It’s Not Always Jealousy….

Just a little thought while i was meditating this morning…..

Many of my writings on poly tools have to do with how to help us with jealousy…..but sometimes it’s not jealousy that we may need help with. Instead, it’s our own feelings of self-worth, self-confidence or having to work on baggage that is brought up from a new relationship. This new relationship could be one that we’ve started or one that our partner has started.

When we are in a monogamous relationship, it’s easier to hide some of our ‘character flaws’…or for that matter, to not discover them at all. If we have a lack of something about ourselves, it’s easy to work around it without ever knowing what ‘it’ is. But, add new relationships into the mix and things bubble (or for some of us, explode) to the surface.

Have an issue with rejection? Easy enough to hide in a monogamous relationship. It can show up as jealousy when you see your partner making eyes at someone else or when they are talking to someone at work. It’s not jealousy though. It’s fear of rejection or abandonment. But, we fix it by having them not do it again, or worse, not tell you about it. Bam. Problem solved and you don’t have to really work on it. You can even blame it on someone else and never have to self-reflect on what just caused those emotions.

But, with poly, there are so many times that this emotion can come up, that we need to work on it and ourselves, or the life of poly is going to be miserable for you and your partners. Are you feeling a lack of self-confidence? Not uncommon. Do you set up rules in your relationships so that these emotions don’t arise, or do you work on your lack of self-confidence? Or a little of both? For me, I recognized what was going on, and asked for some rules to be put into place while I worked on myself. This helped a lot and helped me learn the trust involved to build self-confidence; both the trust in my partner and the more importantly, the trust in me. Then, as my confidence grew, we were able to get rid of some of the rules.

When deciding to live a poly life, prepare for the self-work. That stuff just won’t stay pushed down.