The Psychology of your 20s - 174. Retroactive jealousy

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Feeling jealous over our partners past can feel highly irrational, but its still a feeling many of us have and contributes to a lot of obsessive and unhealthy behaviours like stalking their exes, asking intrusive questions, starting arguments in hopes of getting the reassurance we need. In today's episode, we talk about the psychology of retroactive jealousy, including its origins and how to move past your jealous feelings. We will talk about:  How past relationships and trauma create jealousy Overthinking and anxiety  Rejection sensitivity  Self sabotage  Interrupting mental compulsions  Listen now!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg  Follow The Psychology of your 20s on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, whatever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we dive into the psychology of our 20s. I have a super fascinating topic for you all today. One that has been on my mind quite a lot recently and on my list for some time as well, but I've never really gotten around to talking about it until now. Today is the day we are going to be talking about that kind of sickening feeling of retroactive jealousy, feeling jealous over your partner's past, the people they used to date, the sex they had before you, the love they felt with other people, feeling like their past has some impact.

some influence on your current or your future together. This kind of jealousy feels like a reaction that neither of you can control because it's about something that your person, your partner, can't undo. You also can't undo it. The past is the past. And before they met you, it's this weird reality where how could they have predicted that they would end up in this relationship and not the one that they had before? I think that retroactive jealousy is particularly fascinating because normally jealousy occurs in response

to present day actions or feeling threatened by a current relationship, current words, current behaviours, but with retroactive jealousy, the actions that you are concerned about normally occurred before they even knew you existed. So it's really confusing and our rational brain normally understands how logical it is to hold our partners past over them, but there is this emotional and I would say vulnerable, often insecure part about ourselves that can't help it. It's a compulsion. It's this unconscious feeling and fear that maybe what they had before is better than what

they have now. They know it. They're aware, but you don't. They're having all these private thoughts that you can never fully understand. And that sense that they're a secret. or there is something you can't control in your relationship results in a lot of unhealthy behaviors. You know, comparison, compulsive snooping, especially online on social media, picking fights, sabotaging the relationship, sarcasm, wanting your partner to constantly prove themselves again and

again and again and again that they want you, that the past doesn't matter. When in reality it is still a part of who they are, we have to accept that everything we may feel jealous of, is actually what has brought us together. How could you be where you are right now without all those things having happened? And in a sense, you have those past relationships to be grateful for, but because you are so appreciative of the love you have currently,

and you believe it's so worth protecting, we don't see that for what it is. It's definitely a labyrinth at times, and it's really hard to navigate because a secondary component of this is that we feel a lot of shame. And when we experience shame, this really causes us to suppress the emotion. When we suppress, we know this time and time again.

Avoidance means that this emotion, this feeling is only going to come back with a vengeance because you haven't properly processed it. So let's talk about how you can actually process your retroactive jealousy today, why it occurs, understanding its origins and what we can do about. it before it ends up perhaps undermining or destroying something really, really precious and really, really good. To begin, retroactive jealousy occurs when we feel threatened by our partner's past romantic relationships. Now, that threat doesn't have to be real. This can be for no reason at all, which I think is actually the most common instance where this occurs. There can be times where

this jealousy is triggered by something like an ex reaching back out or some of, some comment or action by your partner that makes you believe they're not fully over this person in the past. But most of the time, I would say the source of our jealousy is internal. It has to do with an internal cue or an internal fear or an internal insecurity that we haven't quite yet expressed or aren't ready to really think about. There are times when you deserve to be jealous. And I think there are times when you deserve to not just be jealous, but angry if your partner does do something to betray your trust. But when it comes to retroactive jealousy, that's not really what we're talking about. Because the things that we are struggling with,

the things that we feel negative emotions towards are things that are so far in the past that it is not entirely fair to blame your partner. Jealousy is a painful emotion, though, and most of us hate to admit that we've ever felt it, because in many ways I think we conflate jealousy with possessiveness. And we don't want this other person to feel like we are trying to control them or that we don't trust them. You know, I think that that's the really difficult thing is because jealousy, although it's natural, is also very villainized. And it also normally triggers a lot of secondary emotions that we are taught to feel a lot of shame towards to really keep underwraps. things like rage, insecurity, self-doubt, embarrassment.

