428 - Unraveling Jealousy in Five Steps with Dr. Joli Hamilton
Welcome Dr. Joli Hamilton!
Joli has graciously joined us for this episode to talk about her qualitative research on jealousy and her five step approach to managing it. She is the relationship coach for couples who color outside the lines. She is a research psychologist, TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and AASECT certified sex educator. Joli also co-hosts the Playing with Fire podcast with her anchor partner, Ken. Joli’s been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and NPR.
She’s spent the past two decades studying and reimagining what love can be if we open our imaginations to possibility. Joli helps people create non-monogamous partnerships that are custom-built for their authentic selves, no more shrinking, pretending, or hiding required.
Today, she covers the following topics with us:
Why she got into jealousy research and what her methods are.
Differences in how jealousy shows up for non-monogamous people versus monogamous ones.
Things that have surprised her while studying jealousy.
Differences in how people struggle with jealousy since the pandemic restrictions have loosened.
Her experience podcasting in this field and the reasoning behind the name of her podcast.
Five steps to managing jealousy
Notice it (somatic).
Name it (ownership of the emotion) and the emotions that come with it. Name the emotions that go with it (anger, rage, sadness, anticipatory grief, shame, fear, etc.).
Change the story (and hear other stories).
Name your needs and ask for them.
Foster compersion (optional).
Find Joli on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter at @drjoli_hamilton, and at www.JoliQuiz.com and www.theyearofopening.com.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about jealousy research with Dr. Joli Hamilton. Dr. Joli Hamilton is the relationship coach for couples who color outside the lines. She's a research psychologist, TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and AASECT-certified sex educator. Joli also co-hosts the Playing With Fire Podcast with her anchor partner, Ken.
Joli has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and NPR, and of course, her greatest accomplishment yet, the Multiamory Podcast.
Jase: Joli, thank you so much for joining us.
Joli: Thank you so much for having me. It is actually, I don't get nervous before recording very often. I was like, "Oh, I have a little bit of the feels."
Hosts: Wow.
Joli: I had the butterflies a little bit in all good ways.
Emily: Oh, that's good.
Joli: Yes.
Emily: As everyone knows, we just like to destroy guests that come on our show.
Emily: Just put them in the .
Joli: Huge reputation. Yes, huge reputation.
Emily: It's a good knows.
Joli: Of hating people.
Jase: Right
Emily: Sometimes I have that. What if we just found one guest and we just completely break format one day and just tear them apart? I mean, not in a mean way. It'd be someone we actually would have some-
Dedeker: Some choice-
Emily: Some beef with.
Dedeker: -educated critique for, but it's so just not our brand.
Joli: That makes a lot of sense. You could do some consensual, non-consent stuff there. You could definitely play in the edge.
Dedeker: Oh, cool.
Jase: That's interesting too, yes.
Dedeker: We can make it kinky. I didn't think about that flavor.
Jase: I like that, actually. It's an interesting take there.
Dedeker: An all-new podcasting landscape for us. Wow. Actually, I didn't even write this question down ahead of time but I'm recalling from your website when you're talking a little bit about your background and your history. If I'm recalling this correctly, you reached that point where you decided to have explored non-monogamy and open your relationship. Then you're basically like, "I need to get my doctorate to understand this."
Jase:
Dedeker: Then here you are. Was that the correct story bit essentially?
Joli: I mean, it's a kind of a bit but I think it would have to justly include decided to jump into non-monogamy, did it really badly, set my whole world on fire, threw it in a wood chipper, and to find my way out of it, I was like, "Somebody must have figured this out." My way of figuring things out is to turn to the books. Since there weren't as many resources as there are now, like your delightful book yourselves, I was like, "I'll study the closest thing I can find, which was psychology."
Dedeker: Wow.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: I can think I can relate to that. I think all three of us, on our own individual journeys, brushing up against non-traditional relationships, clearly all three of us had a similar seed of why we got to learn about these things and look at the research and read the books and see what other people are saying. Sort of that similar thing of back in the day, not as many resources, and so you just plumb the depths for whatever you can find.
Joli: For me, it was totally about plumbing the depths too, that's why I chose the direction I did.
Emily: That puts in the context the title of your podcast, Playing With Fire as well. Is that about non-monogamy? You're playing with the potential fire of changing your relationship landscape as a whole?
Joli: Actually, it's two-fold. One, you are playing with fire and fire is awesome. It's fireworks and it's a campfire and it's awesome. It's also pretty impressively dangerous and it's also the most common thing I heard said to me when I was opening.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Joli: When I left a monogamous marriage for a triad and everybody was like, "You're playing with fire. You are playing with fire."
Jase: Right.
Joli: I was. It's true. It's the journey that I needed. It also mimics I care a lot about the individuation journey. That also is playing with fire. You're in your interiority, trying to figure out who you are and what all this is. That is also playing with fire.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: Can you explain that a little bit more? We've had talks about individuation on this show before. I think it's been a while though so can you explain that a little bit? I'm really curious about your interpretation of that also being a form of playing with fire.
Joli: I like to get really specific about this because the word itself, for me, comes out of-- I use it in a sense of you and me in psychology. I would say that individuation is, simply put, the process of becoming the most you version of you possible by shedding what is not yours but you were asked to carry or you're asked to conform to and by remembering or recollecting and stitching back onto you all those things that you cut off in order to fit in.
This is different from differentiation, which is telling the difference between myself and other. It's also different from individualism and that, I think, is what people often associate with, that person who's saying my needs are more than others. Individuation, I am taking in a really psychological sense. It's about becoming the most you version of you possible.
