March 1, 2024 • 40 mins
Feeling jealous over our partners past can feel highly irrational, but its still a feeling many of us have and contributes to a lot of obsessive and unhealthy behaviours like stalking their exes, asking intrusive questions, starting arguments in hopes of getting the reassurance we need. In today's episode, we talk about the psychology of retroactive jealousy, including its origins and how to move past your jealous feelings. We will talk about:
- How past relationships and trauma create jealousy
- Overthinking and anxiety
- Rejection sensitivity
- Self sabotage
- Interrupting mental compulsions
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:27):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we dive
into the Psychology of our twenties. I have a super
fascinating topic for you all today, one that has been
on my mind quite a lot recently and on my
(00:48):
list for some time as well, but I've never really
gotten around to talking about it until now. Today is
the day we are going to be talking about that
kind of sickening feeling of retroactive jealous Feeling jealous over
your partner's past, the people they used to date, the
sex they had before you, the love they've felt with
(01:08):
other people, Feeling like their past has some impact, some
influence on your current or your future together. This kind
of jealousy feels like a reaction that neither of you
can control because it's about something that your person, your partner,
can't undo. You also can't undo it the past is
(01:30):
the past, and before they met you. It's this weird
reality where how could they have predicted that they would
end up in this relationship and not the one that
they had before. I think that retroactive jealousy is particularly
fascinating because normally jealousy occurs in response to present day
actions or feeling threatened by a current relationship, current words,
(01:53):
current behaviors. But with retroactive jealousy, the actions that you
are concerned about normally occurred before they even knew you existed.
So it's really confusing. And our rational brain normally understands
how logical it is to hold our partners past over them,
but there is this emotional and I would say vulnerable,
(02:14):
often insecure part about ourselves that can't help it. It's
a compulsion. It's this unconscious feeling and fear that maybe
what they had before is better than what they have now.
They know it, they're aware, but you don't. They're having
all these private thoughts that you can never fully understand,
and that sense that there are secrets or there is
(02:35):
something you can't control on your relationship results in a
lot of unhealthy behaviors. You know, comparison compulsive snooping, especially
online on social media, picking fights, sabotaging the relationship, sarcasm,
wanting your partner to constantly prove themselves again and again
and again that they want you, that the past doesn't matter,
(02:57):
when in reality it is still a part of who
they are. We have to accept that everything we may
feel jealous of is actually what has brought us together.
How could you be where you are right now without
all those things having happened, And in a sense, you
have those past relationships to be grateful for, But because
(03:17):
you are so appreciative of the love you have currently
and you believe it's so worth protecting, we don't see
that for what it is. It's definitely a labyrinth at times,
and it's really hard to navigate because a secondary component
of this is that we feel a lot of shame,
and when we experience shame, this really causes us to
suppress the emotion when we surprise. We know this time
(03:40):
and time again. Avoidance means that this emotion, this feeling,
is only going to come back with a vengeance because
you haven't properly processed it. So let's talk about how
you can actually process your retroactive jealousy today, why it occurs,
understand its origins, and what we can do about it
(04:03):
before it ends up perhaps undermining or destroying something really
really precious and really really good. To begin, retroactive jealousy
occurs when we feel threatened by our partner's past romantic relationships.
Now that threat doesn't have to be real. This can
be for no reason at all, which I think is
actually the most common instance where this occurs. There can
(04:27):
be times where this jealousy is triggered by something like
an ex reaching back out, or some comment or action
by your partner that makes you believe they're not fully
over this person in the past. But most of the time,
I would say the source of our jealousy is internal.
It has to do with an internal cue, or an
(04:48):
internal fear, or an internal insecurity that we haven't quite
yet expressed or aren't ready to really think about. There
are times when you deserve to be jealous, and I
think there are times when you deserve to not just
be jealous, but angry if your partner does do something
to betray your trust. But when it comes to retroactive jealousy,
that's not really what we're talking about, because the things
(05:11):
that we are struggling with. The things that we feel
negative emotions towards are things that are so far in
the past that it doesn't it is not entirely fair
to blame your partner. Jealousy is a painful emotion, though,
and most of us hate to admit that we've ever
felt it because in many ways, I think we conflate
(05:32):
jealousy with possessiveness, and we don't want this other person
to feel like we are trying to control them, or
that we don't trust them, you know. I think that
that's the really difficult thing is because jealousy, although it's natural,
is also very villainized, and it also normally triggers a
(05:53):
lot of secondary emotions that we are taught to feel
a lot of shame towards to really keep under wraps,
things like rage, insecurity, self doubt, embarrassment, and so when
we don't have a healthy way of understanding those emotions,
it can lead us to project a lot of that
(06:14):
anger and insecurity onto our partner, which they probably don't deserve.
I think it's so interesting to think of how many
relationships could have been saved if people had just had
an open conversation about how they were feeling, if they
had just been honest about the emotions and the reactions
(06:35):
that so many people had told them to be embarrassed about,
and because they feel so embarrassed about them, they therefore
have no other option other than to come out in
other ways that society sometimes says is more acceptable, or
society says is less possessive or less crazy, when actually
the main emotion here, this jealousy, is never addressed and
(06:58):
will continue to carry on into other relationships. It's not
about the person you're dating. It's about the feeling that
you don't have a good grasp on. So some of
the key signs that you're experiencing retroactive jealousy are as follows.
You ruminate and repeatedly think about your partner's x or
past relationships, and you feel incredibly envious when they talk
(07:21):
about it. You either don't want to talk about it,
you don't want to hear a thing, even if it's
an important part of their past, or alternatively, you might
frequently ask a lot of intrusive questions about what the
sex was like when they said they loved each other
for the first time, details of every single element of
(07:41):
their relationship because you feel like if you know this
stuff it's going to be comforting, that it's actually going
to make that feeling a lot worse. You also might
continuously compare yourself to their past partners, both physically but
then also in terms of emotionally as well, and thinking
what did this person get of them that maybe I can't.
(08:01):
You wonder what they feel like they're missing, even if
they've given you no indication that they are feeling this way.
You doubt your partner. You begin to fill in what
they're saying with your own version of the truth, a
version of the truth that is based on your own security,
that is based on your kind of negative impression of
(08:23):
past events when it might actually not have been that
way at all. Right, And additionally, you lash out as
a way to look for reassurance if you start fights
and if you are accusatory. Sometimes we have this false
belief that how our partner reacts in response is going
to make us feel better. Either they will reaffirm your
(08:44):
beliefs or disprove them, and therefore it acts as its
own form of reassurance. Right. You know, fights always have
to have either the always have a conclusion. Right, Either
you end the relationship, you break up, or your partner
says enough to you, says something to you that's going
to make you feel better. Both of those offer a
conclusion to your jealousy in the moment that you may
(09:05):
not have been getting elsewhere. You might also find that
you experience a decline in your self confidence as a result,
which we never want to see that because when you
don't feel full yourself with your partner, your connection is
going to suffer. You know, they had a history before you.
As unfortunate as it is, we don't all immediately find
(09:27):
the one on our first tribe, but I'm sure that
you also had a history. You also had a past
before them, and all of those past relationships that you
had obviously ended for a reason, and that is the
same for them. They are with you for a reason.
