Breaking patterns of obsessive jealousy isn’t easy, but well worth it. Here’s how…
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Many of us have been a little jealous in relationships—of a girlfriend flirting with a guy in a bar, or a husband going to lunch with a beautiful work colleague—but there’s a form of relationship jealousy out there that, bizarrely, is focused on people from the past rather than the present.
At it’s worst I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I’d think about was my girlfriend having sex with another guy.
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I’d like to share with you an experience I went through not so long ago involving this lesser-known form of anxiety called “retroactive jealousy”. Retroactive jealousy is a term not everyone’s heard of, but many people in relationships find themselves afflicted by. Simply put, it’s a mix of emotions including not only jealousy, but also anger, fear, and judgment concerning a partner’s past love and/or sex life.
These feelings are manifested in an OCD-like repetition of thoughts and images in the mind, usually involving a partner having a great time with an ex-lover. At it’s worst I was waking up in the morning and the first thing I’d think about was my girlfriend having sex with another guy. And then throughout the day, no matter what I’d try, I couldn’t get the images and feelings of betrayal, anxiety and judgment out of my head until I went to bed. Trust me, it wasn’t much fun…
How did I end up suffering from retroactive jealousy in the first place? Five years ago I met a wonderful girl (Let’s call her Emma) who’s now my wife. We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks when, one Friday night, she received a call at 2:00 a.m. waking us up. Turns out the caller was one of those dreaded “friend-with-benefits”—a guy she’d been casually sleeping with for the past six months.
I shrugged it off at the time, but when over the coming months this guy was joined by four other gentlemen wondering if she was up for some more bedroom aerobics, my mind struggled to cope with the thought of Emma having participated in so much casual bed-hopping right before we met.
I took to the internet and soon discovered I appeared to be suffering from what’s known as “retroactive jealousy”.
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Looking back now I realize how judgmental and silly I was being, but at the time images of Emma with these five guys—hanging out with them at parties, leading them up the stairs to her bedroom, having sex, (especially having sex)—began whirring around my head on an almost permanent loop. Not only that but Emma’s refusal to break all contact with one guy in particular really hit me hard. It felt like she was putting this “douchebag of a guy” over our relationship. The days passed in growing torment and, struggling to work out what was going on with my brain, I took to the internet and soon discovered I appeared to be suffering from what’s known as “retroactive jealousy”.
Here are some of the delightful symptoms:
Obsessive OCD-like thought patterns? CHECK.
Constant trawling of the internet looking for a cure? CHECK
Quizzing my partner about her past and starting arguments? CHECK
Living in a state of confusion wondering how to stop it all? CHECK
This went on and on, with no end in sight. For months I couldn’t understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling—the past is in the past, right? And the more I tried to stop being so hung up about my girlfriend’s sexual history, the worse I felt.
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The problem with retroactive jealousy is that intellectually I knew that the past doesn’t matter and that Emma had no desire whatsoever to hook up with any of these guys again, but emotionally my mind was unable to let it go. Platitudes I’d read online or hear from friends like “The past has made her who she is today”, or the extremely helpful “Just get over it”, really didn’t do a thing because my mind was working on an emotional level, not an intellectual one.
But I was determined to beat it, and beat it I did, after a very long and arduous struggle. If you’re also suffering from the unfathomable pain caused by retroactive jealousy, here are my top three tips you can use to help alleviate it:
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Work On Your Self-Confidence
It’s important to realize that it’s impossible to suffer from retroactive jealousy if we’re fully confident in ourselves. So, to tackle any self-confidence issues means to tackle jealousy issues. Is there something specific you can pinpoint as a cause of your insecurity? Write down all the ways you feel inadequate somehow, what you don’t respect about yourself, all the ways you judge yourself, and all the things you wish you were.
Anything you write down is what needs to be tackled head on, through action. Once you do, you’ll find your retroactive jealousy begin to feel more insignificant the more confident you become.
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Take The 30 Day Challenge
There are three specific things that sufferers of retroactive jealousy do which serves to fuel the condition—dwell on the past, quiz partners, and trawl the internet looking for answers. Starting today, make a commitment to stop all three for one month. No exception.
Whenever you feel the urge to succumb, make it a personal challenge to redirect your mind’s attention onto something else that fully engages it and just STOP. You can do it if you really try. Give it thirty days and see how you feel.
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Learn How To Meditate
I was never one for anything remotely “new-agey” like yoga, meditation, herbal tea, etc. but I have to say I found learning how to meditate to be probably the most beneficial skill I learnt in overcoming retroactive jealousy. This is because it taught me how to simply observe my negative thoughts about my girlfriend’s past and not identify with them emotionally.
Meditation is the art of learning how to see how our ego and all the unhelpful, destructive emotions caused by it, like jealousy, anger, fear, judgment etc., are, in reality, just illusions. When we meditate we reach a place of observing our emotions and seeing them for what they are—products of our egoic minds, rather than our “true” selves.
I suggest Googling “guided meditation” and starting with that to get you on the right track. Sitting in silence for ten or twenty minutes a day and simply observing the world around you, including your thoughts and emotions, will work wonders in helping to cure your retroactive jealousy.
Thanks for reading and I hope that if you’re a sufferer of retroactive jealousy, you manage to get over it a lot quicker than I did!
How about this…dump your girlfriend. The bigger problem is breaking up with a girl because you (I) can’t deal with the retroactive jealousy. The issue isn’t that she’s not a virgin. It’s that she’s a whore with a promiscuous past and way more “experience” than I have. When I’ve been with 7 women, including her, and she’s been with 40+ dudes. I cannot. I can’t. I won’t.
This, this, this.
Pretty hypocritical calling someone a beta when you’ve only slept with 7 women. LMAO.