Dedeker: Even from a surface-level understanding of this, I think it's pretty apparent how choosing to explore a non-traditional relationship framework relates to that, right?
Joli: Exactly.
Dedeker: The term or phrase you used about re-stitching on the things we cut off of ourselves in order to fit in, it goes just beyond non-monogamy, that goes into gender and sexuality and so many different things.
Joli: Exactly. When I think about individuation, and my own experience of shifting from that first half of life, say, up till you're around 35, 40-ish, when you're building your sense of who you can be in this world and just be able to survive, there's so much energy spent on trying to fit in so that you can survive. For me, there was a big shift between 31 and 40. I spent so much time trying to remember who I was. It wasn't just about discovering.
It was also about remembering and that came to me through the process of figuring out, "Oh, I've always fallen in love with more than one person." I've always been sexually adventurous. I've always had this non-conforming attitude. That itself, it found a home in the non-monogamous realm but the individuation journey is bigger than that as well.
Jase: It reminds me of a topic that comes up so often on this show, which is that examining of which parts of X are from culture, from society, things that I absorbed, and what's really me. How that's, in a way, an impossible question to truly say, yes, 100% it's this and not this but more that it's this ongoing thing. Whenever the question of opening up or being new to non-monogamy comes up, we often talk a lot about the unlearning process being even harder than the learning process.
It's like figuring out what's all that extra baggage I took on that I don't need and isn't serving me. Then when it comes to things like attraction, who we're attracted to, it's like, "Is that even me?" How much of that is stuff that got tacked on? That's so difficult to figure that out.
Joli: 100%. When you're developing your capacity to even be aware of your attractions and what turns you on and what you're interested in, you are also at the most tender phase of life for fitting in and trying to be safe, while also trying to figure out how to make your own way in the world and trying to be whoever it is you need to be to literally not die in this capitalist hellscape.
You're doing all those things at the same time, it makes sense that you would pick things up that aren't yours, that you would take things off that were yours, and I don't think that there needs to be any objective sense of here. I've got it. Now, I have me. In fact, there's a really clear piece of the individuation process that, I think, helps us remember that there is no such thing as individuated. You don't get there, you don't arrive, you don't finish any more than you would get enlightened and then be done.
That's just not a thing. Us humans, we're not really there for. We're in a process. For me, that's a really exciting thing because I don't have to figure it out so much as feel into what's real for me and what's true for me, and what my nervous system can handle, me accepting right now, and then also just what I want to explore with right now. All of those are part of really taking non-monogamy and making a psychological process. That's how I see it.
Emily: It's interesting because I was going to ask that question. Can one ever become individuated? But you just said no. That makes sense because I think that's a really unattainable goal. When I think of non-monogamy, often I think of looking at myself through the lens of others and learning about self through knowing many different people, expanding through how they view you, how you are with them, things along those lines.
I wonder how does individuation go along with that? Because it's about other people too and how you interact with them and what they bring out within you. I guess I wonder is that, does it help with that by being with multiple people? Because you're not only seeing yourself through the eyes of one person like you might in monogamy or a long-term relationship.
Joli: You are hitting a sweet spot for me, Emily, completely. When I was trained in Jungian psychology, I was swimming in a sea of people who tend to be deeply introverted and care a lot about the internal experience. I happen to be an extrovert's extrovert.
I also happen to really love relationships, especially messy, complicated ones. The messier, the better. My clients tend to come to me with situations that they're like, "Nobody can help us." I'm like, "Hang on, I am so into that. Tell me more." When I went to school, I was like, "What about the relational?" Because everything I'm finding out about myself, I'm finding out because I have, say, at one point, I had two partners who only could not-- We could not seem to be the same person all in the same room. The three of us couldn't all be in a room and be showing our full selves.
I started to think of this as something I'm calling relational individuation, where I explicitly use my relationships with multiple people, whether those are romantic or friendships or family, I don't care who they are, but people close enough to me, I can use-- Exactly what you're saying, how they're seeing me, how they're informing me, and how I'm interacting with each of them. Am I showing up as my full self with all of them or am I actually splintering, splitting?
I like to think of myself or any of my clients, I'll ask them to picture if you were a jewel and you had all these facets and you still got-- You're the back of the geo, the shadow stuff back there nobody's seeing. Imagine all of these beautiful facets. Are you taking your relationships and showing just a few facets to each person or are you actively opening yourself to know more of you through all of these different relationships? Then your job in the individuation process is getting to know and then integrate and weave these into your wholeness. It's not other people. That's the internal part. The external part of having multiple partners, relational individuation. That's it for me.
Emily: Love that.
Dedeker: Boy, I really want to sit down and just think for a long time. It's really making me want to just really chew on that. As Emily said, I think when you've been practicing non-monogamy for any amount of time, it becomes very clear very quickly, like, "Oh, this is so interesting that I show up this way and this relationship and this other way and this relationship different stuff gets triggered with this person, different activities I do with this person, different types of sex with different people."
The idea of then taking it a step lower into but is a part of that where I'm hiding things, where I'm taking things off or I'm putting things on that don't belong to me. That feels like this extra level layered deeper. I can see how this comes out as a psychological process like you were saying.
Joli: If you just think about exactly what you described, you are facing-- Again, in Jungian or depth language, you face the shadow. The parts of you that you do not see, you face it because other people are showing you. Some of what they're showing you is through projection but a bunch of it is like, "You are acting your shadow out on them." Also, we have to strip away some of our persona, all those masks that we wear to help other people like us but they're not authentic.