You have to trust that being with you is what
they see is the best thing for them, the same
(09:47):
way you feel about that, the same way that you
wouldn't be in this relationship is if it wasn't good,
if you didn't value it. You have to trust that
your partner is able to make the best decision for
them the same way that you make the best decisions
for you. Like I said before, it's hard not to
let retroactive jealousy get in the way because it does
(10:09):
bring a lot of associated shame. And as humans, we're
also very protective of our hearts. Love is a very
delicate emotion. It's a very special thing, and it's very rare,
and so we naturally have an instinctive reaction to be
quite defensive and vigilant to outside threats that might jeopardize
this valuable thing. And truly I get it, but it's
(10:32):
also really valuable to understand where that comes from. So
we're going to talk through four explanations here, past trauma
and relationship experiences, overthinking insecurity including rejection, sensitivity, and finally
self sabotage. Those are the main reasons, all the main
factors that contribute to frequent retroactive jealousy. I also wanted
(10:56):
to spell the idea that if you struggle with feeling
jealous about your partner's past, you are somehow toxic or
possessive or a bad person, because although I do think
that jealousy can reach a very noxious point, I would
say that the majority of people are not like this.
They are just managing a complex interaction between their anxiety, insecurity, vulnerability,
(11:18):
and a host of other factors, and they never act
on it in a way that is meant to harm
who they are with. They are just confused by emotions
that they may not have felt before and are looking
for reassurance. So let's talk about where retroactive jealousy comes from.
We're going to start by looking into past relationship trauma.
(11:38):
If you have been hurt in the past by a
previous partner, perhaps cheating, whether that was emotional or physical,
maybe not respecting your boundaries when it came to their
communication with an x, or being unfaithful in some way,
it's hard to not bring this previous experience into your
new relationship is a very fragile thing, and once broken,
(12:04):
it's very hard to repair. And that doesn't always just
apply to the relationship in which the betrayal of trust occurred.
Those wounds carry on with us and they can become
apparent in our future relationships. That is because those experiences have,
in a way unconsciously taught us something about what it
means to be loved and what it means to be
in love. Even if those lessons are an anomaly or
(12:27):
aren't correct. Our brain is taking on this past information
as a way to help teach it what to do
in future instances like this to avoid being hurt. That
is especially the case when those experiences are very emotionally
salient or painful, if you have been cheated on, if
(12:48):
it was happening for months behind your back, our brain
pays more attention to the content of these memories to
avoid a similar pain from occurring in the future. And
what this creates is a type of hypervigilance in which
you are constantly on alert for any cues or suggestions
(13:08):
or indications that you can be hurt again. So in psychology,
hypervigilance is basically just being more attuned to information in
our environment that might confirm our fears, and it's often
a sign of a dysregulated nervous system, but also traumatic
events in the past or in severe cases PTSD, and
(13:30):
it causes us to interpret the information that we're being
given in a different way, in a way that it
wants us to be able to almost predict a threat.
So when your new partner does something that anyone else
would say you're supernormal, like take a phone call outside
or text on their phone on the other side of
the room or recount some story of an x. You
(13:51):
apply a different meaning to their actions and you interpret
that something must be wrong, that you have a reason
to feel jealous. You can't find a present day reason
for this, you might look to their past for an explanation,
and what emerges is retroactive jealousy. It's important to note
here that your mind is just trying to protect you.
(14:14):
It's trying to do what it does best, which is
to avoid pain, both the physical and the emotional type.
But sometimes it also jumps to conclusions with limited information,
and a lot of that processing of information is based
on biases and distortions that you have developed from past experiences.
(14:35):
So cognitive biases are essentially a way in which we
process information based on how we've learnt things in the past.
So it is, honestly, it's like an abnormal way of
seeing things that isn't based in reality. So the particular
bias that we're thinking of heroes known as selective perception bias,
(14:58):
whereby expectations determine what we actually end up seeing and
what we tend to miss, is all the other information
that is telling us we have nothing to worry about
we don't always think about the reassurance, all the moments
that our partner has told us that they do love us,
(15:19):
that they want to be with us, the little things
they do for us. Instead, the focus remains on the past,
because that is where we see the danger as being.
That is where we see there being perhaps a threat
to our relationship. And it's important to remember that a
lot of this anxiety and worry is irrational and also
(15:39):
just a natural reaction to uncertainty and putting yourself in
a position where you know you could get hurt. That's
really what it is at the end of the day,
Like love provides a lot of opportunity to get seriously heartbroken,
and that is something that none of us are going
to opt into, none of us want to feel. And
so all of that, these thoughts, all of this jealousy
(16:01):
is really just a way for you to ensure that
you could predict if that was going to happen, and
to be on the lookout for any signs of danger
to your relationship. I think the part of love, however,
is that you just have to trust this other person
won't do that, and trusting them also deepens the bond
(16:22):
in many ways. So the second major reason that we
tend to experience retroactive jealousy is related to overthinking. A
lot of individuals who are naturally very anxious also have
the tendency to overthink and ruminate on things beyond their control,
because the very act of thinking about these things repetitively
(16:45):
brings about a sense of false security. If we can
imagine every possible situation, everything our partner is not telling
us every way we might not be as good as
the ex every way that they might want more, we
can prepare ourselves for when those fears inevitably are proven true,
even though we know that they probably never will. That's
(17:09):
not the point, right We don't actually want the thoughts
and the fears to come true, but we just want
to be prepared just in case they do. Overthinking really
plays a big part in the obsessive nature of retroactive jealousy,
because there will never be a conclusion or an answer
that is going to satisfy us whilst we are in
that thought spiral, because as soon as one door closes,
(17:31):
another one will open. That is the nature of overthinking. Normally,
I would say in someone's brain, what might occur is
that a thought pops into your head one of the millions,
perhaps billions of thoughts that we have in a day,
But this one feels really scary because it's about someone
that you care about. It may be a thought like
does my boyfriend find me as attractive as his ex? Now,
(17:55):
most people can dismiss this thought and realize that it's
fear based and irrational and just be like, yeah, of
course he does, and even if he doesn't, that's not
my problem. Like whatever, it's okay. I know that we're
in love. I know that we're okay. But if you
are a natural overthinker, any thought of this kind that
has that emotional magnitude behind it requires close examination because
(18:17):
you aren't comfortable unless you know for a fact that
it's untrue, So you obsess on it, you let it simmer,
which causes the thought spiral to continue. What you're really
struggling with is the uncertainty. There is so much about
a relationship that you can't control. You can't control someone's
private thoughts, you can't control their feelings, and you definitely
(18:38):
can't control their past. This acknowledgment breeds a lot of insecurity,
a lot of instability, and it can also culminate in
something that we call retroactive OCDA, a type of honestly
obsessive compulsive disorder that involves becoming super overwhelmed by intrusive
thoughts of a partner's past, such that we can't even
(18:59):
control their frequency, their quantity, their intensity. We don't want
to feel this way, and the more you struggle against it,
the louder some of those thoughts become, because they gain
a lot more power over you. It may also have
to do with a level of personal insecurity, perhaps insecurity
about your value as a partner, your attractiveness, your intelligence,
(19:22):
your past sexual experience. I see this a lot with
partners where one partner has had more sexual partners than
the other. It feels like because they have more comparison points,
because maybe they've had more casual sex, they've had more experience, whatever,
it may be that this other person can't live up
to what they had in the past, and therefore they
(19:43):
can't be the best. So they'll always this other person
will always want something more than them, they'll want something better,
and that is what really breeds this jealousy. Now, this
is entirely untrue. What's actually happening here is that we
are experiencing a deflation in ourselves based on something someone
else can't even control, i e. A past event, and
(20:05):
we are using that event. We're using our partner's past
as almost a projection of how we're feeling deep inside,
which is that we're not feeling amazing. We're searching for
a reason why we're not feeling amazing, and when it
comes to our partners X, that feels like the perfect
point to diffuse all of our insecurity. A study published
(20:25):
by the American Psychological Association actually found a pretty significant
link between jealousy and low self esteem, especially when it
comes to sexual jealousy. Here's the thing. I don't think
that you should be ashamed of your insecurities because you
really didn't have a choice in the matter. There is
not a single person who would choose to feel less
(20:46):
than or who would choose to be inadequate when given
the choice. But although you don't have control over how
your insecurity has come to be your origin story, you
do have a choice on how you use to communicate
your insecurity to your partner. Is that through sarcasm or
(21:06):
picking fights or this silent treatment, or is it about
doing what is objectively harder, but better overall, which is
being honest with them, letting them see this part of you,
this fragile element of you that is causing a lot
of that anger and sadness over the past. When this
insecurity is left unchecked, it can also reveal itself through
(21:27):
self sabotage. When we don't feel good enough, it's going
to unconsciously inform how we choose to act, manifesting in
behaviors that we know will push our partner away, like
invading their privacy, like picking fights, like continuously coming back
to this intrusive thought. We know what will come of
(21:49):
those behaviors. The outcome is predictable. They will probably leave us,
the relationship will break down, but at least in some
strange way you had to saying it. It feels like
you're bringing the control back to you by pushing them away,
rather than waiting for them to walk away based on
something that you can't predict, like past feelings about NX
(22:13):
or a relationship or whatever it is. You just truly
are trying to sabotage the relationship as a way to
not be blindsided when you believe it will inevitably come
to an end. Self sabotage has its origins and that
insecurity we were speaking about before, and it's a coping
mechanism we use to bring about a sense of agency
(22:34):
in situations where we don't feel a lot of agency
or security, but also to manage stressful situations and past trauma.
