“You will soon have a brother”: how to teach a child to cope with jealousy

“If you give birth to another child, I will leave home. Or I’ll jump out the window. So you know!” – said a fifteen-year-old daughter from her first marriage to her mother. And that one, unfortunately, has a third pregnancy, which she is now afraid to talk about, because her daughter has been getting used to her half-brother with such difficulty for several years. And how, in such a situation, to announce that there will be another one?

In the way my mother told me this story, I heard fear and guilt. And so she asked her: “And what do you feel yourself?” And she found out that for eight years now, since she divorced her first husband, she feels guilty that she could not, did not save, did not give all the best, deprived her daughter of a full-fledged family. And with all his might, over the years, he has been trying to make amends in various ways. Hence, the daughter has the power and strength of resentment. Because she perfectly feels the state of her mother, and since her mother herself broadcasts a feeling of guilt, then there are reasons?

Surprisingly, until the mother feels her right to manage her own life, the right to her mistakes and her happiness, it will be very difficult for her daughter. In any case, it is not easy for her, and her feelings are understandable, but when the mother is not sure of the correctness of her decision, when the mother doubts, is afraid to say, feels guilty, it is even more difficult for the girl. And that’s mom’s job.

What is your daughter’s job? And can a person cope with jealousy at fifteen?

I think this is the age at which you can already begin to learn how to process such difficult emotions as jealousy. But help is needed. Perhaps the girl has not even thought about such a task: the work of the soul to melt down what floats to the surface. Perhaps she does not understand that not everything that pops up should be splashed out on others. Perhaps he does not know how to deal with the fact that, remaining inside, it turns into an unmanaged repository of explosive poisonous waste.

We learn to cope with such experiences all our lives, and many of us need help when it comes to feelings such as envy, anger, resentment, jealousy. Because it is very difficult and painful. Sometimes we mistakenly think that something is wrong with us, that good people do not experience such feelings, that our task is to achieve final enlightenment, in which all these unpleasant sensations simply will not arise.

But no. We are human beings, and for the most part, we experience anger, resentment, and jealousy from time to time. But we have been given a brain, a soul and the ability to change, to gradually learn to make a conscious choice, recognizing and at the same time melting all the most painful into love or a resource – if only in the interests of self-preservation.

Possessing at least a small amount of reflection, we can notice that both anger, jealousy, and resentment, in a negative scenario, become fuel for the destruction of oneself and relationships with others, and in a positive scenario, fuel for achievements, changes, strength for effective competition and even love.

How is this achieved? It seems to me that the experience of growing up and loss gives us all the opportunity to learn this art: to melt in the crucible of the soul all the worst, leaving in the palm of your hand, as in the fairy tale about the Tin Soldier, only the heart.

At an early age, one of the first crises is the realization by a growing child that the world is not controlled by his crying, that not all his desires are fulfilled, that his mother is not an extension of his body, that she is not in his undivided power. The loss of fusion with a beloved object is experienced very bitterly, and we repeat this lesson in increasingly complex forms throughout our lives.

We all want to be loved, recognized, ideally the most beloved, the only, unique. And at the same time, our life in the end is about letting go of loved ones and parting, about the balance of pain and trust, about the time to take and the time to give. It can be a little easier for us to start giving if our childhood is saturated with love, if we have a reserve of feeling of recognition and love. And it is more difficult when there is no this past, early, maternal love that fills us – a source of strength.

But over the years, experience comes, because life is an endless lesson of non-possession, non-control, the impossibility of unlimited power. And the sooner we understand this, the easier it will probably be for us?

Alas, at fifteen this is almost impossible, and we, parents, can only be an example of non-appropriating love – one that carries a quiet joy from the fact that the person we love simply is, love without a mortal need for another, without a desire to receive him in complete and undivided possession, realizing that this is impossible, and most importantly, not very interesting.

Love that grows not out of poverty, but out of wealth. Love out of poverty is trying to “complete” itself through the other, wants to escape from existential loneliness and sounds like “I need you for …”. And the one from wealth is capable of giving without a quid pro quo, and only in it can we see a person in all his volume, and not only in that part in which he serves some kind of our personal utilitarian goal. And in this case, we are capable of what Irvin Yalom calls genuine concern for “the essence and growth of the other.”

When our loved ones leave forever, does our love go with them? When our children grow up and start families of their own, when perhaps we don’t see them for years, do we stop loving them? Does this mean that we are able to love even when the object of love is not at our full and undivided disposal? And this understanding, perhaps, points us to the difficult path of processing jealousy. However, it seems to me that this is the path of an already mature, adult person who has sufficient life experience.

What about those who are young? What about those who are so captured by feelings that they can no longer step back, think and see the logical failure in their conclusions? What about those who have not been saturated with love since childhood, who have lost confidence, who have been wounded and betrayed many times?

There are quite specific practices that help us on the way to combat jealousy. They are described in detail, for example, in Robert Leahy’s book Jealousy. How to live with her and maintain a relationship. Leahy also writes about what a complex feeling it is, jealousy is a mixture of anger, anxiety, anxiety, fear, love, doubt, helplessness and sadness. About the fact that it is natural and biologically justified, about who is more prone to jealousy and why, but most importantly, it tells how jealousy turns out to be a problem, how our mind falls into its captivity and how to free ourselves from this captivity.

“If we are told from childhood that appearance is everything, then we can form a basic belief that being attractive to a partner is the only thing that holds a relationship together,” he explains. “Jealousy can be driven by our belief that a partner finds someone else attractive.” In addition, “lack of attention from parents can lead to a basic belief that we are not interesting. We can fixate on this idea and it will make us distrust the people we get into relationships with.”

Leahy helps readers learn their basic assumptions and rules that get in the way of fulfilling relationships and cause jealousy. It also offers questions, the answers to which allow you to see all the failure of the expectations formed in relation to others. For example, to work with the belief “If a partner really loved me, he would never find anyone else interesting or attractive,” the following questions are useful:

• Does it make sense that you are the only person in the world that your partner finds attractive?
• Do you find other people attractive?
• Does this mean you can’t be trusted?

The author offers a number of practical techniques, for example:

• set aside a daily fixed time for experiencing jealousy,
• repeat the same unpleasant thought for 15 minutes a day until we start to get used to it and it does not cease to cause a negative response,
• disengage from unpleasant feelings and thoughts by asking yourself the right questions (“Do I want to increase my jealousy or disengage from it?”, “What happens if I act under the influence of feelings?”, “Is it possible that I may misinterpret the situation ?”, “What exactly can I do now to better manage myself?”).

What Leahy writes about relationships in a couple will also hold true for a situation of competition between brothers and sisters, and in general for everyone who is somehow involved in a painful and poorly managed relationship with jealousy – regardless of who she is with. turned.

Finally, I would like to share one more quote from the book. “No one but you knows how hard jealousy is for you … It comes from the fear of being betrayed or abandoned by the one you love. It’s time to think of yourself as someone you care about, respect and love. We can call it compassion, because you want to stop your anguish and pain, surround yourself with care and accept your love for yourself.