's a really good tip. Maybe that's very basic for you, but no one's ever said that to me before. So it gives it some substance. It makes it more objective in a way and something that you can...

maybe more count on. Yeah. Well, I noticed that the people who are successfully dealing with it, they were noticing the sensations and then they were naming it. They were just out and out saying like, oh, this is jealousy. I'm jealous right now. I'm feeling jealousy. They're saying it out loud. They're saying it to their partner. They're saying it to their community. They're naming it. And in doing so, immediately the wind is out of the jealousy sails. Like, okay,

Okay, it's being acknowledged. If we think about that green-eyed monster, what does a monster want? It wants attention, right? It wants attention. If you can just be patient and get to know it, it's actually not necessarily going to be a fire-breathing dragon. It could instead be a really, really funny and playful emotion that you experience within yourself. And if you are experiencing rational jealousy based on real harms, things that are happening in your relationship,

Then great. You named it. And now you can start to understand, actually, this relationship does not feel good for me. And we either need to get to therapy together. We need to learn how to work with our emotions. And we need to have some much clearer understandings of where our agreements and boundaries actually are, because I'm not having my needs met right now. Again, in your TED Talk, you taught me this word. The word is compersion. And when I first said it, I thought you said compassion. Then I Googled it and looked it up. And

And I thought that that was very evolved. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So compersion is a term that can help us remember that jealousy isn't the only thing we can feel in response to our partner having an exciting moment or getting attention, right? Jealousy can come up and inspire a whole bunch of threat responses. But we can also experience compersion, which is joy for our partner's joy, joy for the other's joy, even if it has nothing to do with us.

When you say it's an evolved emotion, I think it is a mature emotion. It's definitely a sign of maturity to be able to stand in my space. So let's just say that I am at a party and I'm watching my partner. I happen to know that my partner loves to tell stories about physics. He just loves it. It's one of his favorite things to do. So if I see him across the room and he is talking to someone, he's lit up.

and he's just feeling all the things. And I see a woman reach out and just touch his forearm during that conversation. I have an option right there. One part of me may be feeling like, whew, that's a little something. I might feel a zing. I might feel jealousy. And at the exact same time, I might feel like, wow, I know he feels seen in this moment. I know he's experiencing profound joy because his very long-winded stories about physics are being well-received.

And I can feel joy for that as well. And the key to compersion is we don't actually have to get rid of jealousy to feel compersion. They're antonyms, but they're not mutually exclusive. Do you have to practice to become good at compersion? You know, some people seem to be naturally inclined that way.

And some people actually also, we didn't talk about this, not sure if you want to, but some people find jealousy arousing, right? So they may feel erotic compersion because they actually like the feeling of, oh, there's my partners. Oh, they're having attention. So there are a lot of ways that compersion could show up for someone in a very...

I hesitate to say natural, but jealousy could spontaneously occur at any moment for any person. And in fact, most of us have experienced compersion in non-romantic situations. We watch our best friend having a beautiful, joyful experience with their partner and we feel super excited for them. We watch a little kid having ice cream or getting a balloon and we're very excited for them, even though it's not our balloon, not our ice cream. But then we turn and we're in our romantic relationship again.

And it can be really challenging to feel compersion, even though we have access to it in other areas, it can be challenging in this area. So in that respect, yeah, I need to bring awareness that it's even possible. And yeah, it does take practice. In my experience, it takes practice. I've been researching jealousy for a very long time now. I still feel jealousy. And...

I also feel a lot of compersion. I feel both of them. I let them both exist at the same time. It does take practice, but I believe we can do it if we start with easier areas. Like I think that starting off with romantic compersion is probably a big ask for most people, but you can certainly do it about their professional successes, about their friendships. It's there. It's much easier. And when you know that you can bring this into your life and you can name it, it also, there's another way we can raise our self-esteem. Like

hey, I'm capable of this. I can hold this big, mature experience. That in itself can help us feel more stable and resilient. So Valentine's Day, do you see more...

