TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna talk a little bit about jealousy. I am grateful to say at this point in my life, by and large, I don’t experience a lot of jealousy. Jealousy and the wanting what other people have, feeling sort of this boiling feeling of anger even that I don’t have what other people have, looking at other people and wishing I had what they had, feeling bitter that they have what I don’t have, what I want. I don’t have a lot of that. I have twinges of it sometimes, but the reason I say by-and-large I don’t have it is because when I was younger, especially as a teenager into my 20s, I felt a lot of it. I felt bitter often. I felt like life was unfair. I felt like I’d been cheated. I felt like for whatever reason, the course of my life hadn’t brought me to a place where I got what I thought I deserved. It was an entitled kind of feeling, and I looked at other people and I just was bitter at them that they had something that I wanted. They had a better career, guys that had a better girlfriend or had a girlfriend, and I had none.
People who were succeeding in artistic endeavors that I was trying but I couldn’t do. I had a friend who was succeeding as a writer when I was in my early 20s and trying so hard to write these novels or travel logs that I was writing, and they were just not manifesting. I couldn’t get any agents or publishing companies interested at all. I was getting rejection after rejection, and they were having success after success, and I was bitter. I was jealous. I wanted it. I remember thinking, I don’t like myself feeling this way. What a horrible way to be.
So I want to try to analyze it a little. Where did that jealousy come from? Fundamentally, what was it? What were the parts of me at that time that led me to have those feelings so much more strongly than I have now? And how has that changed? How has that resolved or largely been resolved? And what work might I have to do inside of me to have no more jealousy or even have less than I already have, even if I only have now probably less than one percent of what I used to have?
Well, first I’m gonna talk a little bit about why I started really looking at my jealousy and seeing it as a negative thing. For starters, it just didn’t make me happy. It made me feel like I was a small person. It’s like I was like, there’s something creepy about it. Like, I deserve better than this, just to be bitter about what other people have. But I think the most important thing was I saw, and I saw it loud and clear, that when I was jealous of people, especially people I was friends with, it pushed them away. Because even if I didn’t say that I was jealous, they could feel it.
Because what I noticed is that I wasn’t happy with my friends’ success, and that’s fundamentally not being a friend. I wasn’t being a friend to them. So when I had friends who called me gleeful that they’d had this wonderful new contract with an art piece they published or a book they were writing or some success or some great thing that had happened to them, or, “Oh my god, I’m dating this awesome person and I’m so happy,” and I felt bitter, I thought, I’m not a friend. And they could feel it. They could feel, even if I faked it, because I knew sometimes, sometimes I was conscious enough to know it’s not right that I share this, but you could feel that I wasn’t thrilled for them.
And so what it did is they pulled away from me. And it was like, wait a second, I’m losing friends because of this jealous quality of me, and it’s a very unpleasant feeling. And it caused me to take note. And what I ultimately started realizing is that I was unfulfilled on the inside. There was something in me that was not satisfied with my life. I didn’t like how I was living. And also, I wanted to bypass the whole process of my unhappiness by just jumping forward into success, external success, without doing the work along the way to achieve it.
And so for me, the first big thing that I started doing that really was a process in helping me undo my jealousy, my envy, was to live according to my purpose and to be really honest with myself about what was the most important thing that I needed to do to grow. And what that was for me was to really work on developing my relationship with myself more. And the basic way that I began to do that was to study my history and to study who really am I. What are my good qualities? What are my bad qualities? What are the ways in which I am traumatized?
Because what I started seeing is the ways in which I was traumatized are the ways in which I was split off from myself. I was dissociated. I wasn’t really connected to the real true self inside of me. I wasn’t fully traumatized, but in a lot of ways, I was. I was much more largely traumatized. I didn’t have me on the inside as a conscious connection with my spirit on the inside. And so I started working at it because also being traumatized, I didn’t love myself so much. I wasn’t able to really give myself the love, love being the nurturance that I really needed to keep growing in my life.
And often what I started finding is the more I started really connecting with who I was on the inside, my split-off feelings, I had a lot of buried sadness, buried grief, buried rage, buried anger, buried frustration. What I started seeing is that the more I felt that, the more I realized I had been cheated as a child. The real legacy that I was owed by my parents and my childhood was to be loved, to be nurtured, to really be honored for who I was as a spirit, as a child. And in so many ways, I didn’t get that. I got parts of it. I got a piece of the pie, but I didn’t get what I and every child deserved, which was really to be loved deeply and unconditionally for myself.
So what happened to me is that as I grew up, as I entered my adulthood, I was a partial person. And all those other parts of me were not being tended to. And what I got as a result of having all those parts of me that really I didn’t have integrated, all those parts of me that were abandoned long ago, I was still abandoning them. And as a result of abandoning all these different sides of myself, there were still some unconscious part of me that felt like I was entitled for the world to love me. I was entitled. Some deep part of me, this is the root of narcissism, by the way, I felt entitled to have the world take care of me.
I felt like I was owed this by the world. And what was that narcissism inside me really? That was just unresolved trauma, that was unresolved abandonment from my childhood. I once upon a time was entitled to be loved by my parents that way, but once I grew up and once I became an adult, this is what I had to figure out: nobody out there owed me anything. Not my friends, not the world, not the government, not a girlfriend that I might have, and not even my parents. They really didn’t owe me anything. Nobody did. The only person, there was only one person who owed me anything, and that was me.
