Robert Leahy || The Jealousy Cure

podcast today. Doctor Lahey completed a post Doctor of Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School under the direction of doctor Aaron Beck, the

founder of cognitive therapy. Doctor Lahy is the past president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, past President of the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapy, past President of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City, and a clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Wyle Cornell University Medical School.

Doctor Lahey has received the Aarran T. Beck Award for Outstanding Contributions in Cognitive Therapy, and he is author and editor of twenty five books, including The Worry Cure, which received critical praise from The New York Times and has been selected by Self magazine as one of the top eight self help books of all time. His latest book is called The Jealousy Cure. Learn to Trust, overcome possessiveness, and save your relationship. Thanks so much for chatting with

me today, doctor Lahy. Thanks Scott. It's a pleasure to be talking to you today. Total pleasure. Wow, that's one of the longer bios I've read. I intentionally, I mean, I selected the bio, but I felt like in coming up with it, it didn't do full justice if I didn't include all those elements to it. I wanted to give the listenership an accurate reflection of all that you do for the field. So thank you for all that

you do for the field. Thank you. So I wanted to start off by saying personally that your book, the work here really helped me a lot during my more anxious moments, particularly about seventy eight years ago. What year did the book come out. It must have been more than seven years ago. Yeah, I think it came out at about toward into two thousand and five, two thousand and six. That makes a lot of sense. That makes

a lot of sense. That's around the time. I was in England and just suffering from generalized anxiety disorder or whatever they're calling it these days, and the therapist I was seeing handed me, you know, your book, and she used your book in her practice and we went through the workbook and it was incredibly helpful. So thank you. I mean, why you know that book was an amazing synthesis of lots of research from lots of different psychologist as well as your own research. What's for me to

write that book before we get into your new one, obviously. Yeah, it's sort of an interesting origin of the book. My wife and I were in Istanbul, Turkey, on nine to eleven, two thousand and one, and I was watching the sixth and plane hit the building on CNN, and when we got back to New York, everybody was worried, including me and all my staff. So a few months later I thought I could either worry like everybody else, or I

could write a book on worry. And what was interesting is that in terms of contemporary CBT, there really wasn't anything out there that reflected the research and the theory and the clinical tools and CBT on worry that I thought, you know, would be helpful to people. So that was sort of the motivation to write it. Yeah, it was amazing. There was really nothing like it out there, so it

really did break some ground. Now there's so many books on meditation and how that cures your anxiety, but I think your book went a bit deeper than It's not just saying just meditation, it's saying they're all these kinds of various things. So I want to back up seconds. So I noticed that you did your PhD at Yale. Who did you study with a Yale Well, I studied with a number of people. Is that he did with Edward Zigler, with Bill Kessen, Irving Child, Tom Ackenbach, a

whole bunch of people. So yeah, I have a pretty general background through a lot of different areas, which I try to integrate in my writing. I think a lot of the work that people do in clinical psych often does not reflect the research and theory from other areas of psychology. So you know, for example, there's a lot of research on social cognition, and from social psychology, there's a lot of research on cognitive processes that affect decision

making that. You know, people in cognehavior therapy often don't seem to talk about and to integrate into their work. Yeah. I could agree more. And you know, it's so interesting that you mentioned at Ziggler. I did my pitchdel as well, and he was there and I found out, you know, he's still kicking this guy. I know, it is amazing. This guy like spans how many generations of students? Yeah? Yeah, I think he's probably been at Yale since maybe the

late fifties. He's been there for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, So yeah, how's your work informed by like developmental policy for instance? Well, I don't know about policy, but my work just development in general. Yeah, yeah, I mean looking at for example, I'm interested in how people, how people learn about emotion, and you know, the kind of the rules they have about emotion, you know, which emotions are okay, how do you express emotions? How families teach people about emotion.

I certainly moved away from from a developmental orientation that Ziggler and Achenbach and Susan harder Will helped me understand Beck many years ago. Fair enough, but you know they planted some scenes. Yeah, well, you know, actually Actually, what's interesting to me is I was there was a time I was very much interested in the page's approach, you know,

the child construction of malady or whatever it is. I thought that Beck's work was kind of very much in the pet tradition, you know, looking at the individual's construction of depression and anxiety, and you know how people's thought processes affected what they felt and what they did. And so when I got interested in the issue with jealousy, I thought, well, let's let me take a look at

how the jealous person constructs the world. You know, what are the assumptions they have, how do they process information? What are their rules for themselves and other people? So I guess that sort of constructive this model has influenced my thinking in terms of cognitive therapy, cogni therapy. Yeah,

I can certainly see that. And I'm thinking of his ideas of accommodation seem relevant as well for some reason, you know, in terms of importance of kind of having to adapt and change your cognitive structures sometimes radically sometimes are you know, I like, if I'd have a really good meditation session, I find it fascinating that when I opened my eyes the whole world just looks different than it did ten minutes ago, right exactly? What's not all about?