So it does go hand in hand with retroactive jealousy
quite a bit. There are a few other factors that
contribute to this form of jealousy, including a big one
an anxious attachment style. We know that that contributes to
(22:57):
a significant fear of abandonment and rejection and therefore possibly
a hyperfixation on our partner's past relationships. And then also
rejection sensitivity, being particularly perceptive and sensitive susceptible to indications
that someone is going to reject to one of which
could be of course this is not true, but it
(23:18):
could be their past, so you remain very focused on it.
I'm really trying to make this point. A lot of
this is coming from a place of fear, and fear
is all like, most of the time, very irrational and untrue.
But all of this can really take its toll, especially
for your partner as well. It's important to understand that
They can also feel a lot of the emotional consequences
(23:40):
of this. They can feel shame over their own past.
They can feel like there's nothing they can say or
do that will help you. They can be a lot
of frustration at the repetitive nature of your arguments, and
frustration that you don't believe them when they say those
people really mean nothing to them. Now, some therapist might
(24:00):
suggest to you that a bit of jealousy is helpful.
One of those people is a very renowned psychotherapist, Esther Perell.
She talks about this theory this idea in her book
Mating in Captivity, and according to her, jealousy proves to
us in our partner that we care, that we want
to stay committed to someone, and that we realize that
(24:20):
we have a good thing. So in that way, it's
very positive, because if you've never felt threatened, even at
times when you should, it might indicate that you're not
all in now. I will say that this is just
one perspective. It's not for everyone, and obviously it is
somewhat controversial at times. I, for one, do believe that
a bit of jealousy does actually affirm your trust in
(24:42):
someone and helps you realize again and again that they
will choose you. But when it's rampant, when you have
no control over it, when we are in a state
that no love or reassurance can calm us, this will
put a strain on your relationship and it could cause
you to lose a very good thing. So let's talk
about how to manage our retroactive jealousy and process all
(25:07):
the causes, the contributors that are keeping us in a
position of feeling very powerless and out of control in
our own relationship. So all of that and more after
this short break, you want your relationship to last. It
(25:28):
is important to reaffirm that as much as possible. If
you were not committed. Firstly, you probably wouldn't be listening
to this episode. You wouldn't be having these concerns because
you wouldn't be worried about having something to lose. The
thing is, though, you can't choose your partner, the person
that is the most important person in your life, based
(25:49):
on their past, because that is going to really really
limit your options and mean that you could potentially miss
out on your soulmate just because they've had a few
too many exes, They had a past, So did you,
and you need to remember that those relationships ended for
a reason. They have free will. Your partner has free will.
(26:11):
They are making the best decision for them, and that
is to be with you. They want to be here.
I always find it valuable to think about how I
feel about my own exes. Quite frankly, I want nothing
to do with them, And if that's how I feel,
why wouldn't my partner feel the same way about their past? Secondly,
would you really want to date someone who had zero
(26:33):
experience with dating with emotional intimacy, who had never experienced
love or heartbreak or what it had to teach you.
I don't necessarily think that I would. I feel like
that would be equally as strange to me to feel
like I was the one who's having to show them
everything that had to be their first love, when I'd
(26:55):
had loves in the past as well. So I think
that we always think that we would prefer something else,
the grass being greener on the other side. But actually
what you have right now is probably pretty pretty good,
and it's just the small insecurity that you're going to
have to move past. You can let yourself be ruled
(27:16):
by fear, or you can decide to just give in
to this anxiety. I find that retroactive jealousy is almost
like quicksand the more you struggle against it and suppress
your feelings, refuse to speak them out loud. The more
you fight and fight and fight against your jealousy, the
more entrenched you become, the more you sink. Instead, you
(27:37):
have to do what feels insanely kinterintuitive in the moment,
which is to just let yourself feel what you're feeling
without trying to escape from it, without trying to assign
some deeper meaning to your emotions. You are not your thoughts.
You are separate from your thoughts. Your thoughts do not
(27:58):
predict the future. You are just receiving those thoughts. You
can't control what pops into your head, and having these
thoughts doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean
that your relationship is doomed to fail. It doesn't say
anything about your relationship other than that perhaps you just
have something to work through. This is this idea of
(28:20):
cognitive diffusion, being able to look at your thoughts and
just observe them rather than panic at them. I think
that our experience with retroactive jealousy becomes a lot easier
when you just see your thoughts as just these little
things popping in to say hi, that aren't going to
hurt you, that don't mean really anything other than that
(28:41):
they just exist, that they're just background noise. You're allowed
to ignore those thoughts. You are allowed to ignore the
thoughts that are not useful for you, that are not
productive to you, and kind of accept the fact that
they are not there to help you. They are coming
from a place of insecurity, of anxiety, of overthinking, and
(29:03):
the more you feed into them, the harder it's going
to be to find a conclusion or to find an
answer that's actually going to make you feel better. It's
part of that acceptance of the fact that you're never
going to have full clarity on about your partner's past.
You can think up a million different scenarios, but none
(29:24):
of them are actually going to be true, and all
of them are probably going to make you feel a
lot worse. I just have this belief that sometimes you
do just have to have blind faith in what someone
else is saying to you. If they say you have
nothing to worry about, don't try and argue with them,
Just say Okay, yeah, I choose to believe you. I'm
(29:45):
choosing to believe you even if I don't want to,
even if my fear wants me to look for another answer.
I'm not going to look. Maybe you're lying to me.
