Hi I’m Angela and this video is on jealousy.

I’ve got a few videos that are dealing with ancient emotions. One of them is called lust. And this is jealousy the next one of my favorites, like ice cream flavors. Jealousy is one of the ancient emotions that come from the ancient mind, this means humans even before they have been incarnated, from the dawn of time, and homosapien’s original emotional brain development had jealousy.

If we look at homosapiens as a tribe, tribal situations were better for individuals to survive because humans lived in tribes and worked harmoniously, they were able to procreate and produce more and more of the species until it’s like 7 billion now. Harmony works great for humans to profit and to grow. Jealousy was always a part of that.

So how can we combine jealousy and harmony and think that that’s all cool?

If we have harmony there’s one thing that’s required in order to create harmony and it’s often conflict, so jealousy has been a part of that. But if we look at jealousy in terms of the body in terms of sexuality and in terms of male/female bonding, it was also a way of controlling your partner.

So the psyche of humans when they became tribal was that how could you actually keep your mate? How could you actually know that your mate was going to be yours and not go off. And in some cultures you may know that that has been worked out differently. In some traditional cultures there’s some women that have five husbands and that still operates in some parts of the planet. Different tribes have different tribal setups. Monogamy is not the only system, however monogamy as we know has and the dominant expected system and that was because it managed one of these primal emotions: jealousy.

If we look at jealousy it’s also an emotion that stirs up a lot of how you appear in the tribe. So if you have a partner that chooses someone else what’s your status then you still their partner are you also equal to them are you actually going to have the same privileges rights, same sleeping space, same home or shelter and same access to resources.

So jealousy is so ancient because it’s about “what mine is mine” and “it’s going to stay mine”.

If we look at sexual intimacy it is also about that body that you may be commingled with is “yours” at a feeling and emotional level as well. The limbic brain puts out a lot of hormones when you make love. It is that bonding that happens and it is that feeling and need and desire that it remains because it is a safe feeling.

So the jealousy that we experience is something in our culture that is really not well discussed. It is not handled. It is put off into boxes like: there “should” be a certain response, there “should” be a certain behavior and there “should” be a certain right and a certain wrong. And some of you may get that it just doesn’t work like that. Yes of course if you have been violated, it’s very hard to move that emotion and I empathize with you because I have experienced it and it took me a very long time to recover from that. And the irony in my case was that my partner who did cheat on me actually still wanted to be in a relationship with me, which I didn’t understand. But from his point of view it made sense. There was a sense to it. He did try to explain it to me; we just weren’t on the same system of values or the same way of perceiving a relationship, a bonded relationship.

So that’s where jealousy has often conflicted. It’s so primal, that your go-to response goes to that primal “my needs are going to be taken from me”: my safety, where I sleep, where I live, where I share my resources and if you have kids, it is even more threatening and that gets triggered.

And then if we look at modern relationships where the boundaries have changed a lot, it also feels like well “what are your values of relationship because these are mine and I thought we were on the same

Wavelength” and now the values have been shifted. Or if you went into a committed relationship you agreed with the values, one partner might change. And there you feel like “you’re not who I met” or “you’re not being what we agreed to agree to and therefore I don’t know who you are and I don’t feel safe”.

So jealousy today has been really triggered a lot because people have to question whether they really want to go into a long lifetime committed partnership. Considering also now a lot of people in the planet are living a lot longer. Monogamy or committed relationships used to be 20 to 30 years, now they are 50-plus years, so that’s a long time if you want to be committed and some people are more than able or willing. But if both partners aren’t, it means that there might be a challenge to your value system as well and your identity of what you are committing to, not just what a relationship is, but are you prepared to commit to this person for that length of time.

I’m not saying that we need to create fluid model. But we do need to understand if we are going to manage jealousy that it is a primal emotion and from that place it needs to be given a lot of space to hear itself, to heal any feelings that are hurt and then to really sit when you can after the intensity of the emotions has got to a place where it is bearable, really look at what are you committing to: if you are going to be with the person or if you’re not.