Trust Is the Answer for Jealousy

At one time or another every couple must delve into their core regarding issues of jealousy, bound in securities sometimes previously untapped.

The single person isn’t immune, either. Their jealousies are camped in distances of awkwardness. So much so there may be no reasonable outlet.

Jealousies affect us all, if that sense of possessiveness is exacted to the point where trust is corroded. This issue is decked in the fact of our insecurity for dim and dark grievances hid, unresolved, in the past.

The Challenge of Reconciliation

The practice of moulding the warped aspects of our pasts into a more usable future is the process of reconciliation—not between us and another, but it’s settling indifferent nuances in our own personalities.

We have our desires, and we have our exposures to the truth; both these, can at times, run at cross purposes to each other. We can love someone and hate how they interact with their world at the same time. Or, they might tantalise us, feeding our desires, yet we never run past first base.

These are not their problems; they are ours.

The challenge of reconciliation is to resolve the root cause of our jealousy before it impacts on trust—with the associated longer term ramifications; those we cannot afford.

Connecting Jealousy with the Erosion of Trust

The truth of the matter is a dividing one.

With each encroaching jealous move we reinforce a lack of trust that may not even be valid, for we have allowed other factors—not simply the virtue of our partner—to cloud our judgment. Again, these are linked, most often, with troubled incidents within our past, some buried so deeply we’ve forgotten them, but they still hinder us.

A very practical challenge—and therefore a key opportunity—in understanding this connection—jealousy and the erosion of trust—is to elicit and extend trust, deliberately.

This may be very difficult for a jealous person to do. But it isn’t impossible. And it says so much for the value of the relationship that, even though there is a risk taken trusting someone, it can only help the relationship if that relationship has, indeed, a future we believe in.

There is no sense in not doing this, because if we’re betrayed as a through the agency of our trust we gave it our best shot. And though we may be hurting, it’s a better sort of hurt than to stand as the destroyer of a relationship because we didn’t act on those irrational impulses of jealousy.

***

Jealousies exist because of buried insecurities, unresolved from the past. The only way forward is to deliberately give trust, and to look for evidence where trust is vindicated. Possessiveness in relationships is caustic. Instead, we must simply trust because the relationship depends on it.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.