Jealousy Uncovered: Turning an Uncomfortable Emotion into a Tool for Connection

This week's episode has been sponsored by Oh My Bod, shifting the evolution of pleasure. Hello and welcome to Sex Advice for Seniors. There are so many great emotions out there, aren't there? There's like, there's love and there's sadness and there's fear and all of those wonderful emotions. But I think the one that I, I suspect most people find the most difficult is jealousy because it feels, it feels uncomfortable and very few people enjoy experiencing it. So I'm really, really keen to talk to the person I've got with me today, Jolie Hamilton, who has dedicated her life to understanding and really getting to know what's behind the jealousy that we often experience, especially when it comes to relationships. So welcome, Jolie. So glad to have you with us all the way from Western Mass.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a total pleasure. I love to talk to another jealousy fan. I don't know. I mean, not— you're right. Most people aren't a fan, but I do find it to be a very powerful emotion.

And what is it about it that, that really got you started? Was it something that you experienced yourself and then thought, I gotta get to the bottom of this? Because it's really pissing me off.

Jealousy demanded my attention. I didn't have, I didn't have any option. I had opened up my relationship. And when I opened up my relationship, The experience that I had, of course, included jealousy. That's such a common, like, of course the path in front of me unfolds and jealousy's there. But the trouble that happened was I tried to avoid it. I tried to avoid it by saying, we just won't be jealous. We won't be, you know, we'll just, we'll focus on other things and whatever you shove into the shadow, of course, comes back threefold. And so I wound up with this immense amount of jealousy in my life. And it wasn't just mine. It was the jealousy of each of my partners. And we were all sort of swirling in it, but we weren't able to talk about it. And when we'd talk about it in non-monogamous circles, we were told, oh, you just have to evolve past it. You just have to transcend your jealousy, which is bullshit. That's not— it's jealousy. I might— so I wound up going to school for 12 years to study this. And what I have found is, you know, jealousy was hardwired in. It has a purpose. It has an archetypal purpose for us. It's there to to keep us connected to our valuable others. And yet, because it is also hardwired into our nervous system, it is uncomfortable. And we do have to learn how to reframe it, learn how to re-understand it. It's hard. It's hard. And I like messy stuff. So I was game. Cool.

I mean, I had a very weird situation, I must admit, and it's never reoccurred in my life where I was with someone, we were kind of I wouldn't say we were opening up our relationship as much as we were kind of swinging, and his, his kink was that he liked to see me with other people. This was like over 20 years ago, and I was, I was really happy to go along with that because I'm not, I'm not great with monogamy, and I enjoy a bit of variety. So I was, I was, I was game for that situation. But then there was one circumstance, and I'll never forget it because it changed the nature of that relationship forever, where He'd brought somebody back. We were having some fun. He was off in another room and he heard me laugh with this other person. And he always thought of himself as the funny one. He was the one who was the kind of like funny guy, the guy, the charming, funny guy. And when he was confronted with another charming, funny guy who was 20 years younger than him, frankly, he just lost it. He absolutely lost it. And he said, I didn't like that. And then I said to him, well, I mean, you brought this situation into our relationship. I mean, you know, and we can, and we can move it out again, just as easily, like, just lock down what we've got. And he said, yeah, yeah, he said, but there's something about the jealousy I quite like.

Yeah, yeah. So there's the thing. In my research, what I found is 30% of my participants do enjoy the arousal factor of jealousy. And of course, we can see that. Look at our porn categories. We know that jealousy is an arousing event for many of us, not for everyone. Some people are like, oh, hell no, that actually shuts down my sex libido. Like, that's just not— can't do it. But for 30% of my participants described how it's arousing, it's evocative, and simultaneously, it can also be uncomfortable, right? I can, I can love and hate something. I can be caught in— I think of it, jealousy is a lot like bittersweet. Like, oh, there's— I know I care about this person. I want to pull them in. And also I'm terrified of losing them and I don't like the way this feels. Yeah. Yeah. Humans like complexity.

Yeah.

Yeah. Until we don't, until we just want it to stop. And that's where it gets tricky.