How's that possible? I find it so fascinating phenomenon. Yeah, the thing that's interesting is that if you get in the head of somebody who's anxious, a lot of their anxiety makes sense. In other words, if you adapt the assumptions that the anxious person has and you collect information in the manner in which they collect information, it always

logically follows that things are going to be catastrophic. The cognitive approach, in a ways, it is very much an empathetic cognitive strategy to try to understand how things make sense, how does hopelessness make sense, how does suicide make sense,

and how to make sense of the alternative. Yeah, the jealous person may start off with some assumptions that people can't be trusted, that people are going to betray them, and that they have to constantly be hyper vigilant, and that if anything bad happens then it means relationships going to fall apart. So if you approach any intimate relationship with those assumptions, you're going to end up being jealous and distrustful. They're like use the word assumptions. They're also

like their worldviews or they're like they're beliefs. They're yeah, I'm trying to think about what they really are. These kind of like beliefs that we've internalized through lots of you know, interaction of processes. So yeah, but you're absolutely spot on, and changing those beliefs can literally change our

outcomes of our relationships. And the linkage the commonality there between your Worry Cure book and Your Jealousy Cure, I mean, it's a lot of parallels and some overlap in terms of this sort of non judgmental acceptance, so to speak, of the situation seemed to be in common across both books. This could be a whole like really famous series like

Chicken Soup for the Soul. I mean, you could just go every year, you could have a different cure, like the sexual Cure could be there next one that would sell a lot of a lot. Yeah. Yeah, well you know what. I again thinking about jealousy issue because of a number of patients who tend to struggle with jealousy, and I thought, gee, you see, is there something I could recommend? And I couldn't think of anything I could recommend to read that from a contemporary CBT approach, and

then I began looking at the research. I mean, there is research by evolutionary psychologists like David Buss and other people on jealousy. There's research on what would factors make people more inclined to be jealous, But in terms of contemporary CBT, there really was very little out there, if anything. I mean, there were kind of somewhat naive approaches that you know, sort of equated jealousy with low self esteem, and it's not really clearly related as low self esteem.

You could have high self esteem and feel jealous, like you can think no one can treat me that way, and so you can be assertive because you're feeling jealous. But there really wasn't anything out there, and I think

I think it was like a blind spot. And there are certain kinds of emotions Scott that I think, you know, people kill people over or they really have difficulty with, and you like emotions like jealousy or envy, or ambivalence or boredom or resentment or the desire for revenge, and there's very little in the CBT field that addresses these kinds of emotions that people are told they should not

feel that way. My view is that all emotions have evolved because they're useful in certain contexts, and jealousy is one of those emotions that, from a devolutionary point of view, is quite useful. Oh that's so interesting. So is it still useful from a proximal point of view, Like, you're not advocating to get rid of jealousy completely right now. I think that it's unrealistic to think that people are going to have happy emotions all the time, that they're

going to feel good all the time. My old friend David Burns's sort of an excellent book called Feeling Good. I'd like to write a book called Feeling Everything, which I think is kind of reflects the reality of human existence. That we're going to go through life. We're going to have feelings like envy where we think that other people are getting ahead, feeling like jealousy that people are threat through our relationship. We're going to have feelings of boredom, intense, anger, shame, guilt,

and all these emotions. And to sort of tell people, I'm not saying anybody is saying that. I'm not saying that CBT says you shouldn't have these emotions but a lot of times people have these emotions, other people say, oh, you shouldn't feel that way, and that's validating, and then it makes people feel bad about having an emotion that

doesn't feel good. It's like feeling bad about feeling bad. Yeah, and the whole should just should be taken out of the cab and everyone's mental exicon, right, right, Well, I think I just didn't hear what I just said. I just had should should be taken out to be taken out right, Yeah, I mean I think like my view is that, I mean, some people think like shame and guilt those are really bad emotions. But think about it

this way. Listen, imagine if you were single and you start dating somebody and she's really like you, sky, really terrific, and spend a lot of time with you. But I think I should tell you that the module in my brain that allows me to have feelings of shame and guilt is missing. I'm in capable of shame and guilt.