And so when we don't have a healthy way of understanding those emotions, it can lead us to project a lot of that anger and insecurity onto our partner, which they probably don't deserve. I think it's so interesting to think of how many relationships could have been saved if people had just had an open conversation about how they were feeling, if they had just been honest about the emotions and the reactions that so many people had told them to be embarrassed about. And because they feel so embarrassed about them, they therefore have no other option other than to come out in other ways that society sometimes says is more acceptable, or society says is less possessive or less crazy. when actually the main emotion here, this jealousy is never addressed and will continue to carry on

into other relationships. It's not about the person you're dating. It's about the feeling that you don't have a good grasp on. So some of the key signs that you're experiencing retroactive jealousy are as follows. You ruminate and repeatedly think about your partner's ex or past relationships and you feel incredibly envious when they talk about it. You either don't want to talk about it. You don't want to hear a thing. Even if it's an important part of their past or alternatively, you might frequently ask a lot of intrusive questions about what the sex was like when they said they loved each other for the first time, details of every single element of their relationship, because you feel like if you know this stuff, it's going to be comforting, that it's actually going to make that

feeling a lot worse. You also might continuously compare yourself to their past partners, both physically, but then also in terms of emotionally as well and thinking, what did this person give them that maybe I can't? You wonder what they feel like they're missing, even if they've given you no indication that they are feeling this way. You doubt your partner. You begin to fill in what they're saying with your own version of the truth, a version of the truth that is based on your insecurity that is based on your kind of negative impression of past events when it might actually not have been that way at all, right? And additionally, you lash out as a way to look for reassurance. If you start fights and if you are accusatory, sometimes we have this false belief

that how our partner reacts in response is going to make us feel better. Either they will reaffirm your beliefs or disprove them. And therefore it acts as its own form. of reassurance, right? You know, fights always have to have either the, like always have a conclusion, right? Either you end the relationship, you break up, or your partner says enough to you, says something to you that's going to make you feel better. Both of those offer a conclusion to your jealousy in the moment that you may not have been getting elsewhere. You might also find that you experience a decline in your self-confidence as a result, which we never want to see that, because when you don't feel fully yourself with your partner, your connection is going to suffer.

You know, they had a history before you, as unfortunate as it is, we don't all immediately find the one on our first tribe, but I'm sure that you also had a history. You also had a past before them. And all of those past relationships that you had obviously ended for a reason. And that is the same for them. They are with you for a reason. You have to trust that being with you is what they see is the best thing for them, the same way you feel about that. The same way that you wouldn't be in this relationship is if it wasn't good, if you didn't value it. You have to trust that your partner is able to make the best decision for them, the same way that you make the best decisions for you.

Like I said before, it's hard not to let retroactive jealousy get in the way because it does bring a lot of associated shame. And as humans, we are also very protective of our heart. love is a very delicate emotion. It's a very special thing and it's very rare. And so we naturally have an instinctive reaction to be quite defensive and vigilant to outside threats that might jeopardize this valuable thing. And truly, I get it. But it's also really valuable to understand where that comes from. So we're going to talk through four explanations here, past trauma and relationship experiences, overthinking, insecurity, including rejection sensitivity, and finally,

self-sabotage. Those are the main reasons or the main factors that contribute to frequent retroactive jealousy. I also want to dispel the idea that if you struggle with feeling jealous about your partner's past, you are somehow toxic or possessive or a bad person, because although I do think that jealousy can reach a very noxious point, I would say that the majority of people are not like this. They are just managing a complex interaction between their anxiety, insecurity, vulnerability, and a host of other factors. And they never act on it in a way that is meant to harm who they are with. They are just confused by emotions that they may not have felt before and are looking for reassurance. So let's talk about where retroactive jealousy comes from.

