Shedding the Shame and Embracing Powerful Emotions w/ Joli Hamilton EP 36

[00:00:00] Shanenn Bryant: Dr. Jolie Hamilton is a relationship coach and has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, NPR and the Atlantic. What I love more than all of that though is that you're a research psychologist, and so please, please, please, is there anything that you found in your research that makes jealousy easier? Welcome to the show.

[00:00:28] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah. Isn't that the answer we all want? Like what will make this easier.? Thank you for having me. I'm loving meeting somebody who loves jealousy as much as me.

[00:00:37] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, I know when we talked you were like, a podcast about jealousy, I have to be on that podcast.

[00:00:44] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah, for real, for real.

[00:00:47] Shanenn Bryant: Tell us what you do and what do we do about this thing?

[00:00:51] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah. Okay. So, I am a research psychologist. I specifically studied, Jungian and archetypal psychology. So, I go way back and I study like the archetypal nature of emotions and what actually are they even for? Like what's their purpose? And I also happen to study in both monogamous and non-monogamous relationships.

[00:01:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: So, you can imagine I'm exposed to a lot of different ways that jealousy shows up. The long and the short of it is jealousy is messy, which we all know, and some people deal with it a little bit more successfully than others. And my experience personally and professionally as a researcher is that the more comfortable we get with the idea that jealousy isn't actually trying to hurt us, that it has wisdom for us and that we can be with it, the easier our experience is going to go and the more we can actually come to relate to jealousy just the way we would any other powerful emotion like anger or sadness or grief.

[00:01:51] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And when we relate to it, it respects us more and we can be better off.

[00:01:56] Shanenn Bryant: Well, I'm so glad that you said that because one of the things, I hear it all the time and I felt, I mean, if I go back in time, I can easily recall that feeling super easy and feel it all over again. But like you said, when we're jealous, we feel so embarrassed about being jealous, like so upset that we feel jealous.

[00:02:19] Shanenn Bryant: And yes, a lot of times is because of our behavior because of it, but even just the feeling of jealousy, we get really uncomfortable with that and really embarrassed by it. Whereas we don't really, if we're angry. You know, if I'm mad, I'm not embarrassed that I was mad. I might be embarrassed of things I did because I was mad, right? So, jealousy does seem a little bit different in that way.

[00:02:47] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right, so my research has definitely shown that's true. Many people do report that there is shame packed around jealousy. I do qualitative research, so I am going for what's the lived experience of your jealousy. How have you made sense of it? How have you made meaning out of it?

[00:03:06] Dr. Joli Hamilton: What is it like for you to experience jealousy rather than counting incidents of jealousy. I'm going deep into the experience and when I ask people about jealousy, oftentimes they share stories and they'll say something like, well, I was embarrassed about that. Or, yeah, there's just like, I don't know, I was ashamed of, or they'll say something about someone saying something to them and feeling judged, right? Feeling judged, even if the other person doesn't mean for us to feel judged. Feeling judged is just a precursor. It's just a half step out of internalizing that as shameful or embarrassment. And so what I like to remind people is that the embarrassment is ours as well.

[00:03:50] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Like it is just another emotion, right? Embarrassment is also just a complicated emotion, and often we are embarrassed about things that we have shoved into the shadow. So I'm a Jungian psychologist, so I care about the shadow. Anything that we shove into the shadow, we don't want to be. That is literally the definition of the psychological shadow.

[00:04:10] Dr. Joli Hamilton: It is that which we do not wish to be. So the further you shove jealousy into that shadow, the more embarrassed you may be of it. I can genuinely say that at this point, many, many years into a deep relationship with jealousy, I don't feel embarrassed by it. I do feel all sorts of other stuff. But I don't feel embarrassed because it's, we're friends, we're, we're buddies. 

[00:04:34] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I know that it has a job to do. So a lot of people could go a long way just by unpacking that. Just the embarrassment, the shame from their jealousy.

[00:04:43] Shanenn Bryant: That's why I promote people to get with other people that are experiencing it. I think that's what the podcast has brought to people of oh, okay, I'm not the only one, and I can actually talk about it and getting someone to talk about it like, but once they do, then it's like, oh my gosh, that's so freeing because they're used to maybe talking to their friends about it who don't experience jealousy.

[00:05:08] Shanenn Bryant: They don't understand it, so then that makes them feel worse about it. But when they can talk to other people who experience it, as you said, it kind of comes out of that shadow some.

[00:05:18] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. I'm just completing a study on monogamous individuals experience of jealousy. And earlier I did an in-depth study of non-monogamous individuals experience of jealousy. And one of the primary differences between these two groups is that non-monogamous people know that they're opening the door to the potential for jealousy, right? If jealousy is my beloved and a perceived interrupter, whether that interrupter is real or not, doesn't matter. If it's that triangle, then well, if I'm going to invite the potential for more partners, yep. They're like, okay, jealousy is probably going to show up.