But you know, it's about trusting that You've also got
a very good judge of care character, and you've chosen
a good person to be in your life who is
not going to lie to you, who is not going
(30:05):
to deceive you, who wants to be here with you
now in this relationship. So saying to yourself, Okay, I'm
just going to believe this person kind of lets your
anxiety and overthinking know where you stand. It shows them
that you're the boss. You have set a boundary with yourself.
You are giving yourself permission to stop ruminating. The other
biggest gift you can give yourself in those moments is
(30:27):
to eliminate any of the behavioral compulsions which you know
are going to elicit a really emotional reaction. I'm talking
about stalking their exes, stalking their old tagged photos, asking
endless questions of your partner about their ex information that
you quite frankly do not need to know. Now, I'm
(30:50):
using the word compulsion here, because that is what they are.
They are very difficult to suppress, especially when we have
perhaps gotten used to feeling an anxious thought, feeling compelled
to act in a certain way, and receiving some momentary reassurance.
But it just means that the next time you need reassurance,
the threshold is higher, and you actually aren't learning how
(31:12):
to control those unconscious spikes of jealousy. You're allowing them
to be kind of fueled by all of these behaviors
that are giving you just more information that could potentially
hurt your feelings, more information that you need to put
in and find a way to fit into your brain,
more scenarios to play with. You are just adding more
(31:34):
fuel to the fire, essentially, And we need to approach
this on a need to know basis. If it doesn't
impact your current relationship, you quite frankly don't need to know.
It's okay, you don't need to know everything. The uncertainty
that you're feeling in response to that is just a
feeling you will never know everything. So perhaps if you'll
(31:55):
never know everything, it's better to lowe to know you
know less rather than more. It's also important to remember
that your version of your partner's past might not be theirs.
You are creating this mental movie that is probably totally
different from reality, totally different to how it actually was,
(32:16):
and it is a mental image, a mental movie that
is most certainly leveraging your fears rather than the truth.
It wants to be extreme. It is extrapolating based on
limited information in a manner that our brain thinks will
protect us, but is really harming us and probably lying
(32:37):
to us as well. So it's important to counteract those
thoughts that have no evidence to them. Has your partner
given you any indication that they don't want to be
with you? No, have they ever said that they want
to get back with their ex? No, have they showed
you any indication, a reasonable indication that they wanted to
(32:59):
Probably not question the validity of your fearful thoughts. Now. Obviously,
the example that we are mostly relying on are occasions
where you actually don't have anything to worry about. I
would say though, that if there are boundaries that are
being crossed, that's giving you a reason to feel jealous
(33:20):
and to feel really terrible. If you feel like this
person that you're dating, or this person that you're with
is encouraging that reaction almost as like a self esteem
boost to them. This does not apply. Everything we've spoken
about does not apply. That person is not good for you.
You should have a serious conversation with them about why
(33:40):
they feel the need to do that, why they are
crossing boundaries that you have set for yourself, why they
are choosing to disrespect you, and find out whether that's
something that you're going to be willing to work with
them towards fixing, or whether this relationship perhaps is not
the one for you. Because some some times you realize
(34:01):
that you're actually not crazy, and I'm gonna say crazy
in quotation marks. You are not the crazy girlfriend or
the crazy partner or the crazy boyfriend. You're actually with
someone who is manipulating your emotions for their own personal
gain and for their own sense of confidence and sense
of self esteem. I've had that in the past where
(34:22):
this person liked seeing me get jealous in a weird,
twisted way because every time I got jealous, he got
the reassurance that I wanted to be with him when
I was telling him again and again and again that
I did, But the jealousy was like this extra terry
on top and it was so infuriating when I kind
(34:43):
of began to realize that that was what he was doing,
because it was not a pleasant emotion, and it was
putting such a strain on our relationship and causing us
to fight all the time, causing me to feel like
I wasn't the person I wanted to be in that relationship.
So I'm going to say an important caveat here. If
you're with someone who is deliberately creating feelings of jealousy,
(35:06):
or who is not respecting your boundaries, who is communicating
with their ex regularly and has no need to, maybe
that's not the right relationship for you. Maybe you're not
the problem in those other instances though that we were
speaking about, where it really is just a deep insecurity
and overthinking. I would say, try not to involve your
(35:29):
partner too much in helping you to solve this problem,
in helping you to address your retroactive jealousy. They can,
of course be a teammate, but they can't be your coach,
because then we often become too overly reliant on their
reassurance rather than actually addressing the root cause of this problem,
which is that past trauma. Perhaps maybe that lack of
(35:53):
security in your relationship. That insecurity, the overthinking, the self sabotage,
those are all things that your partner actually can't help
you with. You will have to do that on your own,
and putting too much pressure on them to constantly make
you feel better only just exacerbates and continues the cycle
of retroactive jealousy, never actually causing you to pull yourself
(36:16):
out of that thought pattern and think about the why
rather than the current present moment and the what, and
thinking about what can make you feel better? Why not
think about how can I stop this from occurring in
the first place. Perhaps that is really going to therapy
and breaking down the content of those harmful memories from
(36:40):
the past. What wounds are you carrying from past relationships
that are showing up in your current relationship. Maybe that
is focusing on working on your own insecurity. Why don't
you feel adequate? Is it because you have never felt
particularly confident about your body? Is it because you lack
the same amat of experience as this person? Is it
(37:02):
because you feel like you're not in their league or
some other made up idea or basis for weighing and
judging attractiveness instead of focusing on those things, and this
is such a basic introduction to addressing insecurity that requires
a whole episode of its own. But instead of focusing
(37:25):
on all the ways that you may not be as
good as their ex, that they may be better than you,
that they may be deserving of more, focus on what
you're amazing at. You are excellent at something, I'm sure
of it. You excel at many things. There is a
reason that this person has chosen you, even if you
are struggling to see it right now. You have so
(37:47):
much love to give. You are such a generous person.
I'm sure that you are very very kind, or I
would like to assume so very intelligent. There are so
many attributes that I think we nor because we want
to pretend that we're humble, or because we don't want
to feel immodest or arrogant, and really that can actually
(38:08):
just contribute to us not feeling like we have any
value at all. Get back in touch with the things
that make you unique, an interesting, and incredible and worthy
of love, such that you don't need to be comparing
yourself to this person's ex or their past feelings or
situationships because you are wholly confident that what you have
(38:31):
is better, what you have with them is better. Now,
I think that's all we have time for today. I
really hope that this episode has provided you with something
to think about, has helped you if you are dealing
with retroactive jealousy. I didn't want to approach this with
too much shame, because I know sometimes we can really
(38:52):
get confused when it comes to this form of jealousy
and think that it means that we're possessive, or that
where all these number of bad things, when actually I
do just think that it comes from a lot of
hurt that we need to heal. Retroactive jealousy is just
a sign of some internal damage or some internal insecurity
(39:12):
that our mind is calling on us to address. So
I'm sending you a lot of love. This is a
lot more common than you think. So you are not
alone in this feeling. You're not a bad person because
you ruminate on somebody else's past, But you do have
a responsibility to yourself and to your relationship, to your partner,
to the person that you want to be with. To
(39:32):
get to the root cause of why this is occurring,
it will take hard work. It will take a lot
of honesty and vulnerability. But once you do that, I
think you eradicate a lot of the negativity that is
making you feel shameful about yourself or making you feel
making you question the state of your relationship. So thank
(39:52):
you so much for listening. If there is someone that
you believe needs to hear this episode, please feel free
to share it with them and leave a five star
review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now.
