Develop Healthy Coping Skills

The emotion of jealousy is triggered by something seemingly insignificant. You will need to think back to the time when you started feeling jealous. What were the circumstances? It may be that your partner actually broke your trust by telling you a white lie or spending more money than they had originally stated. Small lies of this nature might not seem important, but they open the door to negative thinking. At the time, you didn’t want to address the lie because of how minor it was. But in your head, you have started thinking, What else have they lied about? And thus, the vicious cycle begins. You may be projecting your insecurities onto your partner. Or, you might feel envious of their success, but that could be because you know your partner is competing with you, and every time they have a win, they rub it in your face. Whatever the reasons, when you look at jealousy as a solution and work backward to find the trigger that set things off for you, you can be confident that jealousy in your relationship will soon become a thing of the past. How do you react when you start feeling jealous? Do you aggressively confront your partner? Start sneaking around and looking through his belongings? Or maybe you isolate yourself and refuse to speak to your partner? Negative coping skills are common in people with an insecure attachment style because you’ve never been taught how to deal with your emotions in a healthy way. Here are some healthy coping skills that will help you handle your jealousy more productively. Cognitive reframing is a technique used by therapists to transform a person’s perspective.

Don't Pass Me By

Let’s say your partner has gone out with friends and you are sitting at home thinking the worst. He’s probably hitting on other women, He’s probably buying girls drinks, He’s probably gone home with someone. In psychology, this type of thinking is referred to as catastrophizing. It means that you’re always thinking the worst when a situation takes place. When you are so used to thinking a certain way, it’s easy to convince yourself that there’s no other way of looking at the situation. Cognitive reframing gets you to ask yourself questions that will put you in a different frame of mind. In the case of your partner going out for drinks with his friends, you could ask yourself, Have I ever heard that he was out buying drinks for other girls? Assuming the answer is no, you can then ask, so why would he start now? Now, you are done reasoning the most noticeably terrible, however helping yourself to remember every one of the reasons why you can confide in him. Validate your emotions. Even though the aim is to overcome jealousy, you don’t try to invalidate or deny your feelings either. This will take you right back to square one. Remember, you developed an insecure attachment style because you were forced to bury your emotions. To overcome jealousy or any other negative emotion, you’ve got to confront them.

It Takes A Lot To Laugh

Validation means that you acknowledge you are experiencing the emotion of jealousy. You can do this by saying to yourself, I am jealous because my partner is out, and I am afraid that he is flirting with other women. I recognize that when I feel desirous, I envision that the most noticeably terrible will occur, yet actually, I don’t have the foggiest idea of what is happening. Speak to yourself kindly when you start feeling the emotion of jealousy. He’s invested so much in this relationship, and he’s not about to ruin it now. By zeroing in on the positive parts of your relationship, you are addressing yourself such that it helps your certainty as opposed to destroying it. A crucial area in learning to improve your own relationship is to understand your existing relationship. It is impossible to know what to improve in your relationship if you don’t know your own relationship’s weaknesses and areas of improvement. Different types of relationships require different strategies to improve, so identifying your relationship type is crucial in improving it all together. We all know that it’s important to take in and understand your partner’s emotions. However, we often forget that we must take our emotions into consideration as well. Most of us are so used to paying attention to other people’s feelings that we don’t know how to listen to our emotions.

A Satisfied Mind

When you build an understanding of what your needs are in a relationship, you can better understand what your relationship needs in general. Knowing how to listen to your feelings is important in having a healthy relationship. For many people, this is a challenge. We live in a world where looking inward and getting in touch with the deeper parts of yourself is not as valued as distracting yourself is. This is due in large part to the media and consumerism, where we are constantly bombarded with information, so tuning out of all of this feels nice. Also, we are being sold means of distraction everywhere we go. Searching internally and connecting with your sentiments will take practice however once you become accustomed to it, it will get simpler. If you are unable to understand your feelings, it will prove not easy to understand the feelings of your partner, even if they put them into words for you. Once you have some understanding of the feelings that you experience, you will be able to relate to someone when they tell you that they are feeling anxious for example, as you may have felt this emotion or something similar as you explored your emotions. You can observe their body language, facial expressions, and the things they have been saying to you in the conversation, combined with them telling you that they are feeling sad to determine that they may be feeling dejected or depressed. What do you think your partner needs to change about themselves to help develop your ideal relationship?