[00:05:54] Dr. Joli Hamilton: They may have some feelings about whether that's good or bad. They may have judgment packed around it, but it is normalized in those communities that jealousy will come up and that we create space to talk about it. That's not true in monogamy. Monogamy is supposed to protect us from jealousy, which is just bull

[00:06:13] Shanenn Bryant: You say it. You can say it.

[00:06:16] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Just is just bullshit. Monogamy will not protect us from jealousy. If it did, we wouldn't have jealousy and that wasn't its purpose really anyways.

[00:06:27] Shanenn Bryant: Oh, thank you for doing that comparison. And it's one of the things that you and I talked about because, the non-monogamy part where, which I thought was very interesting of, you all talk about it like though it's okay because it's assumed and that difference of it not being assumed, just because I'm married to someone of the opposite, then I can't experience that or it's weird that I'm experiencing that. 

[00:06:59] Dr. Joli Hamilton: What kind of statement is it about your relationship? So, okay, like, break this down now. So, as I've done the monogamous collection, some people described it, so, oh, in fact, there's one participant who said it just as succinctly and simply as possible. She said I'd actually be worried if I wasn't jealous.

[00:07:16] Dr. Joli Hamilton: It would mean like I wasn't attached enough. Whereas there was another person in that same study who was like, yeah, when jealousy shows up, I feel like it means that I'm not good at relationships. Cool. That spectrum right there, that is all about the meaning we assigned to jealousy. How we have made sense out of it.

[00:07:34] Dr. Joli Hamilton: So now we need to look at what were the early messages you received about jealousy and probably envy because it often gets conflated when we're children. Um, and then what are we consuming right now for media that's telling us whether jealousy is healthy or not, good or bad, and what it means about relationships.

[00:07:53] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Cause if you're consuming a lot of like reality TV dating shows, you probably think one set of things about jealousy. If you're consuming a lot of like psychoeducational podcasts, you might think another set of things about jealousy. It's not like, for me, if somebody wants to reduce their suffering around jealousy, then the very first thing that they can do is stop assigning so much meaning without really digging into it. Stop just assuming that the meaning you have already assigned to jealousy is accurate and true and objective in some sort of objective sense because that's not really how emotions work.

[00:08:36] Shanenn Bryant: We share all the time, um, the power of one O.N.E. Being open to a new explanation, open to new evidence, experience, whatever it is. And I think this falls so perfectly into that because I don't think that any of the listeners have really thought about how they could look at or feel differently about jealousy.

[00:09:00] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Exactly. So, to me that's where my research, is really, that's what it's for, right? It's, it's to bridge, okay, we have this community of people who've decided to open the door to potential situations where they might feel it. And they are not exempt from jealousy either. So let me tell you, lots of them are struggling with it.

[00:09:18] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Lots. I am non monogamous, and I still struggle with jealousy. It's not like that makes it go away. There is no solution. We have to learn to dance with jealousy. When I am moving between these two paradigms of relationship, I see very stark differences in how people make sense out of it.

[00:09:37] Dr. Joli Hamilton: How they move with their jealousy. Like what they even think to do, whether they even think to talk about it. So, I'm excited that if somebody's dealing with jealousy, right, like boom, they're going to find you and even just that first step into, oh, what if I listen to someone who's talking openly about jealousy?

[00:09:58] Dr. Joli Hamilton: That alone can be ground shaking, and many of my research participants at the end, I always ask everybody the same question, like, so what was it like for you to talk about jealousy for an hour? The monogamous ones, almost universally are like, I've never talked about jealousy for a whole hour, other than if they happen to be like in a jealous fit, complaining to a friend, right?

[00:10:19] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. And then it's hours. 

[00:10:23] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right or maybe a therapist even, but like in that sort of, I just need to vent this out and, and then as soon as the heightened sensation has passed, they put it away. So, they rarely have just from a grounded place of like, okay, I'm going to show up and talk about it.

[00:10:40] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I call it the meta conversation. Can you talk about your jealousy? Not the moment of jealousy, but just talk about how jealousy works, what you think it means, what purpose it serves in relationships. That's one of my favorite questions. What role do you think jealousy should serve in a relationship? If you know that it will be easier to build a relationship structure that actually serves that, if you don't know it well, it's going to be really hard to build an intentional relationship that handles jealousy well.

[00:11:11] Shanenn Bryant: Well, can we talk about that for just a second? Because I think people aren't sure, at least my listeners are very confused because what they'll always say, what I questioned is, well, should I be jealous about that? Or like, am I wrong for being jealous about that? 

[00:11:30] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. Is this justified? 