We're going to start by looking into past relationship trauma. If you have been hurt in the past by a previous partner, perhaps cheating, whether that was emotional or physical, maybe not respecting your boundaries when it came to their communication with an ex, or being unfaithful in some way, it's hard to not bring this previous experience into your new relationship. Trust is a very fragile thing, and once broken, it's very hard to repair. And that doesn't always just apply to the relationship in which the betrayal of trust occurred. Those wounds carry on with us and they can become apparent in our future relationships. That is because those experiences have, in a way, unconsciously taught us something about what it means to be loved and what it means to be in love.

Even if those lessons are an anomaly or aren't correct, our brain is taking on this past information as a way to help teach it what to do in future instances like this to avoid being hurt. that is especially the case when those experiences are very emotionally salient or painful. If you have been cheated on, if it was happening for months behind your back, our brain pays more attention to the content of these memories to avoid a similar pain from occurring in the future. And what this creates is a type of hypervigilance in which you are constantly on alert for any cues or suggestions or indications that you can be heard again. So in psychology, hypervigilance is basically just being more attuned to information in our

environment that might confirm our fears. And it's often a sign of a dysregulated nervous system, but also traumatic events in the past or in severe cases, PTSD. And it causes us to interpret the information that we're being given in a different way in a way that wants us to be able to almost predict a threat. So when your new partner does something that anyone else would see a super normal, like take a phone call outside or text on their phone on the other side of the room or recount some story of an ex. You apply a different meaning to their actions and you interpret that something must be wrong that you have a reason to feel jealous. And if you can't find a present day reason for this, you might look to their past for an explanation. And what emerges is

retroactive jealousy. It's important to note here that your mind is just trying to protect you. It's trying to do what it does best, which is to avoid pain, both the physical and the emotional type. But sometimes it also jumps to conclusions with limited information. And a lot of that processing of information is based on biases and disqualification. And distortions that you have developed from past experiences. So cognitive biases are essentially a way in which we process information based on how we've learnt things in the past. So it is honest, it's like an abnormal way of seeing things that isn't based in reality. So the particular bias that we're thinking of here is known as selective perception bias whereby our expectations. We're by our expectations,

determine what we actually end up seeing. And what we tend to miss is all the other information that is telling us we have nothing to worry about. We don't always think about the reassurance. All the moments that our partner has told us that they do love us, that they want to be with us, the little things they do for us. Instead, the focus remains on the past because that is where we see the danger as being.

that is where we see there being perhaps a threat to our relationship. And it's important to remember that a lot of this anxiety and worry is irrational. And also just a natural reaction to uncertainty and putting yourself in a position where you know you could get hurt. That's really what it is at the end of the day. Like love provides a lot of opportunity to get seriously heartbroken. And that is something that none of us are going to opt into. none of us want to feel.

And so all of these thoughts, all of this jealousy is really just a way for you to ensure that you could predict if that was going to happen and to be on the lookout for any signs of danger to your relationship. I think though part of love, however, is that you just have to trust this other person won't do that. And trusting them also deepens the bond in many ways. So the second major reason that we tend to experience retrogressions. act of jealousy is related to overthinking. A lot of individuals who are naturally very anxious

also have the tendency to overthink and ruminate on things beyond their control, because the very act of thinking about these things repetitively brings about a sense of false security. If we can imagine every possible situation, everything our partner is not telling us every way we might not be as good as the ex, every way that they might want more, we can prepare ourselves for when those fears inevitably are proven true. Even though we know that they probably never will. That's not the point, right? We don't actually want the thoughts and the fears to come true, but we just want to be prepared just in case they do. O overthinking really plays a big part in the obsessive nature of retroactive jealousy

