Welcome to playing with fire, the podcast for people who are ready to custom build their love. We're talking about non monogamy, however you design it as an individuation opportunity. Want to leave the default and make your life spectacularly you? You're in the right place. Hello Jolie. Hey, we're here. We are here. Yay. This is great. It is great. We have two questions.
But I want to do them as one episode. We've got two great questions. They came in just a couple days apart, and I think that they are really well held together. All right. So what are we talking about today? Well, so the first question that came in was, okay, I get it. We're learning about nervous system regulation because
you know, we have bodies, but why, here was the question, why exactly does jealousy freak the nervous system out? Like from the perspective of, well, it's just an emotion. Why does jealousy specifically just send us off the rail? Then a few days later, a different person entirely in a totally different context sent in the question. well, what do I do when jealousy shows up? And specifically, they said, what do I do to help myself or my partner when jealousy shows up as primal panic?
So I think these two fit right together. Okay. Well then, let's get into it. So why does jealousy freak out the nervous system? Well, I mean, we can approach this from lots of angles, but right off the bat. If we're talking from an attachment theory perspective, right, an attachment theory poses the idea that we have an attachment system, right?
evolutionarily adaptive to have a strong attachment and to develop and reinforce a strong attachment to a primary caregiver when we are infants because we literally can't take care of ourselves. system in the body. Makes sense. And then When we talk about adult attachment theory, we're talking about the transference of that infant's attachment need later to romantic relationship, to our partnership. So there we are in a romantic relationship. And are you saying that...
Part of us experiences it as an infant. response to connection well when we're talking about primal panic i think it's important to point out that we are talking about a really severe and significant reaction um so i don't want to insinuate that this is an an infantile response. You're having a very normal response, but we do need to just sort of sort out here. attachment-based relationships aren't the only kind of relationships adults have.
Right. Like adults can also have relationships that are not. formed on the basis of, yes, I need you to survive. You're my secure home base. You are this person who I can count on to be there for me in the midst of all the everything. We also have more casual relationships. And some of us don't necessarily want to have all or any of our romantic relationships be our attachment basis.
But for the vast majority of people, of course, yeah, we are experiencing, we have this sort of... innate sense that our Romantic relationships, especially if we're deeply ensconced in a monogamous paradigm, that our one romantic relationship should also provide for all of our attachment needs. So from that perspective, jealousy, jealousy, which is. An instance of feeling threatened, feeling that your valued relationship is under threat by a third party.
Well, that makes perfect sense. If what you're talking about is I have a secure... base. I have this person. I have this person who I turn to, to provide me with a sense of security. And then I sense a feeling of interruption. Boom. If it's setting off your attachment system. Well, sure, that would induce primal panic. And primal panic, that phrase comes out of Sue Johnson's work in the book Hold Me Tight and the work The... emotionally focused therapy work that she developed.
It's an interesting term. Yeah. What are we- If I were to say, okay, I'm in this primal panic and I want to know what to do, which we're going to get to, what do I mean when I say primal panic? So I find first off, a lot of people don't even realize that they're experiencing jealousy, right? So the phrase primal panic is helpful because it feels very viscerally correct.
right? Like you're feeling elevated heart rate. You're feeling your thoughts racing, starting to tell stories, whether you know that they're true or not. It sounds like a very, like it's an evocative phrase that. It does kind of capture these physiological and neurological experiences. And there's this profound urge to reconnect with the person that you feel you are separated from.
That description, though, perfectly fits the word jealousy. So there is an interesting, not just overlap, primal panic is. In the case of a third party interruption, it is jealousy. Now, if we're not talking about a third party interruption, it wouldn't be. So primal panic stands on its own two feet if we're talking about some other rupture to the valued love bond. But when we're talking about, oh, I feel this. This third party, this other, right?
somebody who I want to have in my partner's life or I don't, right? So in non-monogamy, we may be very happy for our partner on the one hand, but on the other hand, also be experiencing. really significant panic and terror. I do like the word panic in here because it has this sense of urgency, like something needs to be done now. It doesn't necessarily follow the facts of the situation, but the panic says, I need to change this right now.