[00:11:33] Shanenn Bryant: Yes. And that is always a struggle and always what we're looking for the answer for of is this justified?

[00:11:42] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. And to that, my first answer, my highest self wants to tell you all of your feelings are valid and valuable. Awesome. Love that. And the question of whether you are, you know, being rational about your jealousy or whether it's justifiable, those have a lot to do with what the relationship structure you set up is.

[00:12:08] Dr. Joli Hamilton: What your agreements are, what you're experiencing in your relationship that is leading you to feel jealous. Which also will mean we'll need to look back at what's your history with jealousy, because, well, if you're like me, you have a history, a long history with jealousy. it will keep kicking your butt until you listen, right?

[00:12:29] Dr. Joli Hamilton: So, you may be working out your own stuff with partner after partner. And that question, is this justifiable? Like, should I be jealous now? There is no objective standard there because there is no such thing as an objectively correct relationship agreement either. We all have to make them and from those agreements comes the is this or is this not betrayal?

[00:12:54] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And after that would come, oh, does this make sense for me to be jealous about? Because you can have the feeling without it making sense that it's still valid. But most people don't have conscious, like really thought-out relationship agreements. Most of the time we follow the default, so when we feel betrayed and then we fall into jealousy, it's often based on a lot of assumptions and confusion, and that's extra hard because now the jealousy is present.

[00:13:23] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And underneath that is the argument about did I actually do anything wrong? Did my partner do anything wrong to provoke this jealousy? And if you didn't actually have clear agreements, it's going to be even harder to parse out whether that's even true. So, yeah, it's such a, it's such a multi-layered issue to get into about creating the relationships that we actually want with all sorts of people.

[00:13:50] Shanenn Bryant: Not just our romantic partner, but friends, family, all of that. And I love that you said the relationship agreements because while it sounds like a very non monogamous term, right. but I think, you know, it's interesting, I talk about this all the time where, okay, someone that I'm dating or my spouse or something, they're on my emergency contact list, but I don't trust them to go out of town without me. You know what I mean? 

[00:14:22] Shanenn Bryant: t's just, it's a weird. It's hard process that in your mind, and we talk about children, and we talk about finances, and we talk about all those other things, and I think when it comes to some of the guidelines or some of the agreements that would help in the jealousy piece, we shy away from them.

[00:14:41] Shanenn Bryant: Or we just assume that other person, of course you wouldn't do this because we're in a relationship or well, what happens if you do break it?

[00:14:51] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. Okay. Beautiful. So first off, if you have been following the default version of relating, then yeah, you probably never made any actual clear, like we're going to sit down and parse out all of the things that make up how we treat each other in this relationship. And then by the way, we're gonna revisit it frequently, like on a yearly basis to make sure it's still valid.

[00:15:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: It sounds non monogamous. It's not. That is just a relational thing. When monogamous people do this, their relationships get more satisfying, so let's do that. But second, if I don't have a clear understanding of what happens next when my partner hits a deal breaker for me, or hits up against a boundary, if I don't know what the consequences are, well now I'm more likely to fall into either silence and passive aggressive, like hinting or just outright punishment. 

[00:15:45] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And neither of those, I mean, if you had a child and you, and they violate a boundary or they do something wrong and we just punish them, we know that doesn't work. We know it doesn't. It doesn't work with our partners either, but we do it all the time.

[00:15:58] Dr. Joli Hamilton: We assume that they know the rules and then when they violate the rules, we assume that they agree to the same sort of punishments or consequences, but we never really talk it through. And if we take the time to do this, the whole game changes. Everything changes. 

[00:16:15] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I am pro relationship. I don't care where on the spectrum from super, super ultra-monogamous to total relationship anarchy. I don't care where you wanna sit on that spectrum. I want your relationship to be negotiated and clear, explicit, move everything out of the expectations and implicit over to the explicit agreements category.

[00:16:37] Shanenn Bryant: I think we spend a lot of time talking about other things, and then this is the area where we always feel so gray. So that piece, okay. There are some of those major things that we can do. Um, you know, if you step outside our marriage, this is the consequence.

[00:16:55] Shanenn Bryant: If this, if that, what about the jealousy that pops up where it's like, I can't really set an agreement on that. Meaning, I could get jealous over somebody that he works with or that she works with.

[00:17:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yep.

[00:17:14] Shanenn Bryant: They can't not work, right? I can't set an agreement that, okay, well you can't work outside the home.

[00:17:20] Shanenn Bryant: So, in situations like that, what have you found is the best way to deal with those types of things? What can we do?

[00:17:29] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah, so the first step with working with jealousy, and my research has clearly revealed this five-step framework that people who deal with jealousy successfully, they step through this framework over and over again. Most of them don't know they're doing it, but they are, they're walking through this same process over and over again.