because there will never be a conclusion or an answer that is going to satisfy us whilst we are in that thought spiral, because as soon as one door closes, another one will open. That is the nature of overthinking. Normally, I would say in someone's brain, what mindy-coa is that a thought pops into your head, one of the millions, perhaps billions of thoughts that we have in a day. But this one feels really scary because it's about someone that you care about. It may be a thought like, does my boyfriend find,

me as attractive as his ex. Now, most people can dismiss this thought and realize that it's fear-based and irrational and just be like, yeah, of course he does. And even if he doesn't, that's not my problem. Like, whatever, it's okay. I know that we're in love. I know that we're okay. But if you are a natural overthinker, any thought of this kind that has that emotional magnitude behind it requires close examination because you aren't comfortable unless you know for a fact that it's untrue. So you obsess on it, you let it simmer, which causes the thought spiral to continue. What you're really struggling with is the uncertainty. There is so much about a relationship that you can't control.

You can't control someone's private thoughts, you can't control their feelings, and you definitely can't control their past. This acknowledgement breeds a lot of insecurity, a lot of instability, and it can also culminate in something that we call retroactive OCD, a type of honestly obsessive compulsive disorder that involves becoming super overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts of a partner's past such that we can't even control their frequency, their quantity, their intensity. We don't want to feel this way and the more you struggle against it, the louder some of those thoughts become because they gain a lot more

power over you. It may also have to do with a level of personal insecurity, perhaps insecurity about your value as a partner, your attractiveness, your intelligence, your past sexual experience. I see this a lot with partners where one partner has had more sexual partners than the other. It feels like because they have more comparison points, because maybe they've had more casual sex, they've had more experience, whatever it may be, that this other person can't live up to what they had in the past and therefore they can't be the best. So they'll always, this other person will always want something more than them. They'll want something better. And that is what really breeds this jealousy. Now, this is entirely untrue. What's actually happening here is that we are experiencing

a deflation in our self-esteem based on something someone else can't even control, i.e. a past event. And we are using that event. We're using our partner's past as almost a projection of, of how we're feeling deep inside, which is that we're not feeling amazing, we're searching for a reason why we're not feeling amazing, and when it comes to our partner's X, that feels like the perfect point to diffuse all of our insecurity. A study published by the American Psychological Association actually found a pretty significant link between jealousy and low self-esteem, especially when it comes to sexual jealousy. Here's the thing. I don't think that you should be ashamed of your insecurities because you really didn't have a choice in the matter. There is not a

single person who would choose to feel less than or who would choose to be inadequate when given the choice. But although you don't have control over how your insecurity has come to be, your origin story, you do have a choice on how you choose to communicate your insecurity to your partner. is that through sarcasm or picking fights or the silent treatment or is it about doing what is objectively harder but better overall which is being honest with them letting them see this part of you this fragile element of you that is causing a lot of that anger and sadness over the past when this insecurity is left unchecked it can also reveal itself through self-sabotage when we don't feel good enough this can unconsciously inform how we choose to act

manifesting in behaviors that we know will push our partner away, like invading their privacy, like picking fights, like continuously coming back to this intrusive thought. We know what will come of those behaviors. The outcome is predictable. They will probably leave us. The relationship will break down. But at least in some strange way, you had a say in it. It feels like you're bringing the consistent.

control back to you by pushing them away rather than waiting for them to walk away based on something that you can't predict like past feelings about an ex or a relationship or whatever it is. You just truly are trying to sabotage the relationship as a way to not be blindsided when you believe it will inevitably come to an end. Self-sabotage has its origins and that insecurity we were speaking about before and it's a coping mechanism we use to bring about a sense of agency in situations where we don't feel a lot of agency or security, but also to manage stressful situations and past trauma. So it does go hand in hand with retroactive jealousy quite a bit. There are a few other factors that contribute to this form of jealousy, including a big one,