And, um, a lot of people, me included, don't rush very well. My decisions when I'm like, oh no, fix something now. They don't, my judgment goes out the window. Right. And I deal with urgency like very practically. So practically, in fact, that I shut down my emotions. I tend to deal with an emergency situation as.
I go into total logical, rational thinking mode. And that has its own problems in that situation. Right. It's not actually helpful because we're talking about an emotional. It's an emotional situation. Right. Especially within me, right? Because if we were talking about. primal panic in the form of jealousy, fear that this other person is going to interrupt my relationship. If we're talking about that in a monogamous relationship,
Well, I want to know some more details. I want to know what's going on to make you think that. What of your expectations is being thwarted? What's going on? What are you seeing? What are you feeling? but in a non-monogamous relationship. where we've started to make real headway in making agreements and making space for each other to have other experiences. So let's say we're moving out of that focus on the dyad. What do I do with the fact that my attachment system...
still may be totally wired into this one other person. And so as I do this reclamation of agency and autonomy, Yeah, your body may not care that you're doing that. Right. What do we do in the meantime? The question of why does jealousy freak out your nervous system? There are lots of other reasons too. I mean, it's just a high volume emotion for a lot of us. What do you mean by high volume? It's just loud. It's really loud. Think about the sensations that come up for you when you're jealous.
Jealousy tends to be described as having twisting, clenching, knots in the stomach, constriction, can't breathe, hearts racing, minds racing, sweating, palpitations. People don't generally say, you know, I just feel a little something. There's big stuff that happens, right? So it's a loud emotion. If that's coming up, I mean, the body is having this response. And now I have to ask myself, what is it that I'm actually seeing?
What's going on? I think that there's something else that's interesting about this question. Why does jealousy freak my nervous system out? And that is, you know, I think about... The nervous system is asking that one question all the time. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? In our modern day world, we are not facing the same kinds of threats that we were when we developed these adaptive.
evolutionarily speaking, adaptive nervous systems. And some of us may have actually developed quite a lot of embodied safety in our life. So much so that our nervous system's kind of on hyperdrive. Maybe we also have trauma history where our nervous system is hypervigilant. And it's just looking for trouble. So jealousy comes along. It's a loud emotion.
It has a loud physiological embodied somatic sense. And now you have that experience and that in itself is going to be felt as quite a disruption. especially if in the rest of your life things are pretty steady. So are you saying that it gets... like even louder in comparison to an environment that isn't filled with, I don't know, you know, bears and saber tooth tigers or whatever tigers and such. Yeah. Okay. And this is just me.
posing the question, what else is going on in your life? So for some of us, Everything feels really stable and then jealousy comes along. Now imagine this scenario. You're going along and you have a fairly steady life. And then you think things are pretty good. So let's try opening up. Let's try adding a little spice. Or maybe things are a little wobbly, but we have pretty good communication. You know, it's feeling pretty good. I hear this a lot.
why people think they're ready to open up. They're like, we're great communicators. We can do this. And we have a really stable foundation. And then you do the things of opening up and all of a sudden there are. There are lions and tigers and bears that you didn't realize were there. There are gaps in your knowledge base around communication.
It feels completely reasonable to me, having talked to thousands of people about jealousy and their experience of jealousy in relationship, that when we're trying something new in our relationship... A life that felt very stable and steady all of a sudden can feel extremely disrupted, extremely intense to the point of panic. the panic may be completely overwhelming. And so we need to also know what to do when it happens because jealousy in itself.
primal panic in itself, those things don't necessarily mean that you can't thrive in a non-monogamous relationship. But they do mean that there's going to be stuff that you need to do to get yourself out of just this constant sense of Ouch, I can't do this. Like what's happening to me? So you don't have to be trapped in this primal panic. The fact that it will happen doesn't mean that you can't develop the skills to when it happens.
find your way out. Right. I mean, just today somebody reached out to us and said, hey, you know, I'm really struggling because I'm feeling jealousy and I've done so much work. I've been working on this for a couple of years. I'm really, really struggling. And the biggest thing I'm struggling with is I feel like a failure. Like I'm failing consensual non-monogamy. Right. And both of us had the same response in separate emails that.
yeah, you're not failing. The fact that you could slow down enough to notice And to reach out, write an email and say, hey, this is hard. I thought I had a handle on this stuff. Instead of getting reactive, instead of choosing to point your fingers at your partner and get super up in arms, you're taking a measured response. And they were specifically asking for, hey, could you just reassure me?