[00:17:45] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And the very first thing is to simply notice that you're jealous. A lot of times we don't notice we're jealous. We call it a whole bunch of other things, and we wait until it's so big and so bold that somebody else identifies for us. It sounds like you're jealous, right? We don't even notice. So, the earlier you let yourself notice, and it'll usually show up as body sensations first. Racing thoughts or whatever. Whenever you notice that you're sensing this threat to your relationship, this, this interruption. Cool. Great. You've noticed. 

[00:18:18] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Now move to naming it. Like actually allow yourself to own the fact that this is jealousy, and jealousy comes with a whole host of other emotions packed alongside it. That's true. And it's your jealousy. It doesn't actually originate in your partner. This is the most empowering thing possible. Your jealousy is your feeling, your emotion, and it, it exists entirely within you. 

[00:18:44] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Now, it will be impacted by all the things we were just talking about, relationship agreements and communication, and how you set everything up. All of that's true, but the jealousy itself is yours, and so you are fully empowered to begin working on your jealousy from your side no matter what is happening, no matter what the situation is. We know that this is possible because most people have friends and most of their friends also have friends, and they can handle that.

[00:19:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. So, it's, it tends to be with like one particular person that we feel this jealousy. It's, it's them. It's about what they're doing. No. When my best friend is out with her other best friend, who isn't really my friend, I absolutely feel jealous. And I do not make that her problem because I know that that jealousy is mine to work with.

[00:19:37] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Now, I might talk to her about it and process it and we might do all sorts of things, but it's really just a returning to, okay, my emotions are mine, and now I get into nervous system regulation. How do I make agreements? And, and most of all, am I okay with just letting myself have this feeling like literally just, just be jealous.

[00:20:00] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Jealousy actually doesn't require me to do anything. It's, it's the media or it's stories, its mythology, it's poems. Those things they influence to imagine that we have to take action. Right. But we don't, we can just sit in it and don't avoid it. Don't numb to it. Really sit with it.

[00:20:22] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And that's why I use nervous system. I use NSI, Neuro Somatic Intelligence. I use that as my primary tool for just allowing myself to be with jealousy and re-regulating my nervous system over and over again so that it becomes pretty easy to sit with the jealousy even though it's horrifying and overwhelming and knocks you right off your feet when it shows up.

[00:20:46] Shanenn Bryant: It can! You gave the analogy of, okay, I have a friend who has other friends and when that friend goes out with her other best friend, I might be jealous, but I'm not calling her 20 times, I'm not, not speaking to her for three days. And I think that's a really important distinction of, okay, we'll just handle it the way you handle that.

[00:21:10] Shanenn Bryant: Right? Like think or think through, not just, but think through how you were handling that, of knowing this is me. Because we do take it out on our partners and sometimes it gets so heavy. It certainly did with me, and it got so bad. 

[00:21:27] Shanenn Bryant: And how controlling I was and just nasty.

[00:21:31] Shanenn Bryant: And I know that people listening are experiencing that as well. And so how interesting. That it's the same thing and, and really my friend is actually spending time with somebody,

[00:21:46] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. Intentionally to build emotional depth. Yeah.

[00:21:50] Shanenn Bryant: Right, and I'm seeing the pictures on social media of their lunch and all of that, but we don't treat it the same.

[00:21:57] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And so, this has to do with our socialization and really allowing for this conversation I was talking about earlier of, so what are non-monogamous people doing that's different, right? Because if they're tolerating this better, awesome. Let's just learn from each other.

[00:22:14] Dr. Joli Hamilton: There's stuff non-monogamous people can learn from monogamous people too. So, this is a two-way street, but in this case, great. What are they doing? One of the things I heard over and over and over again was, there was a meta conversation about jealousy. But another was they took responsibility for their jealousy.

[00:22:30] Dr. Joli Hamilton: It was theirs to work with. One participant put it like absolutely as simply as possible. She said, jealousy's a me thing. It's a me thing. I have to work on it and. When we're talking about our spouse, our partner, our um, our person, right? That's how I hear it described. But this is my person and I need this person to be mine and mine alone, and I need them to have all of their attention, right?

[00:22:56] Dr. Joli Hamilton: It's about wanting all of their attention focused on me, and attention is the most valuable thing we could possibly, like, we can't buy more time, right? So somebody focusing their attention on you is so powerful and it is an incredibly challenging thing to really imagine into that in any other scenario, like only in this particular modern version of a monogamous love match have we said, yep, you should get everything from one person and they need to turn all their attention to you and anything else is inappropriate, and jealousy is there to keep that in line.

[00:23:36] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I mean, that wasn't jealousy's original purpose anyways. I mean, that's not why, like, why it's wired into us. It is wired for survival though, so it could feel like it. Do you want me to go into?