If you have an episode suggestion, this episode was actually
an episode suggestion, please feel free to message me at
that Psychology podcast on Instagram or you can follow me
(40:17):
at genis Bak if you have any ideas for upcoming episodes, topics,
anything you want us to discuss, and we will be
back next week with another episode.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:27):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, it is so great to
have you here. Back for another episode as we dive
into the Psychology of our twenties. I have a super
fascinating topic for you all today, one that has been
on my mind quite a lot recently and on my
(00:48):
list for some time as well, but I've never really
gotten around to talking about it until now. Today is
the day we are going to be talking about that
kind of sickening feeling of retroactive jealous Feeling jealous over
your partner's past, the people they used to date, the
sex they had before you, the love they've felt with
(01:08):
other people, Feeling like their past has some impact, some
influence on your current or your future together. This kind
of jealousy feels like a reaction that neither of you
can control because it's about something that your person, your partner,
can't undo. You also can't undo it the past is
(01:30):
the past, and before they met you. It's this weird
reality where how could they have predicted that they would
end up in this relationship and not the one that
they had before. I think that retroactive jealousy is particularly
fascinating because normally jealousy occurs in response to present day
actions or feeling threatened by a current relationship, current words,
(01:53):
current behaviors. But with retroactive jealousy, the actions that you
are concerned about normally occurred before they even knew you existed.
So it's really confusing. And our rational brain normally understands
how logical it is to hold our partners past over them,
but there is this emotional and I would say vulnerable,
(02:14):
often insecure part about ourselves that can't help it. It's
a compulsion. It's this unconscious feeling and fear that maybe
what they had before is better than what they have now.
They know it, they're aware, but you don't. They're having
all these private thoughts that you can never fully understand,
and that sense that there are secrets or there is
(02:35):
something you can't control on your relationship results in a
lot of unhealthy behaviors. You know, comparison compulsive snooping, especially
online on social media, picking fights, sabotaging the relationship, sarcasm,
wanting your partner to constantly prove themselves again and again
and again that they want you, that the past doesn't matter,
(02:57):
when in reality it is still a part of who
they are. We have to accept that everything we may
feel jealous of is actually what has brought us together.
How could you be where you are right now without
all those things having happened, And in a sense, you
have those past relationships to be grateful for, But because
(03:17):
you are so appreciative of the love you have currently
and you believe it's so worth protecting, we don't see
that for what it is. It's definitely a labyrinth at times,
and it's really hard to navigate because a secondary component
of this is that we feel a lot of shame,
and when we experience shame, this really causes us to
suppress the emotion when we surprise. We know this time
(03:40):
and time again. Avoidance means that this emotion, this feeling,
is only going to come back with a vengeance because
you haven't properly processed it. So let's talk about how
you can actually process your retroactive jealousy today, why it occurs,
understand its origins, and what we can do about it
(04:03):
before it ends up perhaps undermining or destroying something really
really precious and really really good. To begin, retroactive jealousy
occurs when we feel threatened by our partner's past romantic relationships.
Now that threat doesn't have to be real. This can
be for no reason at all, which I think is
actually the most common instance where this occurs. There can
(04:27):
be times where this jealousy is triggered by something like
an ex reaching back out, or some comment or action
by your partner that makes you believe they're not fully
over this person in the past. But most of the time,
I would say the source of our jealousy is internal.
It has to do with an internal cue, or an
(04:48):
internal fear, or an internal insecurity that we haven't quite
yet expressed or aren't ready to really think about. There
are times when you deserve to be jealous, and I
think there are times when you deserve to not just
be jealous, but angry if your partner does do something
to betray your trust. But when it comes to retroactive jealousy,
that's not really what we're talking about, because the things
(05:11):
that we are struggling with. The things that we feel
negative emotions towards are things that are so far in
the past that it doesn't it is not entirely fair
to blame your partner. Jealousy is a painful emotion, though,
and most of us hate to admit that we've ever
felt it because in many ways, I think we conflate
(05:32):
jealousy with possessiveness, and we don't want this other person
to feel like we are trying to control them, or
that we don't trust them, you know. I think that
that's the really difficult thing is because jealousy, although it's natural,
is also very villainized, and it also normally triggers a
(05:53):
lot of secondary emotions that we are taught to feel
a lot of shame towards to really keep under wraps,
things like rage, insecurity, self doubt, embarrassment, and so when
we don't have a healthy way of understanding those emotions,
it can lead us to project a lot of that
(06:14):
anger and insecurity onto our partner, which they probably don't deserve.
I think it's so interesting to think of how many
relationships could have been saved if people had just had
an open conversation about how they were feeling, if they
had just been honest about the emotions and the reactions
(06:35):
that so many people had told them to be embarrassed about,
and because they feel so embarrassed about them, they therefore
have no other option other than to come out in
other ways that society sometimes says is more acceptable, or
society says is less possessive or less crazy, when actually
the main emotion here, this jealousy, is never addressed and
(06:58):
will continue to carry on into other relationships. It's not
about the person you're dating. It's about the feeling that
you don't have a good grasp on. So some of
the key signs that you're experiencing retroactive jealousy are as follows.
You ruminate and repeatedly think about your partner's x or
past relationships, and you feel incredibly envious when they talk
(07:21):
about it. You either don't want to talk about it,
you don't want to hear a thing, even if it's
an important part of their past, or alternatively, you might
frequently ask a lot of intrusive questions about what the
sex was like when they said they loved each other
for the first time, details of every single element of
(07:41):
their relationship because you feel like if you know this
stuff it's going to be comforting, that it's actually going
to make that feeling a lot worse. You also might
continuously compare yourself to their past partners, both physically but
then also in terms of emotionally as well, and thinking
what did this person get of them that maybe I can't.
(08:01):
You wonder what they feel like they're missing, even if
they've given you no indication that they are feeling this way.
You doubt your partner. You begin to fill in what
they're saying with your own version of the truth, a
version of the truth that is based on your own security,
that is based on your kind of negative impression of
(08:23):
past events when it might actually not have been that
way at all. Right, And additionally, you lash out as
a way to look for reassurance if you start fights
and if you are accusatory. Sometimes we have this false
belief that how our partner reacts in response is going
to make us feel better. Either they will reaffirm your
(08:44):
beliefs or disprove them, and therefore it acts as its
own form of reassurance. Right. You know, fights always have
to have either the always have a conclusion. Right, Either
you end the relationship, you break up, or your partner
says enough to you, says something to you that's going
to make you feel better. Both of those offer a
conclusion to your jealousy in the moment that you may
(09:05):
not have been getting elsewhere. You might also find that
you experience a decline in your self confidence as a result,
which we never want to see that because when you
don't feel full yourself with your partner, your connection is
going to suffer. You know, they had a history before you.
As unfortunate as it is, we don't all immediately find
(09:27):
the one on our first tribe, but I'm sure that
you also had a history. You also had a past
before them, and all of those past relationships that you
had obviously ended for a reason, and that is the
same for them. They are with you for a reason.
