Did you see what I did there? I know, I am such a smart @rse, aren’t I?
I go around complaining about all those ill-conceived, unimaginative headlines written by sub-standard journalists such as “you are feeling sleepy” and “look into my eyes” when writing about hypnosis and hypnotherapy… And I have punned the usual pun as an in-road to my topic today… I don’t think Ireally needed to explain that to you though, did I?
So what am I writing about today? Let’s have ‘The King’ explain:
We can’t go on together… With suspicious minds…
That stuff that takes up residence in the pit of your tummy and gnaws away at your heart. It lurks behind the false smile that some people force onto their faces in front of colleagues, friends and family. It tends to breathes fire into potential happiness and dissipates it into steam. As Iago warned Othello, “It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”
The recent movie “Precious” is a story that hinges on the jealousy of a mother who believes her young daughter stole “her man” from her. The fact that a 16-year-old girl, pregnant for the second time by her father, was sexually abused by him from the time she was a young child, was irrelevant to the family dynamic. Mary, the mother, could only feel rage and resentment about losing his love to her child. Mary’s fear of losing him prevented her from stopping the abuse. The psychological processes at play are extremely complex in such an example.
In fairy tales, the villain is frequently the stepmother, whose desire to win the husband/father’s affection is the motivation for her cruelty. She is the wicked woman who gives Snow White the poisoned apple, the one who keeps Cinderella in rags and won’t let her go to the ball. The girl who is seen as a threat is given the most demeaning work possible and treated like dirt, much as Mary makes Precious feel worthless in the recent film. As added cruelty, Mary force-feeds Precious, hoping her overly abundant fat will keep her father/lover away.
The reason jealousy is such a pervasive theme in fiction is because it is so pervasive in our lives.
Beware the green-eyed monster. Jealousy kills love. It made Cain murder Abel. It can murder your happiness.
Psychologists often distinguish between jealousy-the desire to keep what one has-and envy, the desire for what someone else has. Jealousy fears loss, envy longs for what it doesn’t have. But in fact we feel both in much the same way. And both hinge on not being happy with ourselves as we are. As the writer Joan Didion said, “To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.”
Jealousy is a severe form of destructive self-hypnosis… It rattles around in our minds and persists and grows.
Find your own truth, acknowledge what it is you’re really jealous about, and you will find the road that leads to true happiness… I recommend that we celebrate people who excel and live happily and look beautiful and have lots of money and as such it tends to open us to happiness and well-being rather than eating us up.
Build your self-esteem, be supportive instead of destructive, develop your own skills as a human being (I recommend self-hypnosis) and enjoy the world. I am running my hypnotherapy diploma this weekend and need to get more homework marked, have a good one yourself 🙂