Any of these things that we're talking about, jealousy, for example, around Valentine's Day plans or people's relationship with others? A couple things can come up. For one thing, sometimes there is just straight up jealousy. This can happen amongst like our friends. We can feel like, you know, if our friend is celebrating Friendsgiving with someone else, we would feel jealousy. We might feel jealousy that they weren't celebrating with us. With

With the emphasis on our special day being Valentine's Day and I'm supposed to have this experience, I don't think there's so much jealousy in monogamous relationships that comes up here, but a lot of envy, a lot, a lot of envy.

And that may surface up feelings of jealousy. Sometimes we create space for jealousy to brew because we're feeling envy or because we're feeling other difficult emotions. And there's also this thing called justice jealousy. Justice jealousy shows up when we're

I really just believe that my partner like is not going to show up this way. And then all of a sudden I see them showing up for someone else in this really great way. And I,

Valentine's Day is often something that couples write off after a while. They're like, fine, I give up. He's not going to get it. He's not going to do anything. And then if out of nowhere you see your valued other somehow with a little bit of juice around this, it can bring up this feeling of like, I don't like that. I thought you couldn't do it. What's happening here?

It's in non-monogamous relationships, just as jealousy gets much messier. In monogamous relationships, though, I find that it often, it's hard to accept that after a long time, our partner can actually change. It can be hard for us to realize like, oh, actually, maybe they're just doing their work. Maybe they actually dug in. So instead, it can raise up these feelings of suspicion and like, oh, they're showing up for this now. Should I be suspicious? And this gets us back to the conversation of,

Are we talking to our partners? Do we know what's going on with them? Are we actually having explicit conversations about what the expectations are and what work they're doing on themselves? Sometimes they're just doing their work and they're actually getting better. And I want to celebrate that.

I think also the idea of Valentine's Day for me, and I'm a pretty romantic guy, but I think the idea of it being such a consumer sort of driven day, I feel like I'm being manipulated a little bit into spending way too much money on going out to dinner on this day versus the 15th or the 16th or the 12th, whatever it might be. And does it even matter to you? Does it give you a payoff? Yeah.

If you if I have worked with quite a few people who feel like the question around Valentine's Day is I'm supposed to because I need to be able to present it to other people. If this is an Instagram holiday for you, then there's also the question, could you revisit that? Does it actually matter for you? And what do you want to do about that?

And sometimes, I mean, what's in your heart and what manifests, there may be a gap between the two. For sure. Absolutely. Especially if we were not provided great models of romantic and long-term partnership, which, face it, most of us weren't. Or even if the model that was presented to us was good for our parents, that doesn't mean it's a great model for us. And so we may struggle to actually inhabit our loving relationships the way we want to.

Yeah, my parents never celebrated Valentine's Day. But I was expected to. And did you step up? Was that your move? Yes, I've stepped up. But you've definitely given me some things to think about. Jolie, 2025 may be different as a result. What a pleasure. Jolie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed that. I really, really appreciate it. This was lovely.

That was my conversation with psychologist and jealousy expert Dr. Jolie Hamilton with some research and advice that I think we could all use on this Valentine's Day and maybe all year round. Thanks so much for listening.

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Aaron Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker, Lori Gallaretta, Jesse Remedios, Sophia Sanchez, and Kira Dering. Andrea Kane is our medical writer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Amanda Seeley is our showrunner. Dan DeZula is our technical director. And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Liktai.

With support from Jamis Andrest, John D'Annura, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Laini Steinhardt, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namarow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kanang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.

There's a reason the Sleep Number smart bed is the number one best bed for couples. It's because you can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. Firmer or softer on either side, Sleep Number does that. One side cooler and the other side warmer, Sleep Number does that too. You have to feel it to believe it. Sleep better together. And now save 50% on the new Sleep Number limited edition smart bed. Limited time. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you.

See store or sleepnumber.com for details.

This week on The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish. With RFK Jr. poised to take over the Department of Health and Human Services, this is their time. I'm a crunchy mom. Of course I'm going to keep telling you that your Brita's not filtering out what they're saying it is. A virtual army of women known as crunchy moms. Now that crunchy moms seem to have a direct line to those in power, how will that change the access you and your family will have to vetted health information?

Listen to The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish, streaming now on your favorite podcast app.