They're not real or they're only real for very limited contexts will be like trying to reintegrate your work persona right back into your home life. Many people find that to be jarring. Do that, but do that across multiple meaningful relationships. Now you have access to the exact work that some of our great thinkers have said, "If you face this, you will grow and you will continue to grow throughout your life," and for me, that's what relationships are for. They're there for growth.
Jase: The fact that you brought up earlier the concept of enlightenment, that it's not a thing you arrive at and you are enlightened, that's something that the three of us, especially Dedeker, read a lot of Buddhist writings and things like that as well. That's a recurring theme is that whole concept of enlightenment isn't a goa. It's not an end state. It's something that you're constantly striving toward.
Even people who are considered enlightened masters will say themselves, "I'm in it sometimes and I'm not sometimes. It's not a state that I get there and now I'm there." Just to bring that back to what you're talking about, I think is something that frustrates a lot of people who want a really clear answer of just, "No, but tell me the thing I should do so I can do it right."
Joli: Get a gold star, an individuation, or enlightenment.
Jase: Even just in non-monogamy or in my relationships or something, in communication. I just want to highlight that point that you're bringing up about how it's more about constantly observing that and maybe becoming more aware of it, again, to use a mindfulness way of thinking about it.
Joli: Freeing yourself of that.
Jase: In your example though of there are situations where I might want to do some masking or I may be intentionally hiding some part of myself for a good reason, and learning to understand it better so that rather than that becoming the default way I show up all the time, it's more a tool in my toolbox.
Joli: 100%. There's a complete difference from my perspective between consciously choosing to mask, consciously deciding to even have an entire alter ego to go enter some spaces. Certainly, anybody who plays just in scene in BDSM understands putting on an alter ego and then taking it off and that's great. It can be so fun. It can be freeing. That can absolutely be psychologically advantageous material. There's so much evidence just showing up in the literature now saying, "Oh, yes, the thing that the kinksters have known for all this time, that's real and that can pay off."
Most of the time, I'm watching my clients, I'm watching people I know in real life struggle to tell the difference between their persona and their actual self. That's where it becomes so helpful to just consider that your relationships may show you where you are unconsciously masking, where you're unconsciously in your persona, and bring you into greater relationship with like, "Oh, I could choose this, or I could choose not to. I could choose to show up in a more complete version of me," and that risks rejection. Sometimes it's not what we want to choose, and that's legit. You get to.
Dedeker: Sorry, I'm having a total psychology, non-monogamy philosophy boner right now. Not to make it too blue. We don't usually go that far on this show. Way back in my early 20s-- I have my undergrad degree in theater, actually, which intersects with a lot of this philosophy quite nicely. In some of my early undergrad classes, we did have to take theatrical philosophy courses.
I remember Sir Peter Hall is a really well-known philosopher who writes a lot about theater and he wrote this book called Exposed by the Mask. Literally, his whole point was making this argument that we're so used to thinking about these things as, "Oh, I wear this collection of masks but there's a real self underneath it." My real self that's maybe part shadow, maybe part just who I am when I'm by myself or whatever and I'm making this argument of, "No, there is nothing behind the masks. You are the collection of masks."
Even when you're by yourself, there's a particular mask, a particular persona that you put on. It is about, I guess, when we're in intimate relationship of both showing and then being shown what's in our collection of masks as it were. That is some of this work.
Joli: I have all the gooses now. I teach a process I call the inner counsel process that's designed exactly to get at that, Dedeker. It's designed to help people very simply. We think often through IFS therapy, you think about parts work, and we talk about parts. What I've noticed is many people, those so-called part, they get a little irritated by calling them parts. Those parts don't want to be thought of as parts. They're whole autonomous beings, if you will, inside of us. We are the sum total of them. From a Jungian perspective, we are also both all of that and beyond that.
When I'm teaching the inner counsel process, what I'm teaching is for people to think about these aspects of self in a whole way. They get to really have personalities and they get to be us and not be separate from us and not be assigned. I love IFS up to a point because when we start assigning those roles and saying, "Those are the managers and those are the protectors and those are the exiles." We forget that, in fact, if we stay close to the image. That's what psychologist James Hillman would tell us, "Stay close to the image." If I stay close to the image of all of these different so-called parts, what I have are these autonomous aspects of self that make up me.
Some of them are complete and whole and some of them do feel fragmented. I, for instance, have a part that I could call a part. She is so entirely real and whole. When she comes out and holds the stage, I have a completely different look. My face changes. I feel different. This, I think, fell out of vogue to talk about when we went through a whole lot of pushing aside people with dissociative identity disorders and things, and yet, if you just look, it's just so clear that this is normal. This is completely reasonable behavior for being a human. I'm so into it.
Emily: Just real quick for the layperson and the listener, can you just say what IFS and parts that you're speaking of?
Joli: I got deep real fast.
Emily: No problem.
Joli: Ifs, internal family systems theory.
Emily: Got it.
Joli: I like to just remind everybody, every theory, the Jungian theory, these are all theories. If you don't like them, it's fine because they're just theories. Internal family systems theory posits the idea of these different parts of ourselves that we formed in order to protect us or to manage the symptoms of being in a complicated situation. Some of them are even called exiles. Those exiles are those parts that we've completely abandoned. I think that it can be helpful language. If it works for you, awesome, but my parts tend to get irritable.