an anxious attachment style. We know that that contributes to a significant fear of abandonment and rejection and therefore possibly a hyperfixation on our partner's past relationships. And then also rejection sensitivity, being particularly perceptive and sensitive, susceptible to indications that someone is going to reject you, one of which could be, of course, this is not true, but it could be their past. So you remain very focused on it. I'm really trying to make this point. A lot of this is coming from a place of fear, and fear is most of the time very irrational and untrue. But all of this can really take its toll, especially for your partner as well, it's important to understand that they can also feel

a lot of the emotional consequences of this. They can feel shame over their own past. They can feel like there's nothing they can say or do that will help you. They can be a lot of frustration at the repetitive nature of your arguments. And frustration that you don't believe them when they say those people really mean nothing to them now. Some therapists might suggest to you that a bit of jealousy is helpful. One of those people is a very renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel. She talks about this theory, this idea in her book, mating in captivity, and according to her jealousy, proves to us and our partner that we care, that we want to stay committed to someone, and that we realize that we have a good thing. So in that way, it's very positive, because if you never felt

threatened, even at times when you should, it might indicate that you're not all in. Now, I will say that this is just one perspective. It's not for everyone. And obviously, it is somewhat controversial at times. I, for one, do believe that a bit of jealousy does actually affirm your trust in someone and helps you realize again and again that they will choose you. But when it's rampant, when you have no control over it, when we are in a state that no love or reassurance can calm us, this will put a strain on your relationship. And it could cause you to lose a very good thing. So let's talk about how to manage our retroactive jealousy and process all the causes, the contributors that are keeping us in a position of feeling very powerless and out of

control in our own relationship. So all of that and more after this short break. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong.

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If you are not committed, first, like you probably wouldn't be listening to this episode. You wouldn't be having these concerns because you wouldn't be worried about having something to lose. The thing is, though, you can't choose. your partner, the person that is the most important person in your life, based on their past, because that is going to really, really limit your options and mean that you could potentially miss out on your soulmate just because they've had a few too many axes. They had a past, so did you, and you need to remember that all those relationships ended for a reason. They have

free will. Your partner has free will. They are making the best decision for them, and that is to be with you. They want to be here. I always find it valuable to think about how I feel about my own exes. Quite frankly, I want nothing to do with them. And if that's how I feel, why wouldn't my partner feel the same way about their past? Secondly, would you really want to date someone who had zero experience with dating, with emotional intimacy, who had never experienced love or heartbreak or what it had to teach you? I don't necessarily think that I would. I feel like that would be equally as strange to me to feel like I was the one who's having to show them everything

that had to be their first love when I'd had loves in the past as well. So I think that we always think that we would prefer something else, the grass being greener on the other side, but actually what you have right now is probably pretty, pretty good. and it's just this small insecurity that you're going to have to move past. You can let yourself be ruled by fear, or you can decide to just give in to this anxiety.

I find that retroactive jealousy is almost like quicksand. The more you struggle against it and suppress your feelings, refuse to speak them out loud, the more you fight and fight and fight against your jealousy, the more entrenched you become, the more you sink. Instead, you have to do what feels, insanely counterintuitive in the moment, which is to just let yourself feel what you're feeling without trying to escape from it, without trying to assign some deeper meaning to your emotions.

You are not your thoughts, you are separate from your thoughts, your thoughts do not predict the future, you are just receiving those thoughts, you can't control what pops into your head and having these thoughts doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean that your relationship is doomed to fail. It doesn't say anything about your relationship other than that. Perhaps you just have something to work through. This is this idea of cognitive diffusion, being able to look at your thoughts and just observe them rather than panic at them.