Yeah. And I suppose that's the thing is because that's what happened with us. It got tricky and we just, and we just shut down. We shut down all the extracurricular activities and we never really confronted what was actually going on, which I suspect was the biggest issue of the whole thing was that we just kind of went, well, that didn't work. That made you really uncomfortable. We're just going to stop that now.

Yep.

And, and that, and then we did. So that's it. But I think I've certainly, I would say that generally most of my situations where that may involve other people, I don't really want to know too much about what they're doing, if I'm really honest. And I, and because there is some aspect of jealousy around that, just even if it's teeny weeny, and I don't want to feel it.

Yeah, and everybody's different. So some people seek safety through more transparency, and some people seek safety through more privacy, and neither of those is right or wrong. Where we get into trouble, especially in our conscientious opening relationships, like we're trying to do things well, and we're trying to find the blend of transparency versus privacy that actually works for us, and often it feels different for everybody in the relational ecosystem. And so now we're trying to weigh like, okay, well, I feel safer if I tell you everything, and you don't want to know this, or you really need details, but my other partner really isn't comfortable with me sharing details. And so working that all out, you know, a lot of people hope that opening up will just be instantly fun. It's not just jealousy that's going to come home and say, hi, you need to deal with me. It's also What are you not clear about? What do you not even know about yourself, let alone your partners? It's going to reveal a whole bunch of things that monogamy let you kind of just ignore, lets you just like, we'll just bracket that out and that won't exist here. And now all of a sudden it's here. It's not bad, but it does require a level of commitment to looking into those dark shadowy corners.

Yeah. And also what I notice about my poly friends who are really committed to the poly lifestyle is the level of communication involved in negotiating all these different relationships, the complexity of dealing with how one person deals with an aspect of the relationship like jealousy and another one wants something totally different, right? You've just pointed out, right? Somebody says, I want to know everything. The other person says, I don't want to know anything. Somebody else may say, well, you know, on a need-to-know basis, right?

Right. So what do we do when we're in that position? And I find people often try to make relationship rules that will just like help, let, help us skip all of that, which isn't actually practical once we start having real relationships, not just, hey, we're going to get together with a couple and have a swap and then we'll really never see each other. Like, but when we start to get into relationships where this is ongoing and we're navigating multiple competing needs and wants and differences of opinion, we have to learn how to make nuanced agreements. We have to learn how to not just communicate, but to communicate about our communication. We have to do the meta communication. How do we talk with each other? How do we share information? And for some people, they, they open up and they're like, this is how I always wanted my relationships to be. I wanted them to be about all the deep conversations. I was always frustrated. With the surface level or the mundane. And for other people, they're like, whoa, this is not— I thought it was just going to be about getting laid more. I thought it was just gonna be that and done. It is more complicated, especially if you want more than just let's go to a sex club once or twice.

No, absolutely. And that's why I tell people I'm not poly.

Yeah.

Which people like poly to me implies this, all of this stuff of negotiation and having to work all of this stuff out. And I know that part of what you do, a significant part of what you do, is helping people to move relationships that were monogamous into potentially poly or just opening up relationships. How did that all come— was again, was that all part of the same part and parcel of this situation that you were in?

Yeah, I mean, 16 years ago, I had been, I had been with one partner for 17 years. I had been, I unhappy, you know, with my sex life, but, but, but faithful and doing the thing and like doing monogamy. I was performing monogamy well. And then when I found out about non-monogamy, about polyamory, I embarked on quite the adventure and I made a lot of mistakes and I didn't know who to turn to. We didn't have, you know, the, all the books behind me. We didn't have all the podcasts. You know, I have a podcast myself now specifically talking about non-monogamy. Because I wanted to be a person in the world who people could turn to because I threw my life in the wood chipper. And that, like, as much as I am happy with, like, the very long-term results of that, in the short term, there was so much mistake that could have been avoided if we had had mentors to go to, if we'd had elders to turn to. And we didn't. In 2009, we just didn't have— we didn't know where to turn. It's not an easy process to go from a default setting to a very conscious, like, let's design this setting in your relationships, no matter what that looks like. There's a lot of different ways you can do it.

Yeah, completely.