I've noticed a lot of my clients' parts get irritable about these labels. I've just dropped them and asked people to return to the idea of these are complexes. They have a wholeness to themselves. If we treat them that way, there's a piece that comes with just populating the council like, "Oh." I actually bring my council together. I have a whole bunch of stuffed animals and Christmas ornaments and fridge magnets that represent these aspects of self and remind me that it's up to me to integrate all the different ways I'm showing up in the world.
That's my part, the integration of it, the conversation between these different aspects. There are a lot of ways to do that. IFS is one but I happen to like this slightly more intricate way because, in order to do it, you got to take on the whole Jungian thing. I like to simplify that as much as possible.
Dedeker: I wanted to circle back to you were talking about stuff that's showing up in the evidence. I wanted to talk about your research as well because you researched jealousy, correct?
Joli: Yes. I did and I do.
Dedeker: I'm asking this question and I could probably theorize 600 different answers but I'll just go ahead and ask the question, why research jealousy?
Joli: I accidentally tattooed the Japanese symbol for jealousy on my back 15 years ago. It's literally been following me.
Dedeker: What was the accidental part of it?
Joli: My first polyamorous lover said to me, "I love your passion and intensity for all of life." I was like, damn, "I am getting that tattooed on my back."
Joli: I already had the symbol of mother on my back. This was before I knew anything about cultural appropriation. I had a translator who I was working with translate it for me. She worked and worked and worked.
She's like, "We just don't really have." She's like, "I could do intensity. I could do light. Unless you want a whole thing down your back. We just don't have anything." Then about three weeks later, she came back and said, "I got it. It's the word zeal." I was like, "Awesome, I'm in." Zeal, the Greek root for zealous, which follows through to jealous, and there we are. I think it just picked me right at the beginning of my journey. I made a commitment to jealousy to stick with her.
Dedeker: She's stuck on your back. You're sticking together for life. Where to even begin with the research? I know we've covered some jealousy research on this show but I guess I'm curious, let's start with where you began. How did you set up your own research? What were your methods when you first started studying?
Joli: I'm a qualitative researcher. I don't so much count things as I describe them. I started from the premise that I wanted to get to know jealousy better. I wanted to know if it was an archetypal quality. From an archetypal psychology perspective, is this an emotion that actually is big enough that it just has an autonomous nature? We can tell something is archetypal when it is both overwhelming and completely banal, mundane every day. Jealousy is both mundane. Anybody can feel it at any moment. When it shows up, it can be a tidal wave that knocks you right off your feet. I wanted to know if that was true, for one thing.
Also, I wanted to know more about what it was like for people to actually be in their jealousy. Not so much just count up how often they were feeling it or what circumstance even, but really, what is the quality of that? I set myself up to discover, first through a non-monogamous lens. That was my first study. I did an interpretive, phenomenological analysis of 13 individuals who experienced non-monogamy by their own description because that all works out a little bit differently. Right now, I'm actually in the sister study to that, where I am doing a monogamous sample.
I'm in the write-up phase of the first of three parts to that monogamous sample because it took a little while to collect the men and the non-binary voices. The women's voices came in first. They're who are hitting the research first. That's just getting written up, literally right now.
Dedeker: Oh, my goodness. Wow.
Emily: Wow. Through these two studies, how have you found that monogamous people experience jealousy differently than non-monogamous people?
Joli: That was at the core. After I established, yes, jealousy has an archetypal quality. That's its nature. I was curious if it's experienced differently based on relationship structure. It's a yes. Jealousy is described differently based on the expectations and norms that people have, their norms and beliefs that is often based on what their relationship structure is. Also, we use different strategies. That's what my data is showing is that there are different strategies employed when jealousy shows up. That's where there is so much generative potential for people to learn from people in different relationship structures.
People, I think, expect me to say that it will always be non-monogamous people. We got to always learn from them, but in fact, what I'm finding is that many monogamous people have put in a lot of clear boundaries and have allowed themselves to decide to be in smaller or simpler containers, in part, because they know that that's the best choice for their nervous system at the phase that they're in. Certainly, we could all learn from that. It's about how they deal with it, what they do with it. There are other differences but that's the primary one, that there is something for all sides to learn from each other.
Dedeker: Thank you for saying that. I know that's something we're really passionate about on this show as well, is this idea that it's not just the non-monogamous weirdos over there or the toxic, unevolved monogamous people over there. It's all about trying to translate these two different viewpoints and glean, what are the gems here on both sides.
Joli: Totally. As I asked people to describe to me their experiences of jealousy, there were some really obvious things. I had the only people in my monogamous sample who were able to name an antonym for jealousy, some other way that they might feel. They were therapists who trained at least a little bit to understand how to work with non-monogamous clients so they at least knew the word. They knew the word compersion. All the rest of them, they didn't have that word.
I know from myself just raising children, if a kid doesn't have a word to name their experience, it's real hard to foster it. There are some really simple pieces of data that are coming out like, "Let's just introduce this word to all relationship styles," simply put, but then, there were some more nuanced pieces like, "Where should we be spending our attention? What is attention in relationships?" If attention is assumed, as several of my monogamous participants described attention needing to be a primary resource that should be directed at them as the partner.
Interestingly, they didn't necessarily see how they should have to direct all their attention to their partners. There is just a juiciness of like, "We want attention." That's one of the commodities in relationship. In the non-monogamous sample, there were people who absolutely described struggling with that same thing. They had done some coming to grips with, "Oh, I'm going to have to figure out how to manage this desire for attention or attention exclusivity because I can't actually have it."