I think that our experience with retroactive jealousy becomes a lot easier when you just see your thoughts as just these little things popping in to say hi, that aren't going to hurt you, that don't mean really anything other than that they just exist, that they're just background noise. You're allowed to ignore those thoughts. You are allowed to ignore the thoughts that are not useful for you that are not productive to you,

and kind of accept the fact that they are not there to help you. They are coming from a place of insecurity, of anxiety, of overthinking, and the more you feed into them, the harder it's going to be to find a conclusion or to find an answer that's actually going to make you feel better. It's part of that acceptance of the fact that you're never going to have full clarity about your partner's past. You can think up a million different scenarios, but none of them are actually going to be true. And all of them are probably going to make you feel a lot worse. I just have this belief that sometimes you do just have to have blind faith in what someone else is saying to you. If they say you have nothing to worry about, don't try and argue with them.

Just say, okay, yeah, I choose to believe you. I'm choosing to believe you, even if I don't want to, even if my fear wants me to look for another answer. I'm not going to look. Maybe you're lying to me, but, you know, it's about trusting that you've also got a very good judge of character and you've chosen a good person to be in your life who is not going to lie to you, who is not going to deceive you, who wants to be here with you now in this relationship. So saying to yourself, okay, I'm just going to believe this person kind of lets your anxiety and overthinking know where you stand. It shows them that you are the bus, you have set a boundary

with yourself, you're giving yourself permission to stop ruminating. The other biggest gift you can give yourself in those moments is to eliminate any of the behaviour. behavioral compulsions, which you know are going to elicit a really emotional reaction. I'm talking about stalking their exes, stalking their old tagged photos, asking endless questions of your partner about their ex, information that you quite frankly do not need to know. Now, I'm using the word compulsion here because that is what they are. They're very difficult to suppress, especially when we have perhaps gotten used to feeling an anxious thought, feeling compelled to act in a certain way, and receiving some momentary

reassurance, but it just means that the next time you need reassurance, the threshold is higher. And you actually aren't learning how to control those unconscious spikes of jealousy. You're allowing them to be kind of fueled by all of these behaviors that are giving you just more information that could potentially hurt your feelings, more information that you need to put it and find a way to fit into your brain, more scenarios to play with. You are just adding more fuel to the fire essentially. And we need to approach this on a need to know basis. If it doesn't impact your current relationship, you quite frankly don't need to know. It's okay. You don't need to know everything. The uncertainty that you're feeling in response to that is just a feeling.

You will never know everything. So perhaps if you'll never know everything, it's better. it alone to know, you know, less rather than more. It's also important to remember that your version of your partner's past might not be theirs. You are creating this mental movie that is probably totally different from reality, totally different to how it actually was. And it is a mental image, a mental movie that is most certainly leveraging your fears rather than the truth. It wants to be extreme. It is extrapolating based on limited information in a manner that our brain thinks will protect us

but is really harming us and probably lying to us as well. So it's important to counteract those thoughts that have no evidence to them. Has your partner given you any indication that they don't want to be with you? No. Have they ever said that they want to get back with their ex? No. Have they showed you any information? indication, a reasonable indication that they wanted to? Probably not. Question the validity of your

fearful thoughts. Now, obviously the example that we are mostly relying on are occasions where you actually don't have anything to worry about. I would say though that if there are boundaries that are being crossed, that is giving you a reason to feel jealous and to feel really terrible, if you feel like this person that you're dating or this person that you're with is encouraging that reaction almost as like a self-esteem boost to them. This does not apply. Everything we've spoken about does not apply. That person is not good for you. You should have a serious conversation with them about why they feel the need to do that, why they are crossing boundaries that you have set for yourself, why they are choosing to disrespect you, and find out whether that's something

that you're going to be willing to work with them towards fixing, or whether this relationship perhaps is not the one for you. Because sometimes you realize that you're actually not crazy. And I'm going to say crazy in quotation marks. You are not the crazy girlfriend or the crazy partner or the crazy boyfriend. You are actually with someone who is manipulating your emotions for their own personal gain and for their own sense of confidence and sense of self-esteem. I've had that in the past where this person liked seeing me get jealous in a weird, twisted way,