I don't think you would trust the person. So these emotions have some adaptive value if you like, if you believe that people you work with would feel guilty or shamed if they betrayed you, you're more likely to trust them. If someone's good at convincing you that they feel guilty, you're more likely to trust them in the future. Jealousy. If somebody said to you, if you have an intimate relationship, someone said to you, you know something, you can go

out and have sex with anybody you want. I wouldn't be jealous. I don't think you would trust the person. And some people think you that. Some men think all I want to all that freedom, and it sounds good until you begin thinking what would it mean if somebody actually say that to you. It would probably mean that they didn't love you, you weren't special to them, and that they wanted freedom to pursue other options. So the emotion of jealousy is one of these disparaged emotions, and

of course it gets to the extreme with people. For example, jealousy is the leading cause of homicide in the couples and the man kills the women. It's overwhelmingly the leading cause, and so jealousy is a killer, and people kill themselves over jealousy. So obviously it can get extreme. But you don't want to say I want to get rid of jealousy completely right, because jealousy in a way is a way of a way. Taking the temperature, you can have

a temperature that's too low or too high. Just going back to the evolutionary approach a second, they make a big ado about sex differences in what they're jealous about, like the content of versus cheating versus you know, sexual versus emotional intimacy, et cetera. Do you make that distinction in your book. Yeah, so that's an important distinction. Of course.

You know, both men and women are jealous about those things, but women tend to be more jealous about emotional closeness and men tend to be more jealous about the sexual infidelity. And so from an evolutionary point of view, the model is called parential investment theories developed by Robert Rivers at Cambridge back in the nineteen seventies. That the apparential investment theory is that the woman always knows the babies or

a baby. The man doesn't really know for sure. So it's like, you know, he has the maybe baby, he's not quite sure if that's his baby. So the male is very, very threatened by any sexual infidelity of a female because he doesn't his evolutionary adaptation. He's not going to want to protect the or take care of the genes of offspring that are not his offspring. So I mean it's sound like a very dark view, but evolution

is about competition and about survival. So the female wants to have the part of the male, and so if the male is directing his emotions toward another female and his support and his resources and his protection, then he's not going to be available to take care of the offsprint. So it's really about the genetic fitness of the pattern

to protect the investment in the genes in the next generation. Yeah, I get that distal perspective, but there's huge individual differences in you know, people who were jealousy is an issue for them, Like it's whether it's a pair trigger sort of thing for them or not. Attachment style seems to be relevant here, Yeah, so anxiously. Yeah, So you know, with the research shows is exactly that that individuals who have an anxious attachment style are far more likely to

be jealous. But what's also interest in Scott is that people differ in terms of how they feel in a close relationship. Some people really want to have a close relationship and some people don't want to have a close relationship. So people who have this sort of distancing in an intimate relationship who don't want to be close are far less like we would be jealous. There's interesting research showing that they actually make a stable, well long term relationship,

the anxious and the avoidant. Even though there's constantly drama in the relationship, it lasts a long time because each one is kind of like what the other person. I don't know. It's kind of an interesting dynamic there when you mix the avoidant with the anxious attachment person right exactly. And I've actually seen that we have you have the

same particular case. Thinking of a woman who wants a very close relationship and who wants to have constant contact with her partner and a man who values freedom and spontaneity and doesn't want to be tied down. So her approach to try to connect with him and be close to him triggers his desire for autonomy and pushes back, which then triggers her jealousy and anxiety vice versa. Yeah, yeah, so it's a self fulfilling prophet. The more she pushes,

the more he avoids. But interestingly, the research suggests that kind of relationship works. It works better than an avoidant avoidant one does it never works right right, But an anxious anxious that works better than even an anxious anxious one for instance. So it's just interesting to think how these can come together. So having a hair trigger for jealousy,

is that correlated with a hair trigger for rejection sensitivity. Well, you know what happens with some people is that they have these triggers, like if you know, the trigger could be you're at a party and your partner is talking to somebody else and they could just suddenly trigger the idea that they're going to chase after that person and