Again, to me, that's not about whether we have a lot of lovers or not. That's about whether we can manage the complexity of being with people who may or may not meet our expectations for attention, for being in relationship to us, for getting us, understanding us.
Jase: That attention piece got my attention so I can help it. That really made my ears perk up in thinking about that because something that we talk about a lot in monogamous relationships is this idea that within monogamy there's this cultural belief that your partner becomes everything to you. They end up they're your best friend, they're your personal trainer, they're the person who takes out the garbage, they're also the person you have sex with. They're literally every single thing. They're your confessor, they're your coach, all of that.
Basically, that's not practical or realistic, or healthy to do. That attention thing does bring me back to that idea of how much of that comes from just this cultural narrative that in order for you to be totally loved, means someone needs to be obsessed with you that you're the only thing they ever think about because that's in all the romantic shit. That's the sentiment that gets expressed a lot.
Joli: Absolutely. First off, in my research, many people did name like, "Yes, this is my person and therefore I should get all my needs met here." They were very clear about that. It was not just how they were seeking safety, it was what they believed they should do, even if it wasn't working well, even if they were struggling really hard. That was hard for me because as a researcher, I was sitting there saying, "Oh, you could break that paradigm and stay monogamous and you could break that paradigm." Obviously, that was not my role as researcher so I'm like, "Maybe they'll find me somewhere else. We'll see."
Also, when I'm working with clients, I'm noticing more and more people still struggle. I'll have people that are years into their non-monogamous adventure say, and they're still just struggling so hard with the idea that they can't have this Disney version of love. They know it cognitively, they understand that that is not realistic nor healthy. They're also just not getting it. What do they do with it? Because their body still seems to want it, and all those parts that we were talking about, all those aspects of self, that inner counsel I've assembled, parts of them are like, "We should get the thing. If it were real, we would get the thing. The thing is, this dignified version."
Dedeker: This is so fascinating because it's making me think of the years and years and years of being asked questions, whether it's from family and friends or in an interview capacity, especially in a mainstream interview capacity. All the normal questions. How do you have time for that? How do you manage your energy? Really you have sex with more than one person, wait, but what if this happens? What if that happens? What about the jealousy? No one has ever asked me about attention as a resource and it makes sense. Why would they, I don't think we're used to thinking about it as a resource in that way.
That's so interesting because I've had experiences in relationships where I'm spending a lot of time with a partner, but I don't feel like they're very attentive and it doesn't matter that I'm getting most of their time. I'm frustrated because I feel like I'm not getting the attention that I want versus I can not go without seeing a partner for weeks or months sometimes but feel like they're very attentive. It's something beyond just the amount of time, the quantity of time, the quality of time, the sex gifts, whatever it is. It is like there's something else there. That's really interesting.
Joli: I think you're spot on and I'm seeing this show up. I have a lot of clients who are saying they're in their reinvention of life. They've assembled a life they really like and they don't want to burn it to the ground, but their needs aren't getting met and they don't usually have the words for it. What they described to me is, I'm not getting the attention that I want or they describe that they use the words that say like, "We spend all of our time together," but they're not. You can feel in all of the rest of their descriptions that their needs are not met, their desire to be seen and known is not
met. Some of them, and actually a growing number of them are describing how their recognizing their current partner just doesn't have the capacity to provide that. Maybe they're noticing, "Oh, my partner is on the spectrum. Oh, they relate differently than I do. Okay, cool. How do we do this different?" Or they realize, "Oh, my desire for attention is huge. I knew my partner was an introvert when I married them, but I still married them and my desire for attention is enormous. Oh, it's me. Oh, it's me. What do I do now?" That recognition, I'm finding more and more people are like, "What if I didn't have to just get a divorce and go find the perfect person, but instead I decided to diversify."
I talk to people about how that could be non-monogamy, the kit and caboodle where it's everything from emotional to sexual and everything in between, or it could be some creative version of monogamy where you still decide to keep some realms of exclusivity and also expansively, but you start practicing that intentionally. I'm finding, especially for my Gen X clients and up. We just weren't necessarily provided with that explanation that we get to pick and choose what we take from the monogamous realm. It's like it was supposed to be all one thing. That feels like it is the game-changer for people like, "Oh, if I want attention in a particular realm and my partner does not want to give it, can we negotiate about this particular domain rather than say it's the whole thing or nothing."
Dedeker: Right. That makes sense.
Emily: I have two questions. First, is there anything from this research that really surprised you about jealousy, and second, are there different things that people in monogamous relationships versus non-monogamous relationships get jealous about? What are the things that are causing jealousy within these two different groups of people?
Joli: Well, one of the things that surprised me was actually how prosaic some of it was. I felt the tenderness in people's stories when they were like, "But we're doing all the right things so I shouldn't have to feel jealousy." Especially in monogamous relationships, none of my subject has ever reported actually, and none of my communication outside of that has ever anyone reported being taught clearly about jealousy and what to do with it when they were a child.
Emily: I certainly wasn't. .
Jase: Definitely not.
Joli: I go so far--
Emily: Just figure it out. Deal with it.
Joli: Wait, just figure out and act like the hardest time of your life. First, I go deep into if you're going to first experience jealousy when you're between zero and four and then you re-experience it in romantic relationships when you're in puberty and then freak out.
Emily: You're going to act like the zero or four-year-old when you're dealing with jealousy in those romantic relationships.