They broke it. My parents broke it, but I had to fix it. They broke it, you fix it. And that was the sad reality, and that was the sad grief that I had to go through and had to come to that nobody’s job. There was nobody out there who had the job to take care of me except for me. And so I was responsible to take care of me. And so it really did a lot to undo my sense of entitlement. Now ironically, the more I started taking responsibility for myself to heal myself, to meet my unresolved needs, to be the parent for myself that my parents had failed to be way back when, when it was the appropriate time for them to do it.
I started doing that. The more I started having this, really amazing thing happened, which was a sense that finally I was living for a real, healthy, incredibly self-motivated purpose. And it felt amazing. Suddenly, I wasn’t so concerned with writing those books anymore and getting them published and having the world love me and having the world take care of me and being a star and being a hero and being famous. Because those were some of the fantasies I had. Those were some of the ways that I thought would make up for me not having yet gotten loved enough as a kid. And that I realized was so connected to me being jealous of other people.
Because when I saw other people externally succeeding—succeeding with quotes around it—getting loved by the world, getting money for their projects, getting fancy jobs, getting accepted, getting wives and children, starting to buy fancy things and having lots of money, getting all these different societal kudos from the world, I thought in my unconscious unresolved place in my early 20s, even into my mid-20s, when I was still feeling jealous and envy, well, when I saw them succeeding, it was like the little part of me that still felt the world owed me something thought, “Wait a second, they’re winning the contest. Why can’t I win it too? I should be winning it too. They’re getting all the things that, you know, that I want.”
Now, ironically, all these years later, 20-something years after that, I look at those very people and I think, you know, once upon a time, I did see them. They were winning the contest, and I was jealous of them. But in hindsight, a lot of them didn’t win the contest that well. A lot of their marriages have split up. A lot of the kudos and perks that they’ve got for their fancy projects that succeeded, their books that got published, their writings, their other projects they did that they did so well at that I wanted and I was bitter at their success, I realized it didn’t actually work for them in the long run.
A lot of them became very unhappy and depressed when they couldn’t repeat their success or they lost their house or the market changed or whatever it is. All the ways they won the contest didn’t actually always work in the long run. But that’s getting a little ahead of myself. The process I had that I continued on that really started to undo my jealousy so much more was, again, to have that internal purpose inside myself—to live for growing, to live for healing, to live for working out my traumas. And not just to live for it, but to start to succeed at it, to do well.
That I think really was when my—that was really the antidote to my jealousy and to my envy. It was to start to succeed and really just succeed at something that, to me, was more important than having external success. It was to having internal success, to having become much more self-actualized, to really feel like, “Wait a second, the stuff that I have now is stuff that can’t be taken away from me.” My self-love, my growing sense of me, my more integrated sense of my feelings, my insight into myself—that transfers into insight with other people.
Out of all that insight that I was gaining by knowing myself, by healing, by getting away from the traumatizing people in my history and instead loving myself in the ways that they never had done for me, I realized I could be a therapist. I had a whole career that came out of it. And actually, that really did help because once I started getting a career in which the stuff that I had learned on the inside was useful to other people on the outside, I started feeling like I’m never gonna be jealous again of people who were externally succeeding.
Because in the strange way, I was externally succeeding also. But still, I still think underneath it, what set the stage for that was the internal success of doing well at growing and healing and resolving my traumas. And what I found was that being a therapist, in my case, that first taste I had of external success, that actually even more fueled my desire to grow and heal. Because all day long, I was sitting with people who were struggling with these very issues. And the more they struggled with these issues, the more it actually motivated me to do the same and give it my all, give it everything I have.
And I’m still doing that—still healing, still working on it, still trying to know myself, still trying to make sense of myself, journaling, observing myself, observing my dreams, observing my patterns, observing my growth process as an adult, still studying my childhood, still thinking about what happened to me, how does it still affect me, and still feeling hope as I get older that, wow, this process is amazing. I feel more satisfied on the inside. That little sliver of the pie of self that I was given when I came to being an adult out of my troubled childhood—that’s grown. I have much more of a sense of me.
And the more I have a sense of me, a connected, integrated me that has a full range of feelings, the less I look at people and think I want what they have. Because I also see often I don’t want what they have. Even though externally they may have certain areas of success that I never even came close to achieving, it’s like, it seems often in so many of these cases, it’s like a house of cards. Because I see people who have all this external success and yet on the inside, they’re not very happy.
And I think I saw that most clearly as a therapist when I worked with clients—many clients who had a lot more money than I did. They had a lot more external success than I did. But I listened to their internal lives, and I heard a lot of loneliness, sadness, emptiness, meaninglessness, purposelessness, surrounded by all this fanciness, all this external success, kudos, things that people wanted. The average person would say, “I want their life, not yours, Daniel.” But deep on the inside, in the private moments when the real truth came out of a flight, no, I’d much rather have my life—my freedom, my self-love, my ability to give to myself, to know who I am.
Self-knowledge—a precious gift. And also to give to other people on this path. So that’s what I found. Also, to be able to give to myself, to be able to give to other people, it’s like the opposite of jealousy. Instead of feeling bitter and angry when other people are succeeding and wanting what they have, I feel much more now that I’m glad for people’s successes. I’m glad for my friends’ successes. I’m glad when my enemies—people who I don’t even like—actually start to wake up and become more mature and start to know themselves better, start to self-reflect more.
Like that, to me, is success. I never felt that in the past. Now it’s like I feel happy when I hear people in the world or the world itself, in some small way or a big way, is actually changing, is waking up, is healing. And I think that for me, that altruism, that sense of generosity, generativity—those to me are the opposite of jealousy and envy. And that seems to be—that is actually the direction my life is going. But what it seems to be is the direction my life is continuing to go on. And that’s what I’m hoping for.