leave me. Or the trigger could be retrospected jealousy. It could be your partner is thinking about, or talking rather talking about an experience with a former partner and that can trigger it. And so I think part of the scott is that people who are prone to jealousy all and have rules about relationships, and a lot of these are really perfectionistic rules about the way people should be. For example, one rule that people have is that I should be the only person in the world that my

partner finds attractive. First several billion people in the world. It's hardly imagine you're the only person in the world that's attractive. Or if my partner find somebody attractive, they're going to leave me. Or if my partner had a good time with somebody else in the past, that means they can never be happy with me, or that I should be interesting and exciting to my partner all the time,

or I should know everything my partner is thinking. You know, some people equate trust with the sort of like existential merging of two people, which is just so unrealistic. As people push for more and more, you know, demands for certainty and interrogating control, it drives the other person away the person pushes back. What's interesting, Scott is the kind of things that the target of jealousy might say, you know,

to try to defend herself or himself. Let's say, for example, if a man is feeling jealous and the woman says, you know, well you shouldn't feel that way. You should trust me. You're neurotic, that's your problem, you know, don't bother me. You must have low self esteem. All of these sort of dismissive and critical and contemptuous statements actually feed into the jealousy because jealousy is about a threat

to attachment. So if the man is expressing his jealousy and the partner is rejecting him, that this sort of feeds into his sense that his attachments threatened, and then he ups his his demands for certainty and reassurance, which then leaves to the pushback. It's an interesting dynamic to see. One of the problems I think that people have in their relationship is the difficulty in accepting the emotions that

the other person has. So if you keep telling your partner they shouldn't feel jealous, they're jealousy is not going to go away. I've never seen somebody say, oh, my partner tells me to stop feeling jealous, jealousy just disappeared. Alternatively, if you validate the person, say do you really understand that you feel that way? You must feel really connected to me. I feel really flattered that you care enough and value me that much. That must be a difficult

emotion that you're having. You should feel free to talk to me about it. I can accept those feelings. I care about those feelings. I have compassion for you. In other words, if you go into an attachment compassion validation mode with a person, who's jealous. That's going to be reassuring in a very emotional fundamental way. They still may feel the jealousy, but they also believe that you have room and you're accepting those emotions and that you still

respect them, so you're not rejected. It's it's just like having a baby that's crying and yelling at the baby that stopped crying. That never works. If you pick up the baby and you sue the baby, the baby feels that there's a secure place. So in some ways, even though my approach is cognit behavioral, it's very much, very much ground and attachment theory. That's great. And yeah, they

do seem to be such good bad fellows so to speak. Yeah, there is a I'm just sort of black and right now, but there is a recently developed training for attachment staff for a couple's being more sensit to each other. Think it's called like emotion focused therapy or something like that. Have you heard of it? Right right? You're thinking about lest the Greenbird's work. I think that's what you're thinking about, This emotional focused therapy, which is good, and also John

Gottman's work. Yeah, gotsh quite quite good. I think one of the fundamental things in a relationship is the sense that your partner really cares about your feelings. And when a partner expresses the jealousy thing, I really feel jealous and you're flirting with that person. We tend to do when somebody says that, we tend to become defensive and we go on the counterattack, which you know may be a perfectly human thing to do, but what it does is it fees right into the jealousy because it makes

a person feel more insecure. We have a very hard time normalizing and validating emotions that a person has when we feel the person's angry with us. We want to win, we want to defeat them, we want to even humilitate them, and that just makes the jealousy and the insecurity worse. David Buss, in one of his books, describes research where they found that couples where they had issues about jealousy

were more likely to stay together five years later. And if it stands, the reason really because yeah, because jealousy indicates you care enough. You know, like if you think about people who have very superficial relations, you know, just shallow one night stand, you know, no tender whatever, those don't lend themselves to jealousy. So you know, people feel they have something invested in they care enough, you're more

likely to express the jealousy. And sometimes people will intentionally try to get the partner to feel jealous to sort of test them out. Do they care enough? You know, do they care enough to be jealous? And you know, if the person's personale, you can do whatever you want. I don't care. You know, Perth's thinking that maybe he's not that into me, maybe he doesn't care that much about it. Wow. You know. Stephen Pinker and how the mind works refers to a lot of as a doomsday device.