Joli: Exactly. I can't say I didn't expect that I have seven children. I did have some expectation that that would happen because as I was nursing one, then the next came along, we met jealousy right up close and it was very real. Yet, I also was surprised to see how every single person thought jealousy was normal and a completely normal part of the human experience. I was just enthused. I was like, "Dang, you know what? I think we're growing all of us, all together." I randomly have these 26 people I've interviewed and all of them agreed, jealousy is normal, a normal part of the human experience, and while they might not like it.
That made my heart warm because that let them at least be self-accepting, even if they hated what they were experiencing. Surprising though, there were few things that I've struggled with and some of them are the levels of what I would categorize as abusive-relating that were accepted as completely normal either in both groups. In the monogamous group, yes, that definitely was happening. Also, in the non-monogamous group, especially in people describing their first five, six, seven years, some of them had been non-monogamous for a long time and it worked through a lot of stuff, but their old descriptions, they were like, "Yes, that was not okay." It was heartbreaking.
I think it was a little surprising just how prevalent it was and how people didn't really know that that's what they were reporting and that was just hard to face.
Dedeker: That's another thing we don't get taught about. Really, about what is acceptable behavior in a relationship or not, unless we happen to have parents that are willing to have those conversations with us.
Joli: Actually think too.
Dedeker: Yes, exactly. That's always the thing that flabbergasts me when I look back on it, having been in abusive relationships. No one sat me down. I even have people in my family who've survived abusive relationships, physically abusive relationships, and no one took the time to clarify, "Hey, these are definitely bad behaviors. These are healthy behaviors. There's a lot in the middle that's pushing it." I'm not surprised that people look back on it later and then they're like, "Ooh, in retrospect, that was really not okay."
Joli: I was just going to say that I also think that people are shocked. When they're reporting, they're talking about their experience. Some of them were hearing themselves like, "Oh." Also, there was more than one participant who was reporting a controlling or coercive level themselves from their own. They weren't reporting that they were being abused. They were reporting that they were being coercive. They're talking about things in ways that I'm like, "Is that really?" Some of it's that mild stuff that we're like, "That's what's normalized in the dignified default version of monogamy." It doesn't matter what relationship container you're in, if that's the normalization, then control.
My first marriage was that way. We were extraordinarily controlling of each other. We didn't know any different. I had, I think there were six participants out of that group, that were some type of therapists. Several of them raised by therapists. Several raised by a set of therapists, and yet none of them received neither a childhood education that they remembered of any kind of anybody ever mentioning jealousy or envy, which we should sort out, or then when they went through jealousy later, any sense of like, "Hey, this is a normal thing we should bring up and we should talk about."
That was the other big difference is, it was so normalized in non-monogamous circles to have three kinds of conversations. Proactive meta conversations about jealousy, processing conversations about jealousy, and then planning conversations about jealousy community-wise. There isn't a container for that in the monogamous paradigm, but there could be. There absolutely could be, so do it.
Jase: Whenever we talk about jealousy, one of the comparisons I like to bring up is how we do learn a, I would say, more socially acceptable way of handling jealousy when it comes to our family members or our friends or things like that, when we're jealous of them getting a promotion that we didn't get, or they got to go on a trip that we didn't get to go on, or they have a partner that's great and I don't, those sorts of things. We're taught the acceptable and adult mature thing to do is not try to sabotage that, try to control them, try to limit them in some way, but to kind of, "Yes, it sucks and oh, I want that, but it's not the end of the world. I don't need to get in there and change it."
Yet when it comes to our romantic relationships, it's like we're taught totally the opposite. That you should be controlling and that it's somehow this person doesn't count as a person in the same way as everyone else. That it's this massive schism between the way that it's acceptable to behave with everyone except this one type of person in your life, and that's weird.
Joli: Can I sort those out though?
Jase: Yes, do it.
Joli: It is true. We're given a little bit more socialization around when somebody gets a promotion or somebody is getting married and we're not, or somebody's whatever. They got something we want, but that's actually envy. It's not jealousy. The reason I think this matters is, envy can be incredibly motivating for us because it's an I vow thing. They have what I want, and there is no third person involved. I can identify jealousy because it's always triangular. There could be a whole bunch of overlapping triangles, but it's always triangular. It's a social experience of triangulation. Whereas envy, it has me and this other.
There's a psychological difference here because I can transmute envy into motivation really quickly. Many people were taught like, "Oh, well, if you like that he got that trophy, cool. Go work harder on your kicking and maybe you'll get that trophy." If we're talking about jealousy, I describe it this way. I have me the jealous one. I have my beloved, and I have the perceived interrupter. The perceived interrupter, Jase, you are spot on. It's like they othered in this phenomenal way of, "We can dehumanize them and not treat them." We can also dehumanize the beloved because they become an object. That's actually how we refer to it. We'll talk about the object of my jealousy.
I think it is so remarkably different right from the get-go. We can see jealousy in infants as young as six months old. This is hardwired to protect our care bond, and that's just so different than the experience of envy. For me, if we just sort these two things out, we can then leverage the fact that we are able to deal with envy better. We have socialized ourselves a little bit better to deal with it, so what can we do about jealousy? If people conflate the terms every day, in fact, more than half of my research participants conflated the terms. It's totally a normal thing to do, but when we do, we lose track of the fact that you would treat these two emotional experiences differently.
In order to use them successfully, because jealousy has great wisdom for us, as does envy. I'm going to need to sort them out.