because every time I got jealous, he got the reassurance that I wanted to be with him. When I was telling him again and again and again that I did, but the jealousy was like this extra cherry on top, and it was so infuriating when I kind of began to realize that that was what he was doing because it was not a pleasant emotion, and it was, putting such a strain on our relationship and causing us to fight all the time, causing me to feel like I wasn't the person I wanted to be in that relationship. So I'm going to say an important caveat here if you're with someone who is deliberately creating feelings of jealousy or who is not respecting your boundaries, who is communicating with their ex regularly and has no need to,

maybe that's not the right relationship for you. Maybe you're not the problem. In those other instances, though, that we were speaking about where it really is just a deep insecurity and overthinking, I would say try not to involve your partner too much in helping you to solve this problem, in helping you to address your retroactive jealousy. They can, of course, be a teammate, but they can't be your coach because then we often become too overly reliant on their reassurance, rather than actually addressing the root cause of this problem, which is that past trauma, perhaps, maybe that lack of security in your relationship, that insecurity, the overthinking, the self-sabotage, those are all things that

your partner actually can't help you with. You'll have to do that on your own. And putting too much pressure on them to constantly make you feel better only just exacerbates and continues the cycle of retroactive jealousy, never actually causing you to pull yourself out of those of that thought pattern and think about the why rather than the current present moment and the what and thinking about what can make you feel better why not think about how can I stop this from occurring in the first place perhaps that is really going to therapy and breaking down the content of those harmful memories from the past what wounds are you carrying from past relationships that are showing up in your current relationship. Maybe that is focusing on working on your own insecurity.

Why don't you feel adequate? Is it because you have never felt particularly confident about your body? Is it because you lack the same amount of experience as this person? Is it because you feel like you're not in their league or some other made-up idea or basis for weighing and judging attractiveness. Instead of focusing on those things, and this is such a basic introduction to addressing insecurity that requires a whole episode of its own, but instead of focusing on all the ways that you may not be as good as their ex, that they may be better than you, that they may be deserving of more, focus on what you're amazing at. You are excellent at something. I'm sure of you excel at many things. There is a reason that this person has chosen you, even if you are

struggling to see it right now. You have so much love to give. You are such a generous person. I'm sure that you are very, very kind, or I would like to assume so, very intelligent. There are so many attributes that I think we ignore because we want to pretend that we're humble or because we don't want to feel immodest or arrogant. And really, that can actually just contribute to us not feeling like we have any value at all. Get back in touch with the things that make you unique and interesting and incredible and worthy of love such that you don't need to be comparing yourself to this person's ex or their past flings or situationships because you are wholly confident that what you have is better, what you have with them is better. Now,

I think that's all we have time for today. I really hope that this episode has provided you with something to think about, has helped you if you are dealing with retroactive jealousy. I didn't want to approach this with too much shame because I know sometimes we can really get confused when it comes to this form of jealousy and think that it means that we're possessive or that we're all these number of bad things when actually I do just think that it comes from a lot of hurt that we need to heal. Retroactive jealousy is just a sign of some internal damage or some internal insecurity that our mind is calling on us to address. So I'm sending you a lot of love. This is a lot more common than you think. So you are not

alone in this feeling. You are not a bad person because you ruminate on somebody else's past, but you do have a responsibility to yourself and to your relationship, to your partner, to the person that you want to be with to get to the root cause of why this is occurring. It will take hard work. It will take a lot of honesty and vulnerability. But once you do that, I think you eradicate a lot of the negativity that is making you feel shameful about yourself or making you feel, making you question the state of your relationship. So thank you so much for listening. If there is someone that you believe needs to hear this episode, please feel free to share it with them and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever you are listening right now. If you have

an episode suggestion, this episode was actually an episode suggestion, please feel free to message me at That Psychology Podcast on Instagram, or you can follow me at Jemis Beck. If you have any ideas for upcoming episodes, topics, anything you want us to discuss, and we will be back next week with another episode. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%.

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