I wonder if jealousy is a doomsday device as well, to help you know, kind of do you know what I mean, like evolved like as a binder as a way of protection if like someone like the hot guy next door moves and you know that you don't just

go onto them, right. Yeah, So there's you know, I think I think, I think the reality is that we do live in the competitive world, and you know, as a result, I think one of the most universal emotions that really hasn't been examined that well, the cognitivehavioral feel is the feeling of ambivalence. And you know, I've seen so many people who struggle with the ambivalence because they think they should not be ambivalent. And you know, like some people have this kind of idealized view of love

that it should be like Romeo and Juliet. And you think about, like when you're fifteen years old in high school, you'll be Romeo and Juliet and say, oh my god, isn't that wonderful? How wonderful in love? It's all idealized,

it is so perfect and everything. But can you imagine, like if you and I sat down and we wrote a television script for the Romeo and Julia television series that would be about Romeo and Juliet when they're in their forties living in Queens, New York, and they're both quite a bit overweight, and they're a little bit pissed off at each other. Yeah, you know, I have this idealized romance continuing on for more than a couple of

weeks probably. Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, don't mean get saturated no matter what it is eventually, Yeah, and so what happens I think, you know, I think people have a you know, I think a lot of people have this kind of emotional perfectionism, like I should feel excited all the time, my partner should never be tracking anybody else, and everything should go well. If it doesn't,

it's going to fall apart. As opposed to thinking that at a patient years ago who said he was divorced and was starting a relationship with somebody who was a bit rocky. And he says, so, Bob, what's the key to a good long term relationship? I said, well, let me tell you. You You know, about ten years ago, I should do a lot of windsurfing. I was down on the Virgin Islands of Saint John and I went over to Coral Bay to see Mike, who was the windsurf

hot dog on the island. And I said to Mike, I said, Mike, what's the key to windsurfing and heavy waves and heavy wind? And he said, Bob, it's rock and roll and convincing the action. And I said to my patient, that's the key to a long term relationship and roll and commit to the action. It's like if a windsurfer with waves going up and down and the wind and you're kind of leaning back and pulling the boom, you know, that's what it is. You've got to be able to go rock and roll ups and downs and

just commit to the action. It's not going to be a smooth ride some of the time. And I think acknowledging and normalizing that you and your partner may see other people and find them attractive and interesting or have memories that that's normal. That doesn't mean that everything is falling apart, and that you can accept that that's the case, but focus on committing to the action making the relationship as good as big. Yeah, that seems like a really

sensible advice. You know, it just dawned on me though, that, like, we never even defined what jealousy is. So let's like back up a second, and if you can define jealousy and how it's different from envy, that would be great. Okay, So jealousy, you know, jealousy is usually a very intense passionate emotion and actually derived from the Greek word for zeal ce a l zealous, and it reflects an intense passionate emotion that includes anger and the anxiety, and it's

always about three people. It's always about the two people having the primary relationship and a threat from an imagic threat from a third person. So you can have jealousy in a romantic relationship. You can have jealousy with friends. Maybe your friends spend more time with Bill than with Scott. You have jealousy with co workers, even animals. They have done research on animals and they found like owners and animals, you know how jealous is your animal and the animals.

The animals to show the most jealousy are dogs. Second, horses and cats are a little bit behind. Cats are a bit more self contained and they're kind of cool cats, so they But babies show jealousy on one study showed it was like eight month old babies and their mothers. They had the mother either play with an inanimate object or play with another baby, and when the infant sog mom playing with another baby, the infant express distress. So

you have jealousy at eight months old. You have jealousy and cats and dogs, horses, you have jealousy with friends, You have jealousy with coworkers, and it's universal. You have jealousy with friends, romantic relationships, siblings, step parents, animals show jealousy or dogs are the most likely to be horses psyching cats third, and even eight month old babies show jealousy when their mother is playing with another baby versus

an inanimate object. So jealousy is an emotion that you have and lots of different kinds of relationships, species, and ages. Envy is more about somebody getting ahead in the dominance, hierarchy or status or power whatever. So you might be envious, like you know, somebody who gets advanced over you at

work or published. Is something that gets more attention or has qualities that you wish you had, and what we tend to be envious of, and it doesn't involve three people necessarily, so envious about somebody who is getting necessarily a threat to you to your attachment relationship. We tend to envy people who are most relevant to our comparison level. So I'm not going to be envious of somebody who's like a world class skier, because I'd be lucky if I could skip ten feet. Wait, but you could be

jealous of their wealth or whatever. Right, I'm jealous. I might be envious of their wealth, but I'm not sitting here thinking that, oh they don't deserve that. You know, gotcha. But we tend to have our little comparison, a little status domain. You know, like if you go to a conference, you go to an academic conference, gud, You're going to see an epidemic of jealousy. It's the worst. Yeah, I mean,

academics are terrible. I kind of wonder that maybe that's one of the reasons why hasn't gotten as much attention. Keep in mind, these are emotions people kill people over. This is not like you know, picking my fingers or something. This is an emotion people kill other people over, or kill themselves over. People kill over envy. Now, on the other hand, there's also an upside to envy. Like Bertrand