Dedeker: Yes, but I think in my life right now, so if I'm looking at envy as, "They got the trophy, I just got to go work on my kicking and then maybe I'll get the trophy too, but then maybe I take the same approach with jealousy. I'm just going to go work on my kicking."
Joli: A little bit.
Dedeker: Not for a trophy, just for my own self-regulation.
Joli: That sounds like a pretty good reason to just yes. Find a willing kicking partner.
Dedeker: Kick dance it out.
Jase: I think that that distinction between wanting something someone else has that I don't, and perceiving that something I have is under threat of being taken from me, yes, very different and garners that different reaction. I would still argue though, that we're socialized to a very different set of standards with anyone else besides a romantic partner in that same way. Again, go back to the friend analogy. My friend starts becoming close with somebody else, and maybe spending less time with me. Exactly the same scenario that everyone's afraid of with their romantic partner. Yes, I've seen in my life some shitty shady ways of dealing with that situation too with friends. That does happen.
Joli: That's jealousy. That's straight jealousy.
Jase: No, I'm saying that is jealousy. We see some bad behavior, but I would say that most people acknowledge a certain amount of, "That's messed up what I'm doing, and that's not really appropriate."
Joli: They can own it.
Jase: With these romantic relationships, there's this, "No, that's just how it is." I think it's romanticized.
Joli: That totally showed up in the study. Participant after participant would say, "Yes, they're mine." That sense of ownership, entitlement, possessiveness. There's a researcher, Aaron Ben-Ze'ev talks about entitlement, and how entitlement is right at the heart of jealousy. If we deal with the entitlement that we have toward partners, that we might untangle this. Jase, I think you're spot on when you say that is a place where we have practiced dealing with jealousy more productively, by disentangling our right to this person, and also by just using different words. We can even soften it. I often will say, "I'm really jelly of that." Rather than calling it out.
Dedeker: Oh, yes, I love jelly.
Joli: Rather than being like, "Oh, I am claws in. This is mine and I have to have this person, and almost reducing them to an it. I have to have it." There's totally a transferable skillset here. The only reason I like to tease these two apart is because when we're talking about an object, things get real murky when we start talking about social media and phones. Is social media or a phone, is that a person? Is that an object that I could actually be jealous of it interrupting my connection, because I start to humanize it. I start to anthropomorphize that relationship. I start to imagine real interrupters.
This is why I think it's really interesting to get into because many people are struggling with jealousy but don't know. Again, I treat these as two different experiences because envy as more of an injury to the self. Jealousy is an injury to your relational capacity, so we're going to work with them differently.
Emily: For our listeners, do you have any good takeaways or tools for people that are struggling with this really strong desire for attention, and not being able to necessarily get it, especially if they're new to something like non-monogamy, and are just for the first time experiencing having their partner be away from them in certain capacities that they're not used to?
Joli: The number one thing that popped out to the first study that was all non-monogamous people who were-- they were between 2 and 20 years in, they very clearly revealed that there was a five-step pathway that they walked themselves through in order to navigate jealousy. I did not go looking for that. That just showed up. I was like, oh, okay. They notice jealousy sooner. The sooner you can notice that you're jealous, the easier it will be to work with it. You need to learn your body cues.
You need to understand that you're having somatic sensations probably before you have the cognitive thought that you're jealous. Once you've memorized those, it gets easier to deal with faster. You need to name it, literally name the fact that you're feeling jealousy because ownership of that emotion returns the power of it to you. Like, "Oh, I'm experiencing jealousy." That puts me in a position to now say, "Oh, right, okay, cool. The jealousy's mine. Now I'll try working on it." We also can name all of the emotions that come with it. That was very helpful for multiple people. I see it help people all the time. Jealousy gets thrown as this big wet blanket over all these other emotions.
There are competing theories about whether jealousy is a simple emotion or whether it's a complex emotion. For me, and what my research, what I've turned up is jealousy has accompanying emotions. It's not for me to decide whether they are jealousies made of them or they come along with, but here they are. We've got anger, we've got sadness, we've got anticipatory grief, we've got shame. There's so much. If people notice that they're feeling jealous and then name all those bits, most people already have some tools for dealing with sadness, anger, rage, control, all these other emotions that come along with it.
Now we are already 10 steps ahead just by following the first two parts of the jealousy roadmap that my participants so neatly laid out for me. I thank you to them. Then it's about changing the story, changing the story that you're telling yourself, and starting to hear other stories. I think listening to this podcast, hearing people's stories so that you start normalizing on the fact that jealousy is navigable, it does not mean anything's wrong with you, anything's wrong with your relationship. It doesn't mean that your partner has to change what they're doing so that you feel differently. That's a huge part of it.
Then I hear and now we're calling, you had a recent episode on boundaries, naming your needs. Naming them, and then being able to actually ask for them. That was the fourth step. Every single participant was so clear on the fact that as long as they didn't actually identify their need, and they just kept saying, I don't want you to do that. They were stuck because I don't want you to do that. I'll feel different is not empowering. It doesn't actually provoke our partners to have a lot of empathy for us. Saying what you need. Refer back to every Multiamory episode covering this. Name your needs and figure out how to communicate about them. Use your tools.
Then the last step, and this one is totally optional. If you happen to be a person who can foster compersion and you want to do that, people who were able to foster compersion had something else to aim some of their attention at, but it wasn't required and not everybody experienced it. That's it. Five steps.
Emily: That's great.
Jase: That's fantastic. I love it.
Dedeker: That's so cool.