But it's leaving the default, the set it and forget it kind of relationship, leaving that behind. That was hard.

Yeah, completely. I mean, I, I'm interviewed constantly about the fact that I have, you know, what I call a situationship. And people find at my age, I'm 64, they find that extraordinary, right? But like you, I made a whole bunch of mistakes. I learned what I didn't like, which just didn't work for me. And domesticity just doesn't work for me. It just never has. I mean, I've never been happy in that. And when I've reflected upon the times I've been happy and the times I haven't, I recognize me and domesticity don't go along together. So I had to go out and figure this out, right? But as you say, Even now, I think there are very few people out there who are capable enough and experienced enough to actually guide people into non-monogamy in a way that actually works and is healthy, because it's not easy.

Well, yeah, I mean, so we're— we leave behind our default settings, and that feels like something that many of my clients, they come in thinking, okay, Well, I know I don't want to just be doing the script anymore. But the, the thing that we are, a lot of us feel compelled to do is find the other script. Okay, I'll get out of one box and into the next one, when really we have to learn how to color outside the lines, we have to learn to craft our own life. And that takes time. We're talking about paradigm shifting at that point. And, and starting— I look at non-monogamy as an individuation experience. It is a time when you are coming to know yourself. Some of my clients go through a whole lot of work knowing themselves through an opening process and realize, oh, it was never about the non-monogamy. It was about me not wanting to be in that default setting, me not wanting to go along with the mainstream script. But it wasn't about non-monogamy. It was actually about me getting to know me. And a lot of my clients also, they— there's a lot of destruction that happens when you first open up if you don't know what you don't know. Right? If you don't have anyone to ask, where are the speed bumps? Where should I look? There's no guardrails, right? You just, you, you drive off the road and now you are freewheeling. Like, okay, so what's gonna happen? And it's not— if you're in an established relationship, times 2. Now 2 people have left Main Street and they are just going places. And along the way, we're going to discover things that we thought were 100%. They thought— we thought This is exactly who my partner is. This is exactly who I am. And we're going to be confronted with how we actually show up, how our partner actually shows up. It's not uncommon for me to meet people who are like, okay, I'm a year in and it, I don't know, I just keep, I keep breaking my agreements. What's going on? Like why? And they're confronting this part of themselves that keeps people pleasing, keeps saying yes to things that they're not actually a yes to, or keeps overpromising and then underdelivering. Those parts of you are begging to be known. And the format you've given them to come to consciousness is non-monogamy. But we could have also seen this happen in other formats. It is kind of a sexy one though. These days, you know, people are hearing about non-monogamy and thinking, let's give it a try. So I don't fault anyone for just taking the leap and saying, yeah, we're good communicators. Let's do this. Yeah, but there's actually a lot more to it than just communication. If it were just communication, you could just pick up a script or pick up a book and, and learn it. But it's way more, it's way more about getting to know yourself. And that's work that takes time.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well that it can be very gendered, you know, a lot of gendered expectations for sure, you know, in terms, and also just in terms of if one partner is, you know, more attractive or has more access to other people and the other person doesn't. And so, you know, that's what I've heard lots of is somebody said, well, we opened up and I thought, great, like you said, I'm going to get laid a lot, but she's getting laid a lot and I'm not. And if it's a heterosexual relationship, you know, the man's going, I'm not getting laid at all.

Right.

Actually really difficult because she's going out and having all the fun and he's going, and he's going, where's my fun? And then I did actually go on a date with somebody a while back who was in this circumstance and I was the first date that he'd gone on, right? And he was all excited and he was telling me all about this relationship he was in, which was deeply unsexy, frankly. And at the end of it, she started ringing him because suddenly She, I could tell this negotiated relationship that they had hadn't been really fully tested. Gone and done her stuff. He'd never been given the opportunity. And then when he was given the opportunity, oops, she wasn't so happy about that, you know.

