This was a subject that came up when my family gathered after the death of a relative. We had not seen each other for years, and my siblings sat down and talked quite a bit during the funeral arrangements. What transpired was very interesting indeed. People carry negativity from childhood throughout their lives. Some manage to get beyond that negativity, but for others, it sticks, and it’s very destructive to the relationship among siblings, and it may all be totally unnecessary.
For instance, I always thought my sister was the favorite. It turned out that she always thought I was. She told me how, as the eldest, she was always pushed harder. She had a mother and father who had never parented before, so they read all the books and pushed her in directions that were not always easy for her. She succeeded in life, but she always had this jealousy in her mind for her younger sisters. I asked why. It didn’t seem to make sense, and what transpired was that she thought that the younger kids had experienced an easier time of it because our parents were more experienced as parents and didn’t push the younger ones so much. It’s an interesting situation because each child carried jealousy with him or her through adulthood and had these misconceptions about life as it was. Every single person sees life through his or her individual viewpoint. I saw my life as being lived in her shadow. She saw her life as being harder and remembered leaving home because she couldn’t stand it anymore.
Often, you need to reverse the jealousy to make sense of it. If you feel jealous of sibling for being more talented than you are, imagine how you would feel in her shoes. She is talented, so everyone expects more of her. To add to that, she has jealous brothers and sisters who throw negative vibes in her direction. That’s not very fair, is it?
Now imagine that your brother wins the affection of someone you like. This could be a friend whom you are now forced to see less because of your brother’s attention to her. It could be someone you fancied but never had the courage to ask out. Jealousy in a situation such as this makes the situation worse. You feel:
“He is taking away my friend,” or “He has taken away my chances.”
The fact of the matter is that your sibling has simply gone on and done something in his life that you see as affecting you. He didn’t do it to bug you. He didn’t do it because he doesn’t love you. He did it because opportunity opened the door, and he entered. Now imagine yourself in his place when you start to criticize:
“You spend too much time with her and not enough with me.”
“You only asked her out because you knew I wanted to.”
The problem is that jealous people believe the world revolves around them. They couldn’t see beyond that. If you did accuse your brother of either of these, you would alienate him even further, and that’s even more destructive and gets a worse result because the likelihood is that your jealousy will put more distance between you and helps no one.
There are always consequences to jealousy. You make yourself feel even less important than you are and become wretched in your thoughts. If you voice the jealousy, you then have to live with all the regrets of what you said and become smaller in the mind of the person you criticized.
For people who have jealousy aimed at them, there are also consequences. They feel stifled. They feel that you are trying to push them into a corner where you want them to be, and they will resist that because it’s a natural feeling to want to reject that kind of behavior. Jealousy is completely counter-productive to any relationship.
It really is time for you to understand what it feels like when someone is jealous. If you find jealous feelings coming into your mind, imagine your friend or love saying what you feel to you, and understand that there are consequences that are always negative.
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