[00:23:49] Shanenn Bryant: Yes. I 

[00:23:49] Shanenn Bryant: was gonna say yeah, go into the original purpose.

[00:23:53] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Okay. So, we can spot jealousy. Um, and this comes out of Hart and Carrington. There's a bunch of researchers who've done research into infants. You can spot jealousy in infants as young as six months old. So, the theory is that jealousy then is there to keep us connected to that primary caregiver.

[00:24:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: We needed that primary caregiver to survive. We literally needed warmth from them. We needed food from them. We needed shelter and protection. So, if anyone interrupts that love bond, we are in mortal danger. Then we grow some and a couple years go by, a sibling appears, and we're pretty irritated by that because now this connection that we have had that's been ours is getting interrupted by a sibling.

[00:24:41] Dr. Joli Hamilton: But generally speaking, we don't get told anything about it. We just get told to behave and to share. Right? Just to share. And then we don't really talk about jealousy again until it shows up in our early romances. So now we have, how we felt when we were six months old, and then how we felt when we were three.

[00:25:01] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Neither of those things necessarily made any sense, and I've never had a single research participant or conversation with anyone who remembers any actual emotional education about jealousy. None. Thousands of conversations. So now fast forward, we're in our earliest romantic relationships, jealousy pops back up.

[00:25:20] Dr. Joli Hamilton: The culture provides an explanation. It gives us every possible story we need to say. Jealousy means something is wrong, something is horribly wrong, and we're gonna die. And when that happens, when that total overwhelm that happens and we are delivered the jealousy punch and we make meaning out of it that way, and we're also in our adolescent brain.

[00:25:45] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Well, that's not awesome, but here we are. So now we have this all stacked together, and that becomes our template for jealousy. And so, some of us will not have huge reactions because we're all wired differently. Some babies don't really have a lot of sibling jealousy. They respond very mildly, eh?

[00:26:02] Dr. Joli Hamilton: They're just, they just do, I had one of those, I have seven kids. One of them didn't care. We're all different. And so later when we're trying to process our jealousy actually, make sense out of it, well, we have to contend with the fact that it has these primal roots, and it's tapping those, right? It's just, it's like morse code to those primal roots for what jealousy was for.

[00:26:23] Dr. Joli Hamilton: So, it's totally normal that you feel the impulse to protect this relationship, that you feel like you are in peril because jealousy was there to serve this big purpose. However, we are humans. We have a prefrontal cortex. It is fully developed around age 25. So if you're over the age of 25 or if you're heading toward it and you're having romantic relationships, then what we wanna do is start working with our nervous system so that we can calm ourselves when jealousy shows up enough to allow our prefrontal cortex to come back online so that we can actually think calmly about what kind of threat this jealousy is actually indicating.

[00:27:04] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Can I keep myself in a regulated enough state or get myself back there maybe through a giant rage release, followed by a big crying party, followed by some nervous system regulation. It might take all those, that's fine. But can I get myself back to a spot where now I can say, okay, what's actually going on?

[00:27:22] Dr. Joli Hamilton: How can I have a real conversation with my partner about this? And is this something that legitimately violates a relational boundary that I have? We need to negotiate about that and hopefully we already have some consequences and some renegotiation in place, or is this, like you said, I feel big jealousy because I just happen to be wired that way and this isn't actually avoidable. My partner is trustworthy and they're working with someone. 

[00:27:49] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And now, okay, how do I ask for the support I need, build my life so that I have the support I need and not demonize myself just because I have this right, not shame myself because I have this experience of jealousy?

[00:28:02] Dr. Joli Hamilton: So, then it's about like not allowing my partner to take responsibility for it, return it to me, but also not shame myself for having it. This is why I call it a dance, so complicated.

[00:28:17] Shanenn Bryant: So complicated! That's the piece too, where it's hard for us to even have the conversation with our partner because we're that embarrassed by it. And as you said, just the way that we think about it, being shameful and embarrassing that we're a lot of times not even having the full conversation with our partner.

[00:28:35] Shanenn Bryant: They may notice that we're giving them the cold shoulder, but. we're not necessarily going in and having conversations about it.

[00:28:44] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah, what I notice happens is, if people struggle with their embarrassment around jealousy, um, there are layers to this to unpack, but one of them is likely going to be some self-forgiveness. Some forgiveness around the fact that we have this, what in Jungian psychology we would call a complex, right?

[00:29:06] Dr. Joli Hamilton: We just have this sticky spot. There it is. This is mine to work on. My partner's not doing anything wrong, but here it is. what am I going to do if I don't feel like I can talk to my partner because I'm embarrassed? Working on my embarrassment is a great space to start; a great space, that won't, be helped by just continually talking to the same friends who continue to, like, if you have a group of friends who beats the drum for like, yes, let's dig into this.