And there's the thing about jealousy. So many people don't actually know in a, in a, like deeply embodied sense, what jealousy will feel like when it enters a currently or formerly very predictable partnership, right? Predictable, perhaps because there were those guardrails, the one rule to rule them all of monogamy, or because there just was no access. Wait, which is not uncommon for one partner for lots of different reasons. But yeah, guys do tend to have a harder time getting out there the first time, like, and their dating experience is different now that we are dating online. Like, it's just different. Confronting one's own jealousy. Is a boon to your psychological development, but it feels like crap. It does not feel good to confront that and then find out, oh, I have been asking my partner to hold this and to just be okay. And I've just been telling them about compersion. And I've just been saying like, we can just evolve past this and feel compersion. We can feel joy for each other's joy. And it's just more love and more love and more love. And then we feel it ourselves and we're like, oh my God, I'm dying. And it does feel like death because jealousy is hardwired in for an infant to stay connected to their primary care provider, like their mother, their father, their tribe. And without that, you literally die as an infant. And so what's triggered in you is that sensation, but now you have adult responsibilities and privileges. And in the meantime, in the intervening 55 years, No one's talked to you about jealousy because monogamy is supposed to protect you from jealousy. It doesn't. I've done studies on jealousy and monogamy as well. Monogamy is not protecting anyone from jealousy, but it's supposed to. So we don't get any lessons. We don't get to talk about this openly. And so it really blindsides us. It comes out of nowhere and we're confronted with pain, which feels like an emergency. So yeah, often, yep, we're ringing up our partner saying, come home now. This is like, I'm dying. I'm having a panic attack. You have to come home right now. I've been on those dates myself. Yeah. Yeah. Not fun.

Not fun. No, no, it wasn't.

And they don't know what they don't know. Like, they— it's from a genuine place of like, I really thought it would be okay. Or it's just this time. And here's this, here's the special circumstance that this— it— yeah, it's gonna happen to most of us. There are some people who have a really high tolerance for experiencing jealousy. Yeah, they are, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, right? And just because they have a high tolerance for jealousy doesn't mean they're not feeling it. My own anchor partner and husband, extraordinarily high tolerance for jealousy. He never reacts to it in any sort of unrelational, anti-relational way ever. And 16 years, never. But as he learned what jealousy was, he's able to identify it in his body, he can feel it. But his— the way he processes it allows him to slow way down. And this is one of the first things I teach people when you're working with your jealousy: slow down. Jealousy tells you it's an emergency, you're gonna die, you're gonna like— your life's gonna fall apart, everything's gonna end. Slow down. We need to tend to your body first, and then walk carefully through a set of steps that allow us to get to know what is the wisdom of this jealousy.

That's so interesting. And I was going to ask, what is a practical tip for when you do feel that intense surge of— it is energy and also anxiety and fear and all the stuff that you experienced during jealousy? What is the best way that you can cope with that?

Yeah, so my research initially was designed to just reveal what people's lived experiences of jealousy were. But through that research, it became very obvious that people who people were successfully managing jealousy all did the same thing. And the very first thing that they did was slow down and notice, oh, there's sensations in my body, I'm feeling away, and name it. They didn't get shameful about their jealousy. They didn't, they didn't shame themselves for feeling it. They named the jealousy. And they learned techniques to be with it in their body, actually slow down and be present. So there are a lot of different tools we can use here. I prefer neurosomatic intelligence because so actionable. It's a very easy to learn system for working with your nervous system. And jealousy is going to give you a big lightning strike to your nervous system. So we slow down and we deal with that. And only after we've learned to do that, to be with the jealousy, then we work on what's the narrative behind your jealousy? What are the stories you're telling about what this jealousy means? And what are the needs? What are the underlying needs? And how do we negotiate with our partner about those needs? But those are— we usually rush to the end steps and we skip the beginning ones because the beginning ones require us to slow down and be the grownups that we mean to be in our relationships. It's hard.

Yeah, and, and I also think that because all of this stuff is so new, opening up relationships, dealing with your partner, being with other people, we don't have much familiarity with any of these situations. Many times the first thing that happens, I imagine, is you just run away. You just run away and you just run away. Run away or— No, I don't want to deal with this.

