Jealousy...My thoughts

Let's talk about the dreaded "J" word..Jealousy.  Jealousy is a hot button topic in the poly community. Jealousy does not go away when you decide to become poly.  On a personal level I rarely, if any, ever feel jealous. Compersion comes more easily for me. I've always felt that the reality of polyamory is that my partner(s) will interact with others so why would I feel jealous or bothered by that?  I believe that the huge amounts of self work and learning about who I am contribute to the fact that I don't readily feel jealous.  This doesn't mean that I'm a better person because I don't feel jealous.   I've talked to partners and my friends who identify as poly who deal with varying degrees of jealousy.

 In the book More than Two, there's a chapter called "taming the green eyed monster" There's a highly insightful section called the chameleon emotion which discusses this. A quote that I found that sums up this post is this" One of the things that can make jealousy such a challenge is that it's a shape-shifter:jealousy masquerades as other emotions. Before you can fight it, you need to see it for what it is. Some of the emotions that can have jealousy at their root are fear, loneliness, loss, sadness, anger, betrayal, envy and humiliation."

However, after thinking about my poly journey thus far I've noticed that I deal with other emotions.
Instead of jealousy I deal with anger. My anger eventually leads to bitterness and hostility towards that other person. I think that my anger is just as serious, if not more serious than jealousy.  Throughout my journey I know that I felt jealousy when my partners gave another partner something that I readily asked in the relationship to another partner or when we broke up they gave them that thing I'd been asking them for.  This lead to anger and a host of other emotions. I began to ask myself why wasn't I good enough? Why can't I get what he gave this other person? That's where the anger, the doubt and betrayal come in at. 

 I first experienced these emotions with a past partner. After our relationship ended we just decided to be friends. I wanted to be friends with him because he was and still is a great person but as time went on I started to feel angry towards him. I resented that months later he'd gone back to a previous relationship and all the things I wanted when we were together he was giving to someone else. My anger festered but I never spoke of it. Since we don't live in the same city he never saw or felt my facial expressions or vibe, phone and text conversations can hide emotions and they hid how I felt for almost a a year when I finally lay everything out on the line. I needed to tell him everything. I'd been holding most of my feelings in because I didn't want to seem "crazy" or jealousy honestly.

But when I unpacked these emotions, let me tell you just how much better I felt. I actually got a chance to heal and thoroughly process so much that had been holding me back. It was indeed jealousy but that feeling was hidden by bitterness, betrayal, and sadness.