Russell said, without envy, we would not have democracy. So you can think about envy as as a concern about unfair distribution or unfair reward. So if somebody you know has you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars that we view as undeserving, and a lot of these other people are poor, that kind of envy might be viewed as social justice. So in fact, Jonathan Wawls, who's with Harvard leading a legal scholar, actually viewed envy

as an underlying emotion for distributive justice. So envy ID is an important emotion, and envy also teaches us who's getting ahead and who should we emulate. So you can think of envy as well, you know that person got a head over here, what did they do? Maybe I can do it, And so envy can be a motivational role model for the people and get us to pay

attention and to emulate characteristics that are rewarded. So again, like I find many patients who are envious, I normalize envy and look at envy as it's an emotion that you have, and many people feel ashamed about it. They feel like, what's wrong with me? I have the envy as opposed to normalize it validated understand that that's how people feel. That people don't talk about envy. Very very few people say, gee, I'm really envious as that person who succeeded and I want them to fail so I

can feel good. I mean, very few people acknowledge their shot and freud, you know, but everybody knows it's there and it's very powerful. People will undermine people that they feel competitive with. It's something that we have to bring out of the shadows and be able to talk about and normalize and figure out how we can use it if at all in a constructive way. Well, you seem like a terrific clinical psychologist. And I love the idea of normalizing and having people accept the size of themselves.

But certainly that's not the same thing as saying that their life would be optimal well being with it remaining. I mean, I think we could probably learn to not be so reactive to it, right, Yeah, I mean you can think of let's just take envy. You can take envy. Think of it as I envy this person who is doing more than I'm doing and getting more recognition. So okay, so is there something positive that I can move that toward. And maybe I can move that toward clarifying my goals.

I could think about that as developing my motivation. I could use the envy to expand my curiosity. I can also think about my envy if I envy this person's achieting these goals. I can look at what I e would call my life portfolio, all the things in my life that I have that are meaningful to me. So even if somebody is ahead on this thing, I do

have many things in my life that have meaning. So you know, ironically, in a way, you can take this sort of darker kind of emotion maybe and you can transform it into some of the positive psychology domains that you're particularly interest to. Scott love that. I absolutely love that. Okay, so let's just talk about some like practical strategies that many of our listeners might be on the edge of

their seat waiting for this moment. But if you could just kind of give some techniques without obviously giving it all away because we won't be able to buy your book. But you know, what are some ways people can cope with their jealousy. Well, turn back to jealousy for a second. I think in terms of practical strategy, the first thing I think is to normalize that you're not a crazy person because you're jealous. So I would normalize the jealousy.

I would validate the difficulty in having the emotions. I would try to develop some compassion towards yourself with a difficult emotion. I would ask you to think about the distinction between your jealous feelings and your jealous behaviors. So the coping behaviors are often would get people in trouble, like the interrogating, the accusation, all the control strategies that people use with their partner, stalking, threatening and all that. I would try to step away from the control strategies.

See if you can give those up for a few weeks. I would accept the idea that you're feeling jealous rather than think you have to get rid of the jealous jealous feelings. One thing I ask people to do is, you're having all these intrusive jealousy thoughts twenty four hours a day, and this is driving you crazy. Set aside an appointment with your jealousy thoughts. So let's say between two and two thirty in the afternoon is going to be your jealousy time. During that time, you focus on

your jealousy thoughts. So one way of viewing it is that like at ten o'clock in the morning, ten o'clock at night, you have some jealousy thoughts, write them down, put them all off to two o'clock in the afternoon, and then focus on them. And what people find is that the intensity of their jealousy usually subsides during the course of the day, and so they're not as upset

about the jealousy. They begin feeling they have more control that they just because the jealousy thought comes to their head. They don't have to be hijacked by it. So during that jealousy time, there are several things you can do. One is you can ask yourself, you know, are my thoughts really rational? So? For example, am I engaged in mind reading? Am I jumping to conclusions? Am I taking