You have to trust that being with you is what
they see is the best thing for them, the same
(09:47):
way you feel about that, the same way that you
wouldn't be in this relationship is if it wasn't good,
if you didn't value it. You have to trust that
your partner is able to make the best decision for
them the same way that you make the best decisions
for you. Like I said before, it's hard not to
let retroactive jealousy get in the way because it does
(10:09):
bring a lot of associated shame. And as humans, we're
also very protective of our hearts. Love is a very
delicate emotion. It's a very special thing, and it's very rare,
and so we naturally have an instinctive reaction to be
quite defensive and vigilant to outside threats that might jeopardize
this valuable thing. And truly I get it, but it's
(10:32):
also really valuable to understand where that comes from. So
we're going to talk through four explanations here, past trauma
and relationship experiences, overthinking insecurity including rejection, sensitivity, and finally
self sabotage. Those are the main reasons, all the main
factors that contribute to frequent retroactive jealousy. I also wanted
(10:56):
to spell the idea that if you struggle with feeling
jealous about your partner's past, you are somehow toxic or
possessive or a bad person, because although I do think
that jealousy can reach a very noxious point, I would
say that the majority of people are not like this.
They are just managing a complex interaction between their anxiety, insecurity, vulnerability,
(11:18):
and a host of other factors, and they never act
on it in a way that is meant to harm
who they are with. They are just confused by emotions
that they may not have felt before and are looking
for reassurance. So let's talk about where retroactive jealousy comes from.
We're going to start by looking into past relationship trauma.
(11:38):
If you have been hurt in the past by a
previous partner, perhaps cheating, whether that was emotional or physical,
maybe not respecting your boundaries when it came to their
communication with an x, or being unfaithful in some way,
it's hard to not bring this previous experience into your
new relationship is a very fragile thing, and once broken,
(12:04):
it's very hard to repair. And that doesn't always just
apply to the relationship in which the betrayal of trust occurred.
Those wounds carry on with us and they can become
apparent in our future relationships. That is because those experiences have,
in a way unconsciously taught us something about what it
means to be loved and what it means to be
in love. Even if those lessons are an anomaly or
(12:27):
aren't correct. Our brain is taking on this past information
as a way to help teach it what to do
in future instances like this to avoid being hurt. That
is especially the case when those experiences are very emotionally
salient or painful, if you have been cheated on, if
(12:48):
it was happening for months behind your back, our brain
pays more attention to the content of these memories to
avoid a similar pain from occurring in the future. And
what this creates is a type of hypervigilance in which
you are constantly on alert for any cues or suggestions
(13:08):
or indications that you can be hurt again. So in psychology,
hypervigilance is basically just being more attuned to information in
our environment that might confirm our fears, and it's often
a sign of a dysregulated nervous system, but also traumatic
events in the past or in severe cases PTSD, and
(13:30):
it causes us to interpret the information that we're being
given in a different way, in a way that it
wants us to be able to almost predict a threat.
So when your new partner does something that anyone else
would say you're supernormal, like take a phone call outside
or text on their phone on the other side of
the room or recount some story of an x. You
(13:51):
apply a different meaning to their actions and you interpret
that something must be wrong, that you have a reason
to feel jealous. You can't find a present day reason
for this, you might look to their past for an explanation,
and what emerges is retroactive jealousy. It's important to note
here that your mind is just trying to protect you.
(14:14):
It's trying to do what it does best, which is
to avoid pain, both the physical and the emotional type.
But sometimes it also jumps to conclusions with limited information,
and a lot of that processing of information is based
on biases and distortions that you have developed from past experiences.
(14:35):
So cognitive biases are essentially a way in which we
process information based on how we've learnt things in the past.
So it is, honestly, it's like an abnormal way of
seeing things that isn't based in reality. So the particular
bias that we're thinking of heroes known as selective perception bias,
(14:58):
whereby expectations determine what we actually end up seeing and
what we tend to miss, is all the other information
that is telling us we have nothing to worry about
we don't always think about the reassurance, all the moments
that our partner has told us that they do love us,
(15:19):
that they want to be with us, the little things
they do for us. Instead, the focus remains on the past,
because that is where we see the danger as being.
That is where we see there being perhaps a threat
to our relationship. And it's important to remember that a
lot of this anxiety and worry is irrational and also
(15:39):
just a natural reaction to uncertainty and putting yourself in
a position where you know you could get hurt. That's
really what it is at the end of the day,
Like love provides a lot of opportunity to get seriously heartbroken,
and that is something that none of us are going
to opt into, none of us want to feel. And
so all of that, these thoughts, all of this jealousy
(16:01):
is really just a way for you to ensure that
you could predict if that was going to happen, and
to be on the lookout for any signs of danger
to your relationship. I think the part of love, however,
is that you just have to trust this other person
won't do that, and trusting them also deepens the bond
(16:22):
in many ways. So the second major reason that we
tend to experience retroactive jealousy is related to overthinking. A
lot of individuals who are naturally very anxious also have
the tendency to overthink and ruminate on things beyond their control,
because the very act of thinking about these things repetitively
(16:45):
brings about a sense of false security. If we can
imagine every possible situation, everything our partner is not telling
us every way we might not be as good as
the ex every way that they might want more, we
can prepare ourselves for when those fears inevitably are proven true,
even though we know that they probably never will. That's
(17:09):
not the point, right We don't actually want the thoughts
and the fears to come true, but we just want
to be prepared just in case they do. Overthinking really
plays a big part in the obsessive nature of retroactive jealousy,
because there will never be a conclusion or an answer
that is going to satisfy us whilst we are in
that thought spiral, because as soon as one door closes,
(17:31):
another one will open. That is the nature of overthinking. Normally,
I would say in someone's brain, what might occur is
that a thought pops into your head one of the millions,
perhaps billions of thoughts that we have in a day,
But this one feels really scary because it's about someone
that you care about. It may be a thought like
does my boyfriend find me as attractive as his ex? Now,
(17:55):
most people can dismiss this thought and realize that it's
fear based and irrational and just be like, yeah, of
course he does, and even if he doesn't, that's not
my problem. Like whatever, it's okay. I know that we're
in love. I know that we're okay. But if you
are a natural overthinker, any thought of this kind that
has that emotional magnitude behind it requires close examination because
(18:17):
you aren't comfortable unless you know for a fact that
it's untrue, So you obsess on it, you let it simmer,
which causes the thought spiral to continue. What you're really
struggling with is the uncertainty. There is so much about
a relationship that you can't control. You can't control someone's
private thoughts, you can't control their feelings, and you definitely
(18:38):
can't control their past. This acknowledgment breeds a lot of insecurity,
a lot of instability, and it can also culminate in
something that we call retroactive OCDA, a type of honestly
obsessive compulsive disorder that involves becoming super overwhelmed by intrusive
thoughts of a partner's past, such that we can't even
(18:59):
control their frequency, their quantity, their intensity. We don't want
to feel this way, and the more you struggle against it,
the louder some of those thoughts become, because they gain
a lot more power over you. It may also have
to do with a level of personal insecurity, perhaps insecurity
about your value as a partner, your attractiveness, your intelligence,
(19:22):
your past sexual experience. I see this a lot with
partners where one partner has had more sexual partners than
the other. It feels like because they have more comparison points,
because maybe they've had more casual sex, they've had more experience, whatever,
it may be that this other person can't live up
to what they had in the past, and therefore they
(19:43):
can't be the best. So they'll always this other person
will always want something more than them, they'll want something better,
and that is what really breeds this jealousy. Now, this
is entirely untrue. What's actually happening here is that we
are experiencing a deflation in ourselves based on something someone
else can't even control, i e. A past event, and
(20:05):
we are using that event. We're using our partner's past
as almost a projection of how we're feeling deep inside,
which is that we're not feeling amazing. We're searching for
a reason why we're not feeling amazing, and when it
comes to our partners X, that feels like the perfect
point to diffuse all of our insecurity. A study published
(20:25):
by the American Psychological Association actually found a pretty significant
link between jealousy and low self esteem, especially when it
comes to sexual jealousy. Here's the thing. I don't think
that you should be ashamed of your insecurities because you
really didn't have a choice in the matter. There is
not a single person who would choose to feel less
(20:46):
than or who would choose to be inadequate when given
the choice. But although you don't have control over how
your insecurity has come to be your origin story, you
do have a choice on how you use to communicate
your insecurity to your partner. Is that through sarcasm or
(21:06):
picking fights or this silent treatment, or is it about
doing what is objectively harder, but better overall, which is
being honest with them, letting them see this part of you,
this fragile element of you that is causing a lot
of that anger and sadness over the past. When this
insecurity is left unchecked, it can also reveal itself through
(21:27):
self sabotage. When we don't feel good enough, it's going
to unconsciously inform how we choose to act, manifesting in
behaviors that we know will push our partner away, like
invading their privacy, like picking fights, like continuously coming back
to this intrusive thought. We know what will come of
(21:49):
those behaviors. The outcome is predictable. They will probably leave us,
the relationship will break down, but at least in some
strange way you had to saying it. It feels like
you're bringing the control back to you by pushing them away,
rather than waiting for them to walk away based on
something that you can't predict, like past feelings about NX
(22:13):
or a relationship or whatever it is. You just truly
are trying to sabotage the relationship as a way to
not be blindsided when you believe it will inevitably come
to an end. Self sabotage has its origins and that
insecurity we were speaking about before, and it's a coping
mechanism we use to bring about a sense of agency
(22:34):
in situations where we don't feel a lot of agency
or security, but also to manage stressful situations and past trauma.