Yeah, it's hard. That this isn't always going to feel this intense. And in fact, it didn't even feel this intense last week. Can you remind me? Like, those are the things that show me that, in fact, you're getting your jealousy stuff. You're getting your rescue plan is in place. And also, you are starting to take a longer view. non-monogamous people just solve jealousy or they just don't have jealousy and that couldn't be further from the truth. Not at all.
There are always going to be those few who say, yeah, I just don't feel jealousy. I mean, it's good for them, but it is not the vast, vast, vast majority of us. I wanted to bring up another source of freakout that can happen. In our NSI training, in our talks, we learned about neural tags, where a particular set of external environment experiences. can pluck something you might not even know about, but it plucks a proto-memory of a time when you were dysregulated, when you were freaked out.
And you may not even be able to point to the things in your environment that feel the same as that time, but it still freaks you out. It could be the sound of a siren. It could be the sound of a car backfiring. It could be the sound of a dog barking. It could be like these things that happen in the background. And so our lives build these little neural tags in our brain. Okay, cool. There are stories of jealousy and negative responses to jealousy everywhere in our environment. So to some extent.
we get trained to have a negative response to jealousy. We get trained to freak out about jealousy just by the stories that exist around us. These movies, they put us into an emotional state. They get us all wound up and it's because of jealousy. That's going to create a neural tag just as well. Yeah. And then the resolution, because we're talking about rom-coms here, the resolution needs to be that.
Any interrupter goes away. And that's how you find safety. And so there's, I love that. Thank you for bringing that up. Neural tags. around jealousy. I mean, God, I wish we could see them. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could literally- see them happening real time in our own brains. See the little string vibrating. I was like, oh, that just happened. Yeah. Because when we feel that pluck, when we feel the pluck of the string, we feel the resonance.
It is very interesting. And I always ask people first to go to what are the sensations you're feeling right now? What's going on in your body? Not the emotions, the sensations. Are you feeling heat? Are you feeling pressure? Are you feeling some sort of zinging? Are you feeling constriction? Are you feeling twisting? Are you feeling a punch in the gut? Describe it to me.
Because in that, in those moments of slowing down, and you can do this for yourself, you can do this for a partner. So now we're already leaping forward into the next question. If you slow down and start naming the sensations, you're buying yourself time to allow that resonance to also dissipate a little bit. Because when, what I hear you saying is, yeah, if I am, if the.
If the neural tag of jealousy is plucked, yes, all my old attachment history, as in my previous romantic relationships, my childhood relationships with my primary caregivers, my friendship. all the patterns that I have seen in the stories around me. The books you've read, the movies you've seen. The music I'm listening to, the lyrics, the poetry I've read, all of that getting plucked too. It's an immense weight. So it makes sense that it would reverberate deeply in the psyche.
When I ask people to slow down and name the sensations and just literally be with the sensations and don't try to change them, the cool thing is... The sensations themselves shift. over time. Most sensations will shift within 30 to 90 seconds. It doesn't feel like that. It doesn't seem like that's what's going to happen. Right.
Right. But in fact, if you can, which doesn't mean it's going to totally change. Yeah. But if I, well, right now, if I tune into what are the sensations I'm having in my body and I notice. Oh, I'm feeling my breath is caught a little bit and I'm feeling tenderness in my, in my, oh, it's my stomach. No, it's my breathing. Oh, I feel tightness in my breathing. I feel like I. Okay, hang on. I'm just going to be with this breath that feels tight.
I'm just going to slow down. Okay. Okay. Oh, oh, oh, my stomach feels sick. I feel nauseous. Okay. So it started like we feel the sensations and sometimes they're shifting fast, sometimes slower. but also this is allowing us to step out of the story. The next thing that we can do is to...