Yeah. I mean, it usually goes one of two ways. We either run away, the avoidant approach, or we cling and control. We try to micromanage everything. We start orchestrating so that we can see everything. We get super hypervigilant. Both of those are trauma responses. And they're reasonable up to a point. They're reasonable because they did keep you safe in the past. But if you want to intentionally negotiate your relationship and start having more diverse experiences than monogamy provides, then we do have to learn, well, what's it going to require for me? And it's different. You know, I experienced quite a lot of jealousy. I do not have a high natural threshold for jealousy. So what I have to do when jealousy shows up is so different from what my partner has to do. You know, we live in the same house. So I watch what he has to do versus me. It does not feel fair. It's because life isn't fair. Nature isn't fair. But years and years of practice later, I don't run away. In fact, I lean right into it. Because what I found is when I run away, all I'm doing is delaying it and it's growing bigger and bigger and bigger in the shadows. My imagination starts creating even more layers to the jealousy. Than are practically in an embodied way present.

Yeah. And I, I'm guessing a lot of this because you've been in a long-term relationship and obviously made the mistakes, decided that you were going to try and work on them together and come through this experience, you know, being better communicators, understanding what's going on with each other. What's your advice when you're— I always, I always think, what's the advice when you're first going to get together with someone around all of this? Right. Because you sure you can get together and then you can make all the big mistakes. And that's part of being in a relationship. Right. But the other side of it, of course, the flip side is that you can try and avoid some of these things happening before you decide that you're going to get massively involved. So what, what would your suggestion be to someone who's just meeting someone, just on their very first few dates? What would you suggest to them?

Yeah, well, the first thing is, are you doing your own work? Like, if you aren't doing your own, like, consciousness developing work, and I mean, this, this is not actually a hippie dippy, like, light and floaty thing. This is digging in, either going to therapy, going to analysis, putting yourself into learning environments where you can know yourself and how you show up in in relationship, do that whether you are in a long-term relationship or not. If you haven't had some, some years spent digging into who you are and how you got here, do that. But then when you're in those first dates, remember, a lot of how the relationship norms will be set are going to happen between dates 1 and 12. In those first, you know, what do you— maybe 3 months of dating, we start to develop expectations. Make them visible. Make your expectations visible. Make your partner's expectations visible by asking them questions. Learn how to start instilling the values of communication and negotiation right away. And if they push back against that, if they're not available to say, establish a really basic norm, like, when is it, when is it good for us to communicate? And, and how long is a, is an okay break to take between communication for you? How does that work? How does that land? If they don't want talk about that. And they're like, no, let's just let everything flow. Then they're not available to build a really conscious relationship with you. And that's fine. You have to then decide, can I be in a light, casual relationship that's not going to have established norms, somebody who's not going to be my individuation partner? Or is this just not the right match for me? Because you're setting up those norms right at the beginning.

Yeah.

And I see so many people get to around the 18-month to 2-year mark, and they're like, Oh, this just isn't— this is, this is hard now. It's not the way I thought. Nothing's going the way I expected because it was an imagined relationship. You were having a relationship with who you imagined this person could be, but you didn't actually help them know what your needs and wants are. And maybe you don't even know what your needs and wants are. So if you don't know that, we got to start back there. We got to go back and start at square one and learn those so that we can communicate about them.

Yeah, and I think if, you know, we haven't really talked too much about the sex part of all of this, but how does sex play into all of this, into jealousy?

You know, you know, it's so interesting. Most people have an opinion about how important sexual fidelity is or how sexual jealousy shows up for them. But a huge number of my clients report very strong emotional responses, like, like your boyfriend at the time, you know, like, he's like, oh no, you laughed in the other room with someone. And that set me off. We often don't know what's going to set us off. But we can imagine how sex will, we can, like, we cast ourselves into that. And it has an emotion attached to it. How sex fits in? Well, that has a lot to do with how you make meaning out of sex. For some people, the sexual piece is really just about, can we establish safety? Can we establish sexual health safety? Do I— can I establish trust so that my partner and my partner's partners, so we can all be on the same page and actually protect each other through great communication? But what we miss is often like, we won't know until we're in it how we feel. And so many times I have a client who will say, Yeah, everything was going fine. My husband had, you know, he had 3 girlfriends over different periods of time over the last few years. And but now he has this one. And this one is freaking me the hell out. We, when sex enters the picture, it's not just about sex. It's also about the specificity of the individual and the connection that we imagined developing and the threat response that we're having in reaction to that, which is largely happening on an unconscious level. So the answer is not simple. The answer is, I don't know until we get into the specifics of your relationships.