Jase: That it's a lot of the stuff we've talked about, but seeing it broken down because you were able to collect all these different people's accounts of it and go, "Oh, I see the patterns. I see what that is." I love it. That's so cool.
Dedeker: I love that because it feels like this nice condensing of all these different approaches and roadmaps through jealousy that I've seen so many other people take. With different contexts and different relationships. I know for myself, thinking about the fact that, I don't know, when I first started practicing non-monogamy in my early 20s, I was probably just at the like noticing stage. I can just notice it, but I'm not going to name it. I'm not going to own it. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to pretend that it's not here because that's bad non-monogamy as my poor tender little early 20-year-old self thought.
Then I don't know it's like so interesting to see it build upon it in that way. This is also such a helpful framework, I think to think about. Especially because when you do suddenly get caught off guard by a jealousy attack or something like that, even having something some little boxes to put this into can be so helpful and so regulating for so many people. That's so cool that your participants gave that to you.
Joli: Totally.
Dedeker: Instead of you being the one to be like, "Hey, try this, and let's see how it goes."
Joli: The evidence was already there. That was my favorite part about it. When I gave my TEDx, I had to pick a thing to talk about, and I wound up talking about compersion because I just thought that there should be a TEDx out there on compersion at the time. I was like there. If I were doing it again today, I would actually choose this roadmap because it emerged from the data and people are out there hacking this together themselves. These were different people in different communities all over North America, piecing this together.
What I noticed is there were also these bubbles where the LA bubble really had a handle on this aspect. The Washington DC bubble really had a handle on this aspect. The Portland bubble I handle on a different aspect. I'm seeing that play out with my clients. That's, man,
Dedeker: I wonder why. Oh, I want to ask 6 billion questions. We didn't have time. I want all of the goss about everyone in every location. I'm oof oof. Oh God, I'm so intrigued.
Joli: It's so fun to see too, how there were many monogamous participants who reported just feeling calm, having spent an hour talking with me about jealousy, even though they struggled a little bit. They didn't know what exactly we were going to be talking about. Because they didn't come in like, "Yay, I'm going to talk about jealousy because this is a thing we talk about in my world." They were like, "I guess I can, yes, I felt jealousy, I can do that." They sat down and they talked about it and some of them were moved to tears and beyond.
Some of them were because they were really deep in their stuff and some of them were more like, "I'm actually taking this from a 40,000-foot view. I can see it." All of them were like, "Yes, we don't talk about this in a structured way." They talk about it with their friends in a casual if something comes up. If there's a jealousy-inspired feeling, this big set of sensations or an incident or a problem, they talk about it, but they weren't proactively talking about it so there was this calming to, "Oh, yes, actually, I have some ways that I work with this. Here's how." Because I would ask them these questions and they're like, "Yes."
How fascinating that sitting right there within themselves was the capacity to build what they needed, which was community, to talk about jealousy proactively and comfortably as a totally normal thing.
Jase: I love that. That's so cool. Before we wrap up, I did have one little bonus question I wanted to ask you. As a therapist, as a psychoanalyst, what does it say about a person who organizes their books by color?
Joli: That's a great question.
Jase: For those who are not seeing the video find they're Hamilton, .
Emily: It's very beautiful.
Jase: It's beautiful.
Emily: It's a very beautiful.
Jase: I love it.
Emily: show.
Joli: Okay.
Dedeker: My sister is one of these people also, so we can. We'll rope her, I guess
Joli: I'll tell you this first off, that they're not just by color, but this happens to be all sexuality and relationship titles. This happens to be all-depth psychology titles. This is literally a representation of self and the rainbow is because I'm queer but I have so much passing privilege. I'm a mom to seven teenagers. I've been a mom since I was 22 years old.
Dedeker: Wow.
Joli: I like to wear my queerness on my sleeve because it's erased every day. Even though my husband and I are both queer, it's just erased all the time. Yes, the rainbow's actually really simple. we don't need any dream analysis at all. Just straight-up queer flagging. .
Jase: Got it. Hell yes.
Dedeker: I appreciate also that your show is called Playing With Fire and there is actual fire in your background. People who are not watching the video can't see. There's an object on fire.
Joli: I always, every time I'm talking to anyone, I am also a double Leo, born in the year of the Dragon, and my nickname is Phoenix,
Dedeker: Yes.
Joli: Oh, and my moon is an Aries.
Dedeker: I'm a dragon lady.
Jase: Lots of fire going on. That's great.
Dedeker: Yes. This has been fantastic. Where can our listeners find more of you and your work?
Joli: If you are interested in just nabbing that jealousy framework so that you've got it in one place, I would recommend going to listen to joli.com. Just go to listen to joli.com and you'll get my top five relationship guides. I think the best one in there, well maybe it's a split two ways, the jealousy framework's just laid out for you in there. You'll just have it. You don't have to take notes. Also, it has my what is sex conversation, which if you've never had that before, it's just a great conversation to have. It's one page and you can blame it on Joli. You can be like, "We're going to have this conversation about what is sex," and somebody else asked us to. If you want to find me on social media, you can find me anywhere at D-R-J-O-L-I_Hamilton, drjoli_hamilton like musical.
Dedeker: Wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Joli: Thank you so much for having me. It was totally a joy.
Dedeker: We want to hear from you listeners. Joli, what is our question that's going to go on our Instagram stories this week?
Joli: This is a question I love to ask my research participants and really anybody I get the chance to talk to anywhere. That is, what is the purpose of jealousy? What's it for?