Actually, it's a thing we can extricate ourselves from. It's a thing we can not do and it's a thing we can help each other do, which is can you just be with a sensation without starting to tell a story about what it means? And if emotions start coming up, okay, can we just be with those? Can you be with the emotion of anger rising up? Because jealousy comes in flavors, right? So can you be with that anger? Can you be with the sadness?
Are you feeling excluded? Excluded isn't something I usually think of as an emotion, but as soon as I'm feeling it, wow, excluded sure feels emotional. Can I be with that? separate from the story I'm telling, right? And that's hard, right? As soon as I start to get into emotional words, I start to think, well, I'm sad. I feel excluded.
I'm mad that I'm excluded. Why am I excluded? They're doing this to me. We immediately can get ramped up into story. So it takes practice to slow down and just stay with the emotional. The somatic sensations. The somatic sensations. Emotional story. One of the things that can become possible when you give yourself the time to feel through your feelings and separate from the story a little bit.
So as to the question of what to do in that moment, if you can get... to a place where you have any access to your sense of humor at all which isn't necessarily easy but there are things you can do to promote it and one of the things that i like to do is to take the story and amplify it. Like, I saw you compliment that person's shoes. As a result, I'm certain that I'm going to die alone. Why are you sharing my deepest secrets? Oh, sorry. And you just...
You take it and you make it as absurd as it actually feels because that's the thing. I don't have to make that up. That is how it feels, but we don't want to tell each other that. But the thing is, if you have a trusted partner. And you can get through the feelings to a place where you can get to the actual story and just share it. So you can both see how absurd it can be. That can sort of break the power of the story.
Well, and, and I don't think you need a trusted partner for that for, I think I can, I take, I can take that and because jealousy will show up. For a lot of us, I mean, jealousy can show up for me on a first date. How can I have jealousy show up when I don't even know this person? How can I be jealous about a story they're telling me about someone? that they've been partnered to for 20 years. How can that be happening? Right.
It's a great place for me to take myself. I literally take myself to the bathroom. Pay attention to the emotions that are coming up and just notice like, oh yeah, I'm getting those same tingles that I get when jealousy comes up. I feel that constriction in my throat. I feel the knots in my tummy and oh my gosh.
Look at what I've done. Look at the amazing narrative I have created where now this person is so important to me that this isn't my attachment system going off because I can trust them because they're my secure base. This is my attachment system going off because it goes off. It's a noisy system. And it's making up stories. I am making up stories about it. And one of the stories I can make up is, yeah, I'll die alone. I'll never be chosen. I'm unwanted. They're core wound stories.
So for me, the story wouldn't be I'll die alone. Well, it would be that, but also I'm too much. I'm too much. See, they don't want me. I'm too much. And now somebody else is going to be just the right amount. They're going to be the Goldilocks amount of person. It's phenomenal. For me, it's so, okay. So you complimented their shoes, which means. Very soon now, you're both going to turn and laugh at me for being me while you guys are so great.
Yeah. It can be all kinds of ways, but going to the absurdity. can help break the connection between the story and the pan. And there's some research basis in there too. There's a book on jealousy by Baumgart. It was written back in like 1989, 1990. It was written in German. I was so glad to find a translated copy because she talked about how
humor as it relates to jealousy. Humor is a loosener, right? It loosens up tight emotions. And jealousy tends to be an emotion that has a lot of sensations of constriction. And humor can loosen that constriction. So it could be humor that's directly related to the situation. But we could also talk about tending your nervous system. just through humor. Go turn on something that you find genuinely funny. A lot of people will say, well, I don't want to distract myself from my feelings.
In an acute situation, distraction is a completely reasonable choice. If we're talking about just compulsively all the time. We're avoiding our emotions. No, I don't want that for you either. But in an acute situation where you're having a moment of primal panic and you're feeling that urge to reconnect with the other. Is this a time when that is feasible? And if it's not, I want you to have a plan in place. What happens next? What do you do next?