[00:29:38] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Let's crack open the bottle of wine and let's just bitch about the all the stuff that makes us jealous. That's actually not going to help you feel less jealous or less embarrassed. I would encourage a new conversation about what the heck happens to me when I am washed over with this jealousy. 

[00:30:00] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I did my dissertation on jealousy, right? And as an archetypal quality and an archetypal quality is both completely banal, it's so mundane. It's so, it happens every day and it is simultaneously overwhelming. It's a tidal wave. It knocks you right off your feet. Anything that carries that sort of import, we're gonna have to have new conversations and make sense out of it in a way that allows for the fact that it is so much bigger than us. 

[00:30:27] Dr. Joli Hamilton: This isn't just a feeling; this is an emotional capacity. It's so important, and it's definitely nothing to be ashamed and or embarrassed about. And the longer it takes to get there, the more you're likely to have done stuff, taken actions that probably are embarrassing or because I see that all the time. If I am embarrassed about the actions I took, um, a frequent one I see is people stalking their partner's social media.

[00:30:59] Shanenn Bryant: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:00] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Monitoring their phones, sneaking into their phones, monitoring their email. If you are surveilling your partner and you feel shame about this, well, it might be good reason to have shame about this because is that surveillance actually part of your relationship agreement?

[00:31:17] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Have you actually agreed to have this no privacy rule? Because if you haven't, first off, we're already into the okay, we need to have agreements around privacy.

[00:31:28] Shanenn Bryant: Oh yes, because you're already like, is this okay or not, okay?

[00:31:32] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Exactly. Before I've even found anything. Right? And so, I might be ashamed way out because some people are really used to surveilling their partners. They started doing it when they were young, and so that's just part of it, what they do, and it can start off really simply. I worked with a client once who said somewhere around 12 to 20 times a day, she would make a loop of all of her partner's social media accounts, and she would just see who's liked, who's press hearts, who's commented, and then she'd put her phone away. Then. 15, 20 minutes later, she'd get the itch to do it again. Sure. Okay. Now we're in a compulsive loop and that all by itself carries a coding of shame, right? Like, now we're like, ick, I'm compelled by this thing, and I don't want to feel compelled by it. And just for the record, the person I'm talking about was 100% confident that her partner was not cheating, was not untrustworthy.

[00:32:34] Dr. Joli Hamilton: She knew this was her stuff, but the jealousy was so overwhelming that she found herself in these loops, and so the shame just started to like wrap around and around and around. So, the way out for her was to start unpacking the shame first, because if she'd gone straight to the jealousy, yeah, we were never really gonna get there. If you've got shame around it, you're gonna have to unpack that first.

[00:33:01] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, for sure. And I think most people do, as you said. I mean, that's what we see. That's what we hear. And the super negative conversation about people who are jealous, right? Like, oh my gosh. So, you know, that type of conversation that you hear over and over again just automatically makes you think, well, I have that feeling, so I am what they're saying.

[00:33:31] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. So, this is where I think it gets really interesting because in my research so far, literally every single interview, everybody has said, yeah, jealousies normal. It's normal. And then plenty of them have also voiced that they've experienced shame around it. So, I think people are doing, I do, I genuinely think, you know, I research mostly in like the 25 to 55 age bracket.

[00:33:56] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Um, I think people are genuinely trying to embrace the fact that emotions are information, they're trying to tell us something and they do not have moral value on their own. However, you can think that and be stating it, and at the same time, be undermining your own experience of actually working with your jealousy by accepting this message that something's wrong with you or wrong with your relationship because of the jealousy.

[00:34:24] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And the very first thing I ask people to do is just talk to me about, tell me, so what does jealousy mean? What role should it play in a relationship? And if we can get into that conversation often, we can uncover some of their unstated beliefs. What do you believe this relationship, how would a good relationship look?

[00:34:44] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Why would you feel differently? Right? And that's where we really get into the nitty gritty. And I get deep into the work with people of, oh, well let's make you a relationship that will leave you feeling that way because you don't currently have one that there's nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't know to make that.

[00:34:59] Dr. Joli Hamilton: That's one of the problems with monogamy. Like monogamy writes a check it can't cash. It says you'll be safe from jealousy, which is not, like we said, it's not true. So, yeah, you also don't have to believe these stories and simultaneously, you don't have to believe the story that you're bad or wrong, or anything's wrong with feeling jealousy.

[00:35:19] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And simultaneously it is each of our individual responsibilities to own the fact that when jealousy comes up, we have to work our side of the street. We have to stay in our own hula hoop and actually work on that. Otherwise, we are going to be stuck. Because as long as you point your fingers out and say you change so that I will feel differently, we have just handed someone the keys to torture us for one thing. So, if they happen to be a jerk, like now we're in trouble because they can manipulate us that way. 