Yeah. And when people, again, when people feel threatened, when they think somebody's come along who's better than them, who does something that they don't like doing and, and does it better or just enjoys it more, often that can feel incredibly threatening. And you know, that for me is one of the aspects of of being in open relationships that I find very challenging. I, you know, because I know I'm not actually a deeply jealous person, so I don't experience deep jealousy, but I do experience it, and I don't like it very much.

So, well, and what you're describing there is really envy, and envy and jealousy often show up at the same time. So in a moment when I am comparing myself to this person who, they are the person who who could theoretically interrupt my relationship, what if what I'm feeling is a comparison between myself and them? Now I'm actually caught in an envy spiral. And envy is just, I mean, it's not one of the seven deadly sins for nothing, right? Like it earned its reputation because it is also a highly intense emotion. And envy from a Jungian perspective, envy is a wound to the self. So that is incredibly profound versus jealousy, which is a wound to the relationship. These are two different experiences, but then they show up at the same time. Or for some people like yourself, one of them is louder than the other. And getting to know that also can help us work with, oh, if this is envy showing up, well, the steps, the beginning steps are still going to be the same. I got to slow down. I got to deal with my body. I got to name what's happening. But the story behind it is going to be very different because if it's not about, oh, this relationship is threatened, but it's about I feel worth problems. I feel like I do not measure up in comparison. Now I got to go back to the drawing board with myself and dig into like, how am I holding myself? How's my self-esteem?

Yeah, completely. That's a very, very, very good point. Is there anything else that we haven't touched upon that you're— I'm sure there's loads of stuff.

You know, there's, there's so much, but I think something to just Since this might be heard by people who are really in that space of like, I don't know, is this, is this something I really want it, but I keep thinking about it. And then we don't do anything. I like to remind people that if you're thinking about it, bringing it up to an established partner, the idea of opening up, you don't wait forever because the longer you're waiting, you're educating yourself. You're listening to podcasts like this. You're getting, you're actually widening the gap of knowledge between you and your partner. So I encourage Everyone, even if you are the initiating partner and you are like, I'm gonna have a reluctant partner at home, I encourage you to think about this as a conversation to bring in before you want to take action. A lot of times people come to me after they have already fallen for somebody else, or they have somebody in their sight line, and we can work with that, but I gotta tell you, there's gonna be repair at that point. There's gonna be a lot more, and it's gonna go way slower than you want it to. So if you're in the, in the fantasizing stage, I encourage you to look at having the conversations now while it's an exploration from a truly uninvested perspective, very different than when I'm all in and I'm like, I'm in love with someone, so you got to get used to this.

Yeah, it's an amazingly good point and one that I think more people should consider. Yeah, because let's face it, often it may be something that we fantasize about and we never do anything about. You know, right. And, or it may be something that we fantasize about and we actually take action. It's, it's a bit like if you're still unsure of your sexuality, if you're still thinking about other things, right, it's just best to let your partner know, look, this is something that goes around in my brain, it might lead to nothing, and it might lead to something, but we probably should just talk about if it did lead to something. What, how you'd feel about that, right?

Yeah, it's— I always tell people there are, there are great ways to have this conversation. I actually have a conversation that I recorded with my husband that's designed to help people figure out like, how do I, how do I invite my partner into this? It's called the Easy Conversation Guide because there is nothing easy about this conversation if you've never had it before. I strongly recommend people consider how they approach this to be something to take seriously, but also not to just keep thinking, I'm just going to learn one more thing. I'm just going to keep learning. When I've got it all figured out, then I'll tell my established partner. Bring them into the picture sooner than later.

Yeah. Julie, it has been an absolute delight talking to you. And I've learned an enormous amount about jealousy. And I'm sure that everybody else is I'm now going and researching your name and trying to find out as much about it because it's such an interesting topic. I find it fascinating. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I'm really grateful.

And thank you.

Have a lovely, lovely day.

You too, Suzanne Noble.