You need a rescue plan in place. And a rescue plan can look incredibly simple. It doesn't need to be complicated. All of us have moves that we make to bring ourselves back into some semblance of mature adult self. And having a plan in place for when jealousy comes up. returns our agency, right? Because jealousy feels like it's happening to us. My partner's doing that out there. Primal panic comes up and it feels like a...
Yeah, complete disaster. Feels like we're going to die because we're having a full blown panic response. And in that moment, it doesn't actually matter how rational your experience is. The checking for, hey, are your expectations being met? Are your agreements in place? Do you need to get your needs met in different ways? Like all of that, that's later. Right now in the acute situation. tending to your nervous system with gentle tools.
And giving yourself time to just be and to not try to fix it, allowing yourself to distract yourself, these are all completely reasonable things. And then, of course, we didn't touch on co-regulation. if you have the opportunity to co-regulate with someone when they're in primal panic. Awesome. It doesn't have to be your partner. And this can actually help. Often we need to help our bodies, our nervous systems learn that.
That one person isn't the only person who can help us regulate. We can self-regulate, yes. but we can also turn to friends. We can turn to our pets. We can turn to other embodied creatures. to be with us in those times. And again, I think most people know this at core, but there's something about jealousy that tends to make us feel like, no, I have to merge with this valued other right now. Yeah. And in the case of non-monogamy especially, it can be the wrong time.
Because if you're getting through an experience of, oh, this is the first time my partner is out doing this and I'm going to be with my feelings because it's in alignment with my values and it's hard. okay, well, something can be hard and we can learn how to be with it. And this is something I really, I admire so much in the people who are doing the unpacking work of.
I'm going to learn how to be with myself through non-monogamy. It doesn't necessarily come easy to me right off the bat, but I'm going to learn how to be with it. Which also brings in another case scenario, which is... Not all of us are partnered to someone who we're able to access all the time. And so if you are not in a nesting partnership, you're not in an anchor partnership and you're feeling jealousy.
Your ability to anchor to yourself is going to be really, really important, but also your connections to other valued others. Who are the other people in your life that you can connect to and remind yourself of that core sense of? I am here. I am cared for. You know, literally our hearts can beat together. Our breath can sync up.
As we're leaving the monogamous paradigm, being able to shift into a broader view of who are my... community members who are my people who's my inner circle who can I turn to when my whole body is kind of freaking out and going through these things And I mean, I wish we all had more. I would like, I really do, but I don't want to overlook the fact that those people also don't have to be right next to you.
Being on a phone call, actually getting on the phone and talking. That is, I mean, I think that's my number one choice. When I don't have somebody right nearby, get on the actual phone. See if you can just listen to their voice. Ask, ask each other for reassurance, right? Ask your friend, your valued other, ask them for reassurance, but also just ask them to be there with you. If you're building a rescue plan.
Don't count on just one person to be your rescue plan, right? I want you to count on yourself. I want you to count on your tools, your nervous system regulation tools. But I also want you to lean into co-regulation with more than just one person in your life, ideally. And you mentioned asking for reassurance. I want to... I want to put in another vote for asking for what you want. Sometimes, this blew me away when I first saw how well it worked. If I say to you, tell me everything will be okay.
There's a part of me that's like, I can't ask that question. Like, it will be disingenuous. Like, I'm telling you what I want to hear. I should be able to just tell myself and it won't land. No, it lands. It works. I mean, it can work. I suppose it won't work under all circumstances, but it is worth asking for exactly the reassurance you're asking for, that you're looking for. Right. And that gets into a tricky little spot because sometimes what we want...
is to hear the other person volunteer the words that we want, right? We want them to know the right words to say. But sometimes the other person can't offer us the exact reassurance, a really common thing that comes up is, tell me that you'll always pick me first. Well, what does that mean? Let's just put it in the context of non-monogamy. that might not be available well if there are multiple people in your life someone could have an emergency and need to be picked first
Your partner may not be available to always choose you first. And they may not want to because they may be trying to really... dig out from habits of enmeshment. And so they may want to not get into those phrases that reinforce the enmeshment, but they may be able to offer you something that is a gentler form of the same reassurance. And so this can get tricky because if what you really want to hear is, tell me that I'll always be first. Tell me no one will ever matter more to you than me.
careful careful because that i i appreciate what you said ken and i'm thinking about all the times that I have wanted to hear something that isn't in my long-term best interest. Okay, that is an important wrinkle. Yeah. And just needing to know, for instance, the substitute that I really like for tell me you'll pick me first is tell me you'll be there when I really need you.