[00:35:49] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Um, and also, we are on their timeframe, so if they wanna take the next 40 years to figure out how to deal with their stuff, okay, are you gonna wait? I, I don't want to. This is where we can self-power.

[00:36:05] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, we can change ourselves. I can't make somebody do something, but a lot of times that is where we go, is that outside? Make me feel better. Like make me, reassure me, tell me things that I need to hear in this moment, 

[00:36:21] Shanenn Bryant: Because it's that cycle of like, oh, feed me, feed me, feed me because I'm not feeling great. But then I need it again when I'm feeling bad, because I'm not doing that for myself. Right?

[00:36:34] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. So, what if, what if too though, we acknowledge that reassurance in itself is a healthy relational capacity, right? Like so asking for reassurance, at least in my work, I have found that making a like a clean, clear ask for reassurance. No problem. However, a lot of times what people are asking for is reassurance about the thing that's not actually the thing, right?

[00:37:01] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Like they're asking for reassurance about some sort of surface quality. Like for instance, am I prettier than she is? Or, uh, you know, I, they're not really getting at the heart of it, which is, hey, can you remind me that you love me? Can you remind me that we are committed? A really, really common place that shows up in non-monogamous pairings is people saying, yeah, well when my partner is going out, we do moment of ritual to just remind each other, like, this is in our values.

[00:37:32] Dr. Joli Hamilton: This is in our commitments. We care about each other and we're both safe. That kind of healthy reassurance simply reaffirms the relationship as it is versus that sort of like, I'm gonna pull out from you some sense of self-worth that I do not have within me, and I don't know how to reinforce. So, I want to sort those two types of reassurance apart. 

[00:37:57] Shanenn Bryant: Yes. And thank you for going into that deeper because that's the piece that we're usually doing That's not really about, we think it is. Like, I winna hear that you think I'm prettier than her.

[00:38:10] Shanenn Bryant: That kind of thing where, you know, is that going to make you actually feel better?

[00:38:18] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Great. And yeah. And in, in any given moment, we may have a particular thing that we want to hear and I wanna know, like, okay, taking that a step further. Can you reaffirm yourself and do you actually know what your relationship is built on? Or is it built on a moment by moment, like looking at this person and saying, they're mine, they're mine. They're mine, they're mine. If you have a seagull relationship, mine, mine, mine, mine you're probably not going to feel really safe and calm. And that takes work, that takes effort on its own. 

[00:38:59] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I definitely have had that kind of relationship. It was called a first marriage. Like, it's not comfortable, right. That, that sort of need. 

[00:39:10] Dr. Joli Hamilton: And yet it's often all we know, right? Building a relationship where we actually know how this person is showing up with us, what we're doing together, and not just what the agreements are, but how will they look in action? Like how will it look in action for us? A really common marriage vow is "I will forsake all others", and the word forsake means abandon, which I think is just wild.

[00:39:36] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right? I will abandon all others. I. I hope your husband's not a pilot. It's just such a, it's such a, like, it's such a big word to put there. I get the idea behind it, right? Like the gesture is supposed to be, I will not turn this specific kind of attention to anyone else.

[00:39:58] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Great. Let's get clear. What is that attention? What's the quality of it? What will it look like in action? For instance, are you the kind of person who, when you go out with someone, you wanna see that their head never turns to anyone else? And you're like, you're out on the town and their eyes are on you.

[00:40:13] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Personally, I don't need that. I love when my partner's looking around. I think it's really fun. I think it's really sexy. We have a great time with it, but I have other ways that I want to be reaffirmed and have clarity around how our relationship agreements will look in practice. And that really does shift the way it feels to live a life where jealousy can happen, but we don't feel like we are at Its whims. You know, we, we don't feel like it's going to have us. When we think about jealousy as a complex, we say sometimes the jealousy will have you, when the jealousy has you and its grips. Yeah, you’re going to need some time. 

[00:40:50] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Well, you bring up something very interesting that I was thinking. It sparked something when you were talking about that piece of being really clear in terms of like, what are the things that are really important to you that are going to reassure you.

[00:41:09] Shanenn Bryant: So, I can just think of this silly example, especially in when I was in my extremely jealous piece, my husband and it absolutely is from a previous relationship with infidelity happening, where that person would call me in the evening and we would talk, and then they would hang up and they would call their next person.

[00:41:34] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yep.

[00:41:35] Shanenn Bryant: It showed up again in my marriage when my husband was like, from the time he left work, the drive home if I found out that he talked to anybody else during that time, it was the weirdest thing because I was like, no, you call your wife when you're on, that's a, that's a husband and wife thing to do. It's like your download for the day and you called somebody else, and it seemed bonkers right to... 