So it does go hand in hand with retroactive jealousy
quite a bit. There are a few other factors that
contribute to this form of jealousy, including a big one
an anxious attachment style. We know that that contributes to
(22:57):
a significant fear of abandonment and rejection and therefore possibly
a hyperfixation on our partner's past relationships. And then also
rejection sensitivity, being particularly perceptive and sensitive susceptible to indications
that someone is going to reject to one of which
could be of course this is not true, but it
(23:18):
could be their past, so you remain very focused on it.
I'm really trying to make this point. A lot of
this is coming from a place of fear, and fear
is all like, most of the time, very irrational and untrue.
But all of this can really take its toll, especially
for your partner as well. It's important to understand that
They can also feel a lot of the emotional consequences
(23:40):
of this. They can feel shame over their own past.
They can feel like there's nothing they can say or
do that will help you. They can be a lot
of frustration at the repetitive nature of your arguments, and
frustration that you don't believe them when they say those
people really mean nothing to them. Now, some therapist might
(24:00):
suggest to you that a bit of jealousy is helpful.
One of those people is a very renowned psychotherapist, Esther Perell.
She talks about this theory this idea in her book
Mating in Captivity, and according to her, jealousy proves to
us in our partner that we care, that we want
to stay committed to someone, and that we realize that
(24:20):
we have a good thing. So in that way, it's
very positive, because if you've never felt threatened, even at
times when you should, it might indicate that you're not
all in now. I will say that this is just
one perspective. It's not for everyone, and obviously it is
somewhat controversial at times. I, for one, do believe that
a bit of jealousy does actually affirm your trust in
(24:42):
someone and helps you realize again and again that they
will choose you. But when it's rampant, when you have
no control over it, when we are in a state
that no love or reassurance can calm us, this will
put a strain on your relationship and it could cause
you to lose a very good thing. So let's talk
about how to manage our retroactive jealousy and process all
(25:07):
the causes, the contributors that are keeping us in a
position of feeling very powerless and out of control in
our own relationship. So all of that and more after
this short break, you want your relationship to last. It
(25:28):
is important to reaffirm that as much as possible. If
you were not committed. Firstly, you probably wouldn't be listening
to this episode. You wouldn't be having these concerns because
you wouldn't be worried about having something to lose. The
thing is, though, you can't choose your partner, the person
that is the most important person in your life, based
(25:49):
on their past, because that is going to really really
limit your options and mean that you could potentially miss
out on your soulmate just because they've had a few
too many exes, They had a past, So did you,
and you need to remember that those relationships ended for
a reason. They have free will. Your partner has free will.
(26:11):
They are making the best decision for them, and that
is to be with you. They want to be here.
I always find it valuable to think about how I
feel about my own exes. Quite frankly, I want nothing
to do with them, And if that's how I feel,
why wouldn't my partner feel the same way about their past? Secondly,
would you really want to date someone who had zero
(26:33):
experience with dating with emotional intimacy, who had never experienced
love or heartbreak or what it had to teach you.
I don't necessarily think that I would. I feel like
that would be equally as strange to me to feel
like I was the one who's having to show them
everything that had to be their first love, when I'd
(26:55):
had loves in the past as well. So I think
that we always think that we would prefer something else,
the grass being greener on the other side. But actually
what you have right now is probably pretty pretty good,
and it's just the small insecurity that you're going to
have to move past. You can let yourself be ruled
(27:16):
by fear, or you can decide to just give in
to this anxiety. I find that retroactive jealousy is almost
like quicksand the more you struggle against it and suppress
your feelings, refuse to speak them out loud. The more
you fight and fight and fight against your jealousy, the
more entrenched you become, the more you sink. Instead, you
(27:37):
have to do what feels insanely kinterintuitive in the moment,
which is to just let yourself feel what you're feeling
without trying to escape from it, without trying to assign
some deeper meaning to your emotions. You are not your thoughts.
You are separate from your thoughts. Your thoughts do not
(27:58):
predict the future. You are just receiving those thoughts. You
can't control what pops into your head, and having these
thoughts doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean
that your relationship is doomed to fail. It doesn't say
anything about your relationship other than that perhaps you just
have something to work through. This is this idea of
(28:20):
cognitive diffusion, being able to look at your thoughts and
just observe them rather than panic at them. I think
that our experience with retroactive jealousy becomes a lot easier
when you just see your thoughts as just these little
things popping in to say hi, that aren't going to
hurt you, that don't mean really anything other than that
(28:41):
they just exist, that they're just background noise. You're allowed
to ignore those thoughts. You are allowed to ignore the
thoughts that are not useful for you, that are not
productive to you, and kind of accept the fact that
they are not there to help you. They are coming
from a place of insecurity, of anxiety, of overthinking, and
(29:03):
the more you feed into them, the harder it's going
to be to find a conclusion or to find an
answer that's actually going to make you feel better. It's
part of that acceptance of the fact that you're never
going to have full clarity on about your partner's past.
You can think up a million different scenarios, but none
(29:24):
of them are actually going to be true, and all
of them are probably going to make you feel a
lot worse. I just have this belief that sometimes you
do just have to have blind faith in what someone
else is saying to you. If they say you have
nothing to worry about, don't try and argue with them,
Just say Okay, yeah, I choose to believe you. I'm
(29:45):
choosing to believe you even if I don't want to,
even if my fear wants me to look for another answer.
I'm not going to look. Maybe you're lying to me.
But you know, it's about trusting that You've also got
a very good judge of care character, and you've chosen
a good person to be in your life who is
not going to lie to you, who is not going
(30:05):
to deceive you, who wants to be here with you
now in this relationship. So saying to yourself, Okay, I'm
just going to believe this person kind of lets your
anxiety and overthinking know where you stand. It shows them
that you're the boss. You have set a boundary with yourself.