And for me, that works. It offers quite a lot of space. What does it mean? What does when I really need you mean? But for me, that comes out of a memory I have. What does be there mean? The whole thing. Yeah. But it comes out of a memory, a set of memories I have where.
And it's funny. For me, they're memories of either needing to be taken to a hospital or needing to be at a hospital by someone's deathbed, basically, and being abandoned in these very specific situations. And I have like a dozen memories like that. So really, if I wanted to get really specific, the reassurance I would want is, tell me you'll be there if I need to be in a hospital.
Because you said, tell me I won't die alone. Like, yeah. I mean, that's really like, you might need it to actually be really, really specific, but you could also look at what. What memory, what fear is really being pulled? Because I'm not worried about whether you'll be there every night. I'm not worried about whether you'll be home in a certain time. I'm not worried that you'll choose me every second. But I do have a deep, like...
Like a groove, a neural tag of, oh, if something were really, really wrong. I might get dropped. And so that's what I would want reassurance about. And that's what, for me, underneath my primal panic is those memories. Not just my earliest attachment wounds, but those things all happened in my adult life. But they do. They set off a particular neural tag, and then I am in primal panic that feels like I am going to die.
Because my whole nervous system is going off in those times. And again, I'm all caught in story then. We're not talking. I don't need to go to a hospital. I'm fine. Nothing's wrong. This isn't what's happening right now, but the imagination gets going. And so that links back to, yeah, what I said about creating the absurd story, like going all the way to the end.
That's not just a trick for calming down now. There's actually information there. Where did I go? Like, what did I think was the worst thing that could happen? That comes from somewhere. And it can be helpful to really pin down, like you said, oh, that's not at all what's happening right now. It's not even in the context of this. And if that's true, it just can really help you understand your own self and how you respond.
Right. And I'm not going to go deep into this. We've done some other episodes on betrayal, but another. clear neural tag is people who have a history of betrayals in their life, whether they witnessed their parents in sort of continual or a really acute time where they were witnessing betrayal between their parents.
or whether they've been betrayed themselves. I just recently had somebody tell me that all of their early romantic relationships were all, they were cheated on every single time. And so now like that's just. That's what they expect out of romance. It's going to leave a mark. Right. It is where there's always information in there. So think about the acute response plan you want to have in place. And then I want you to also think about.
What? What's going on? What is this revealing about you? Because when I say jealousy has wisdom. What I really mean, all that's behind there is this is a way to get to know yourself and get to know the people you care about better. Because whatever's setting them off into that huge response. There's so much intimacy and information that we can share to really be in intimacy. There's so much available there. Painful as it is in the moment. Yeah.
Okay. I think that's enough on primal panic for this particular moment. And we're going to link some of the other episodes. We've got some other episodes on jealousy and primal panic, on working with your nervous system. We'll link those episodes as well so that you can find them. So if you find yourself in this situation, you could probably use some more help. We're having a Befriending Jealousy workshop.
this month, if you're listening to this the day it aired. It's March 25th of 2025. That's a Tuesday. It'll be 7 to 9 p.m. Eastern, I believe. You can find out more. There'll be a link in this episode and you can find out more at JolieHamilton.com. And lots of people, actually about 25%, according to a recent national survey, are interested in some type of open relationship. But how do you know if you are ready to open up happily? Not everyone is, and that's no problem.
I've got a 60-second quiz that will give you the answer. And even better, you'll walk away with your next step, whether you're good to go or not so much when it comes to opening up. And this is no buzzfeed nonsense. I personally designed this quiz from my years of academic research. go to JolieQuiz.com. That's J-O-L-I-Q-U-I-Z.com. And find out if you're ready to open up happily