[00:42:07] Dr. Joli Hamilton: He's like, why, why, why? It's just a phone call. Yeah.

[00:42:10] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah, it's just a phone. Now it doesn't bother me anymore because part of that I worked at like, what is this? And was able to be like, it's because of that thing and it's not the same thing. But I could see where even something like that where you could go, you know what, this is one of my things.

[00:42:27] Shanenn Bryant: I know it's weird.

[00:42:31] Dr. Joli Hamilton: You get to be weird, but you get to be weird.

[00:42:35] Shanenn Bryant: but if, if I go, hey, can you like. And maybe it's not that specific, but things like that, that we probably aren't thinking about. And so, then we're always grasping for all these other things. And maybe diving in my point was diving into the things that you do that are really important to you.

[00:42:55] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Right. So, I like to think about this too, and like when you're walking from, okay, maybe you experience a lot of jealousy right now, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably experience a lot of jealousy. Okay? 

[00:43:07] Dr. Joli Hamilton: if you're experiencing a lot of jealousy, let it be a practice that you move out of it in, in the way that you can. It would be completely reasonable to me to have any of my clients show up and say, so, yeah, it feels terrible when you know they're calling somebody else on their way home from work.

[00:43:25] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I want to be that first phone call. Great. Then make a relationship agreement around that. And here's the key. Make it an agreement with a date in your Google calendar right now for when you're going to revisit that. And check in. Do you still need that? Because as you do the rest of your jealousy work, you may get to six months, a year, three years and be like, oh, actually that doesn't matter at all anymore.

[00:43:50] Dr. Joli Hamilton: I feel very secure. I'm feeling good. And that's great. Okay, so you can renegotiate. A lot of times we make these rules, and we make them in the first, you know, three weeks of our relationship, and then they're supposed to last forever. But that's not, you don't have to do that. So, allow yourself to be in a process, and I would say if you need more scaffolding right now to hold you up, okay, then I want you to plan those revisit dates into your calendar now, like while you're in a regulated state.

[00:44:21] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Plan those dates we're gonna revisit this, and when we do, we're gonna make sure nobody's hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. We're gonna sit down, we're gonna talk about this from a place of caring. And if I still need that thing right, then we'll negotiate about it. And if it's a hard line for my partner, okay, it's gonna be a harder negotiation. But that's what relationships are. They're just like an ongoing negotiation.

[00:44:44] Shanenn Bryant: It definitely does change. I mean, there are things that then you can go, it was that way before. It's not that way anymore.

[00:44:51] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Totally. Totally. And that's great. That's also a moment where we can do my favorite thing around jealousy, which is celebrate our growth. Celebrate how, oh, you know what? This used to just crush me. This used to send me reeling. 

[00:45:05] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Celebrate all your wins. If all of a sudden you are over a part of your jealousy, you get to name it, show gratitude to your partner for the fact that you've both shown up to this weird world together and you've done this thing and you're growing and that's awesome.

[00:45:22] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Jealousy, the growth through jealousy. as I grow with it, and I can come into this relationship where I'm like, oh yeah. I feel jealousy, but it doesn't rule me. It doesn't, it doesn't rule my life. Celebrate

[00:45:34] Shanenn Bryant: What a great place to wrap up. I told you in the beginning I was so excited that I found you because there are not, at least, that I found not that many people that are researching jealousy. And I hear that there's not that many people talking about it. There are select few, so I love that you're doing that.

[00:45:53] Shanenn Bryant: Thank you so much for all the work that you've done and for sharing it here. I appreciate it.

[00:45:58] Shanenn Bryant: Dr. Hamilton, where can people find you? Because I know that they're going to want to hear more about your research. They're going to wanna connect with you, so where can they go to do that? 

[00:46:08] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Yeah, so if you were enthused by the idea that there was a process to work for jealousy, that's just, it's just five steps. And the thing is, I did not invent these five steps. They just revealed themselves in the research. So, the five steps are laid out. You can get them at my, I have a free guide. Go to listentojolie.com. L I S T E N T O J O L I.com. Go to listen to Jolie, get that particular resource. If you're not into the non-monogamy thing, that's totally fine.

[00:46:37] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Like if you show up just to get that resource and you're like, I am hightailing it back to monogamy. That's totally cool. Cause I am so into people being into the research and. I really, really care so much about people being engaged in this conversation about jealousy and we all do it differently, but that's actually, that's really good news.

[00:46:59] Shanenn Bryant: Yeah. Great. Well, I know that they'll be rushing over there to get it. We'll put the link in the show notes and thank you so much. 

[00:47:06] Dr. Joli Hamilton: Thanks for having me.