Jealousy

I've thought that, because of naming conventions, that our culture has some of the intepretations of feelings quite misdefined. This lack of correspondence of names to what is actually happening with feelings contributes to the confusion of what is going on in the experience. There are probably feelings that you cannot access because you haven't gotten past some of the inherent misunderstandings about emotions that our culture seems to have. These misunderstandings are present within the names of the emotions of our language, jealousy among them.

I believe writing about emotions are a great contribution to the hidden mysteries of what they are, how they operate, etc. It's stuff such as this that I wish was more public. Don't more people think about this stuff and try to figure out how it works?

First off, people often use the word Jealousy when they really mean Envy.

I say these things about emotion and language for a reason. I've discovered that it's more useful to think of jealousy, (of another rival taking a beloved away)in another way. For me, feelings of jealousy were actually a composite of three other emotions. Two of them are "Catch-22," meaning they cannot be unraveled because they are two ends of the same continuum.

I prefer to describe these emotions in categories because there are so many names for emotions. Loneliness, connection, belonging is one category of these three. The second category is a desire for privacy, self control, autonomy. In jealousy, these two categories of feelings are the "Catch-22" emotions. If you choose to answer one desire from either of these two categories, you reject and also crave the other category.

The third emotion that keeps jealousy active in me was an irresistable drive to compete. I was driven to incessantly compare myself to the other woman. It seemed to come from a fear and uncertainty about why the lover was attracted to me or her. I found that when I stopped my internal dialogue as I found myself competing with her, it unraveled the other "Catch-22" paradoxes.
Fortunately, this strategy has worked with every other experience of jealousy that I've had since. What have you thought about jealousy?