things too personally? Do I have unrealistic expectations? Would my partner have the same reasons to be jealous of me? You know, sometimes you think, oh, you know, I'm jealous of my partner. Will maybe they have good reason to be jealous of you too. Is it in my interest to interrogate my partner or threaten my partner? Will that drive them away? Is there some strategy that we can use to develop some money understanding about what kinds of

behavior is okay for both of us and others. You may need to have kind of like an understanding that you have to clarify for the two of you. You can also have ground rules for what the two of you do when one person's jealous. So you go to a party. If your partner says she I'm feeling jealous, what is she going to do? What should she? Can she tell you that you're jealous? Is that going to be okay. Do you think that you have to get

her to stop feeling that way or insult her. So you need to develop some kind of rules for accepting and discussing the jealousy without criticizing and suppressing the emotions. The person has another technique I use, and the sounds counterintuitive, is what's called the boredom technique. So, for example, this one patient who is feeling very jealous about his wife going away on business trips, and he had the thought, my wife could be unfaithful to me, and of course

that's always trip. You can't prove that she cannot be faithful. So he had to accept. He had to get used to the thought that it's possible that his wife could be unfaithful to me. He was equating the thought that it's possible my wife could be unfaithful with the idea that she would be unfaithful. Those are two different things. You know, it was possible I could win the lottery, but it's not a fact that I'm going to win

the lottery. So I had him repeat the thought literally hundreds of times, like he would sit at home and repeat silently, it's always possible my wife could be un faithful to me, and that thought initially became anxiety provoking, but after a few minutes the thought became boring. He just habituated to it. So there are a whole lot of techniques that I described in the Jealousy Care. You don't have to feel helpless when you have intrusive thoughts

or a lot of things that you can do. I mean personally, you had that exercise in the work here with kind of put it aside, kind of take a step back, and that was so helpful for me. And it's all amazing how like the day, just the next day you can like totally not care at all about something that you're like, oh my god, this is the most important thing ever, you know, in the moment, it's

just so weird, so weird. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a good example of I think one of the goals in life sometimes is to develop the capacity of indifference. I mean, you might say that's kind of a zend goal, but it's it's a matter of just wisdom. And one way of thinking about it is one are the things that used to bother me like five years ago or five months ago, even you know whatever, And so noticing that your emotions can change, and that you could eventually

become indifferent. I think the other thing that's important, Scott, is that sometimes jealousy is a warning that the relationship is at risk, So developing kind of a golden parachute that if this relationship didn't work out, I would be able to survive. So building your support network, you know, looking at your skill set, recognizing that you had a life before this relationship. So there are a lot of techniques that people can use to kind of put the

jealousy in perspective. But telling yourself not to be jealous, or telling somebody that they're neurotically makes me feel worse. Yeah, I think that was a great aspect of your book, is putting jealousy and perspective, and that seems to just be a really general, sort of helpful principle for a lot of people that come to see therapy. Is you know, almost every problem that someone presents and therapy helping the

patient put it in perspective seems to be helpful. Hey, look, I just want to thank you so much for coming and chatting with me today on the Psychology Podcast and for your great work in the field. Well, Scott, there's been a real pleasure in you know, as a friend of mine once said to me when I was writing the Worry Cure Book years ago, and he said, you know, if the book helps one person, it's been worth it.

And I'm glad to hear it help you. Yeah. And the thing like like, you never know when you write something and somebody they've never talked to as they read it and they feel better. It helps someone get through better, that's what you do, That's what I do. And we're very fortunate to be able to do what we do helping people have more meaningful arts. We're incredibly fortunate and something that I just think it's so interesting to think that. And I don't talk about this much on the show.

I don't think I ever have. How I used to have very intense anxiety about seven years ago, and I just think about how much I've grown and changed, and just to think that it's possible to really grow. I mean, you know, even just a little like boarding an airplane used to be the most catastrophic anxiety experience for me, and I had to take medicine, etc. Now it's like no big deal. I'm like whatever, you know, I'm boarding

an airplane. I don't even think about it now. So just knowing that we can undergo such personal transformation, I think just make motivates me want to help people more because it's like, I know it's possible, you know. So anyway, thanks again, so great chat out with you. Thank you so much, Scott. You have a great week and hope to talk to you sometimes again to make sure you well. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you

enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.