Eight Signs You're The Victim Of Jealousy
Jan 16, 2018 by apost team
Helen's face, or specifically love and beauty, once launched a thousand ships to Troy. Jealousy, however, sinks thousands of ships daily everywhere. Fulton J. Sheen describes jealousy as "the tribute mediocracy pays to genius." Some tribute, aye? While jealousy may be some sort of backhanded compliment, its presence is anything but complementary within the life of the victim.
What Is Jealousy?
To deal with jealousy, you first must understand what it is and how it manifests itself. If you have a heartbeat, then you've likely experienced it to some degree yourself. It's important to note that jealousy can be based on both real and perceived facts. Also of note is that studies have proven a "healthy amount" of jealousy is necessary to maintain human motivation. In other words, if the facets of your life were all safe from threat 24/7, you would have no motivation to put forth any effort at maintaining and improving any element of your life.
So why does jealously happen? Jealousy occurs when a person's place in life feels threatened by someone or something. This isn't to be confused with envy. With envy, you simply want what someone else has. Although, the two often do overlap and do go hand and hand.
Relationships provide a perfect example of jealousy. You've likely had a sociable friend or significant other with a lot of other relationships in their lives. The threat these other relationships pose to your own place might've to lead you to fear the other relationships are more valued, better, important, replacing, surpassing, time-consuming, etc than your own. This is called jealousy. A healthy amount keeps you invested in making the effort necessary to maintain and grow the relationship. Excessive amounts result in anger, envy, mistrust, and underhanded actions. Such extreme jealousy can have long-lasting and wide-ranging negative impacts on everyone involved.
When a person experiences an unhealthy amount of jealousy, the result is fight or flight. With flight, they'll discard the situation and avoid you in order to avoid the disappointment, depression, and other negative emotions of a potential loss. In this case, you'll likely never even be aware of the person's feelings and, aside from their absence, you'll likely never see any direct consequences of the jealousy.
It's the fight response that you have to be mindful of identifying. With fights, the jealous person will make every effort to keep or gain what they consider their rightful place. The fight response can cause a great deal of havoc to your life if you don't identify it as a problem. This fight response may be overtly obvious to some people. However, jealousy can also manifest itself in more subtle, small episodes of psychological warfare that you may not realize are taking place until the culmination makes a big impact.
Eight Behaviors That Signal Someone Is Jealous Of You
1. Inauthentic Praise
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Most often, a jealous person isn't going to blurt out that you're taking spotlight or something that they feel rightfully theirs. They'll instead offer polite praise to your face before going about a verbal smear campaign behind your back. Take people by their actions, not by their words to your face.
2. Backhanded Praise
This is a passive-aggressive approach to jealousy. The jealous person will often begin with a mildly complementary remark and then include the dreaded backhanded 'but...' Example: "Mary did a good job on the banner. I bet she stayed up all night working on it, which might've been why the words were lopsided and she didn't take the time to shadow them like I did on my last banner." It's an effort to moderate and downplay your success as unimportant. And, if they have any success of their own, they'll take the opportunity to reminisce and flaunt it as better and more important. A lot of people with more Pollyanna personalities have difficulties recognizing such passive aggressiveness for the dig that it is, which means that those people simply hear the remarks as constructive criticism by the helpful (jealous) person. Therefore, any confrontation over it looks like aggression on your part if you don't choose how you handle the situation very carefully.
3. Imitation
Hello, Single White Female. In most cases, however, it doesn't go to such extremes. It's more a matter of a person feeling they deserve to be where you're at more than you and, by some twist of irony, feeling that the way to get their place is by doing exactly what you do... only better. So, they'll imitate your style, mannerisms, voice, and/or personality with the notion that they pull it off better.
4. Intimidation
Some jealousy takes the path of intimidation, not imitation. The jealous person may attempt to dissuade you from success by discouraging, distracting, or developing unrealistic fears concerning your aspirations and actions. They may turn constructive criticism moments into verbal opportunities to downgrade you without merit. Jealousy can even resort to blackmail and threats of whistleblowing real or fabricated facts.
5. Everything's A Competition
A healthy degree and amount of competition improves relationships and work ethic. The problem is when that competition is all-encompassing and designed for embarrassment. When someone is jealous, everything becomes a competition with the potential to leave their target looking and feeling lesser than and themselves as greater than. Be particularly careful with insecure jealous people. These personalities will often pit rivals against each other so that they can either swoop in and save the day or use the process of elimination without ever getting their hands directly dirty.
6. Amplification Of Failures
They're thrilled that you failed. No matter how insignificant it may be, the jealous person will always take every opportunity to amplify your failures. They'll keep the topic alive making it a metaphor, standard, reference point, or otherwise relevant as long as they possibly can. They'll exaggerate and widen the failure to be of more importance than actuality. And, they'll ensure that it reaches everyone's ears.
7. Busybody Gossipy Fabricators
That's a mouthful, right? Someone jealous wants to stay in your business constantly. They'll often make a pretense of being a kind ear or helping hand, but, in actuality, they're gathering information to use against you. Information you divulge is then spread around through gossip and rumor to discredit or undermine you. One of the worst parts is that they'll often fabricate added or misleading information based on what you tell them. Example: A jealous coworker hounds you about why you were off yesterday. You finally tell her that you're worried about your gynecologist visit because they found some cysts on your ovaries that could be cancerous. The jealous coworker suggestively gossips throughout your family-oriented place of employment that you, an unmarried woman, are extremely worried about what the gynecologist told you yesterday, which may infer anything from STDs to pregnancy in the minds of co-workers and management.
8. Open Hatred
Some people make no pretense of liking the people they are jealous of and will openly treat them with disdain for no reason or basis. In these cases, at least you know what the situation is and can prepare and protect yourself from getting being burned by the expressed hatred.
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