Are you craving attention from a person whose focus is on someone else? Do you desire attributes that are possessed by another?
When you experience jealousy or envy, you have measured your sense of your self against your image of another person and arrived at a conclusion that was motivated by the biological signal of the affect of shame.
Technically, from the viewpoint of affect theory an affect is the biological portion of our emotions. Thus, envy and jealousy are emotional transformations of the affect shame.
The emotion of envy is often confused with jealousy. Envy is directed at another or others, wanting their qualities, success, or possession.
Jealousy involves thinking you will lose, or have lost, some affection or security from another person because of someone or something else—including their interest in an activity that takes time away from you. Both jealousy and envy involve comparisons and contrasts. Comparison suggests similarity or equivalence, whereas contrast focuses on differences. At times you may compare yourself with another, but most often you will be focused upon contrasts based on negative feelings. How you feel about yourself is determined to a great degree by the comparison and contrast of your sense of self with what you consider to be your ideals, which may be projected upon another person. Contrasting yourself with an idealized image of another person magnifies shame that can threaten your self-stability. Any threat to your esteem—your established sense of self—will likely activate shame and, when you come up short in such contrasts, shame is experienced as envy or jealousy of another.
You may idealize another person when you are envious; imagining that a quality or something possessed by someone else would bring you happiness or fulfillment. Envy is a state where you experience yourself as lacking something that will lead you to be admired as much as you secretly admire the person who has the desired attribute or possession you envy. Fearing any eruption of inadequacy or disappointment in your self can motivate you to protect yourself by diminishing the importance of the envied other by devaluing them. You are engaged in devaluing when you have belittling thoughts about another person, such as petty criticisms. The things you will criticize about those you envy are likely to be qualities that you believe other people admire in them. A preoccupation with an envied other can lead you to repeatedly measure your self-worth against your image of their value. Although envy can motivate you to damage the position of the person who is envied, either in your imagination or in reality, envy can also make you work harder in order to attain what the envied person possesses.
Envy is a normal human emotion, one virtually everybody feels at one time or another, it also has its value, teaching us what we want to have or to be, and thereby motivating us. When coupled with basic shame, however, it becomes toxic.
Shame is most importantly a felt sense of unworthiness to be in connection, a deep sense of unlovability, with the ongoing awareness of how very much one wants to connect with oters. While shame involves extreme self-consciousness, it also signals powerful relationship longings.
The criticism, devaluation, and humiliation that the child may have been subject to are amplified and turned against the self as in self-criticism. Such shame-based fantasies serve to maintain an illusion of attachment to a caring relationship when the actual relationship may have been ruptured with humiliation.
The sense of shame is comprised of the core belief “Something’s wrong with me” that serves as a cognitive defense against awareness of the needs for relationship and the feelings of sadness and fear present at the time of the humiliating experiences.
Shame is a complex process involving:
1) a diminished self-concept,
2) a lowering of one’s self-worth in order to identify with external humiliation and criticism;
3) a defensive transposition of sadness and fear;
4) a disavowa of anger.
Shame involves disavowal of anger in order to maintain a semblance ofm a connected relationship with the person who engaged in humiliating transactions.
When anger is disavowed a valuable aspect of the self is lost—the need to be taken seriously, respectfully, and to make an impact on the other person.
Shame also involves a transposition of the affects of sadness and fear: the sadness at not being accepted as one is, with one’s own urges, desires, needs, feelings, and behaviors, and the fear of abandonment in the relationship because o fwho one is.
When the child is humiliated, the fear of a loss of relationship and the sadness of not being accepted are transposed into the affect of shame.
Thus, shame is composed of sadness and fear, disavowal of anger and a lowered self-concept—identification with the humiliation.
Person extremely vulnerable to shame either wants to hide himself further, or to cover up his feelings of pain by reacting with rage and projecting shame onto others whom he degrades, which is exactly what happens in the process of envy as well. Thus envy is directly related to inner sense of shame which is what makes it toxic.
What is the cure? A healing and protective relationship where person can get in touch with his fear and sadness for not being accepted as he is, and a relationship where he can finally feel recognized, accepted and validated in his uniqueness as a human being.