You are giving yourself permission to stop ruminating. The other
biggest gift you can give yourself in those moments is
(30:27):
to eliminate any of the behavioral compulsions which you know
are going to elicit a really emotional reaction. I'm talking
about stalking their exes, stalking their old tagged photos, asking
endless questions of your partner about their ex information that
you quite frankly do not need to know. Now, I'm
(30:50):
using the word compulsion here, because that is what they are.
They are very difficult to suppress, especially when we have
perhaps gotten used to feeling an anxious thought, feeling compelled
to act in a certain way, and receiving some momentary reassurance.
But it just means that the next time you need reassurance,
the threshold is higher, and you actually aren't learning how
(31:12):
to control those unconscious spikes of jealousy. You're allowing them
to be kind of fueled by all of these behaviors
that are giving you just more information that could potentially
hurt your feelings, more information that you need to put
in and find a way to fit into your brain,
more scenarios to play with. You are just adding more
(31:34):
fuel to the fire, essentially, And we need to approach
this on a need to know basis. If it doesn't
impact your current relationship, you quite frankly don't need to know.
It's okay, you don't need to know everything. The uncertainty
that you're feeling in response to that is just a
feeling you will never know everything. So perhaps if you'll
(31:55):
never know everything, it's better to lowe to know you
know less rather than more. It's also important to remember
that your version of your partner's past might not be theirs.
You are creating this mental movie that is probably totally
different from reality, totally different to how it actually was,
(32:16):
and it is a mental image, a mental movie that
is most certainly leveraging your fears rather than the truth.
It wants to be extreme. It is extrapolating based on
limited information in a manner that our brain thinks will
protect us, but is really harming us and probably lying
(32:37):
to us as well. So it's important to counteract those
thoughts that have no evidence to them. Has your partner
given you any indication that they don't want to be
with you? No, have they ever said that they want
to get back with their ex? No, have they showed
you any indication, a reasonable indication that they wanted to
(32:59):
Probably not question the validity of your fearful thoughts. Now. Obviously,
the example that we are mostly relying on are occasions
where you actually don't have anything to worry about. I
would say though, that if there are boundaries that are
being crossed, that's giving you a reason to feel jealous
(33:20):
and to feel really terrible. If you feel like this
person that you're dating, or this person that you're with
is encouraging that reaction almost as like a self esteem
boost to them. This does not apply. Everything we've spoken
about does not apply. That person is not good for you.
You should have a serious conversation with them about why
(33:40):
they feel the need to do that, why they are
crossing boundaries that you have set for yourself, why they
are choosing to disrespect you, and find out whether that's
something that you're going to be willing to work with
them towards fixing, or whether this relationship perhaps is not
the one for you. Because some some times you realize
(34:01):
that you're actually not crazy, and I'm gonna say crazy
in quotation marks. You are not the crazy girlfriend or
the crazy partner or the crazy boyfriend. You're actually with
someone who is manipulating your emotions for their own personal
gain and for their own sense of confidence and sense
of self esteem. I've had that in the past where
(34:22):
this person liked seeing me get jealous in a weird,
twisted way because every time I got jealous, he got
the reassurance that I wanted to be with him when
I was telling him again and again and again that
I did, But the jealousy was like this extra terry
on top and it was so infuriating when I kind
(34:43):
of began to realize that that was what he was doing,
because it was not a pleasant emotion, and it was
putting such a strain on our relationship and causing us
to fight all the time, causing me to feel like
I wasn't the person I wanted to be in that relationship.
So I'm going to say an important caveat here. If
you're with someone who is deliberately creating feelings of jealousy,
(35:06):
or who is not respecting your boundaries, who is communicating
with their ex regularly and has no need to, maybe
that's not the right relationship for you. Maybe you're not
the problem in those other instances though that we were
speaking about, where it really is just a deep insecurity
and overthinking. I would say, try not to involve your
(35:29):
partner too much in helping you to solve this problem,
in helping you to address your retroactive jealousy. They can,
of course be a teammate, but they can't be your coach,
because then we often become too overly reliant on their
reassurance rather than actually addressing the root cause of this problem,
which is that past trauma. Perhaps maybe that lack of
(35:53):
security in your relationship. That insecurity, the overthinking, the self sabotage,
those are all things that your partner actually can't help
you with. You will have to do that on your own,
and putting too much pressure on them to constantly make
you feel better only just exacerbates and continues the cycle
of retroactive jealousy, never actually causing you to pull yourself
(36:16):
out of that thought pattern and think about the why
rather than the current present moment and the what, and
thinking about what can make you feel better? Why not
think about how can I stop this from occurring in
the first place. Perhaps that is really going to therapy
and breaking down the content of those harmful memories from
(36:40):
the past. What wounds are you carrying from past relationships
that are showing up in your current relationship. Maybe that
is focusing on working on your own insecurity. Why don't
you feel adequate? Is it because you have never felt
particularly confident about your body? Is it because you lack
the same amat of experience as this person? Is it
(37:02):
because you feel like you're not in their league or
some other made up idea or basis for weighing and
judging attractiveness instead of focusing on those things, and this
is such a basic introduction to addressing insecurity that requires
a whole episode of its own. But instead of focusing
(37:25):
on all the ways that you may not be as
good as their ex, that they may be better than you,
that they may be deserving of more, focus on what
you're amazing at. You are excellent at something, I'm sure
of it. You excel at many things. There is a
reason that this person has chosen you, even if you
are struggling to see it right now. You have so
(37:47):
much love to give. You are such a generous person.
I'm sure that you are very very kind, or I
would like to assume so very intelligent. There are so
many attributes that I think we nor because we want
to pretend that we're humble, or because we don't want
to feel immodest or arrogant, and really that can actually
(38:08):
just contribute to us not feeling like we have any
value at all. Get back in touch with the things
that make you unique, an interesting, and incredible and worthy
of love, such that you don't need to be comparing
yourself to this person's ex or their past feelings or
situationships because you are wholly confident that what you have
(38:31):
is better, what you have with them is better. Now,
I think that's all we have time for today. I
really hope that this episode has provided you with something
to think about, has helped you if you are dealing
with retroactive jealousy. I didn't want to approach this with
too much shame, because I know sometimes we can really
(38:52):
get confused when it comes to this form of jealousy
and think that it means that we're possessive, or that
where all these number of bad things, when actually I
do just think that it comes from a lot of
hurt that we need to heal. Retroactive jealousy is just
a sign of some internal damage or some internal insecurity
(39:12):
that our mind is calling on us to address. So
I'm sending you a lot of love. This is a
lot more common than you think. So you are not
alone in this feeling. You're not a bad person because
you ruminate on somebody else's past, But you do have
a responsibility to yourself and to your relationship, to your partner,
to the person that you want to be with. To
(39:32):
get to the root cause of why this is occurring,
it will take hard work. It will take a lot
of honesty and vulnerability. But once you do that, I
think you eradicate a lot of the negativity that is
making you feel shameful about yourself or making you feel
making you question the state of your relationship. So thank
(39:52):
you so much for listening. If there is someone that
you believe needs to hear this episode, please feel free
to share it with them and leave a five star
review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now.
If you have an episode suggestion, this episode was actually
an episode suggestion, please feel free to message me at
that Psychology podcast on Instagram or you can follow me
(40:17):
at genis Bak if you have any ideas for upcoming episodes, topics,
anything you want us to discuss, and we will be
back next week with another episode.
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