It’s others who have success, money, fulfilling work, a great sex life, comfort, happiness – not me! Do you sometimes catch yourself enjoying finding fault in others? Do you get a secret pleasure when an angel falls? Sound familiar? Relax, you’ve just entered the major leagues and committed one of the ‘seven deadly sins.’ If you’ve been there, like I believe all of us have, the god, or is it goddess, of envy has you by the throat and is eating away at your heart. Envy is a complicated emotion, because it is multi-faceted and contains a combination of desire, feeling deprived, self-pity, resentment, sado-masochism, helplessness, obsessive thinking and frustrated rage.
Envy begins and ends with the feeling of deprivation. Destiny has denied us our fair share. Others have what has been denied us. Sometimes we don’t even want something until we’ve seen someone else have it. We feel helpless in the face of this unfairness and disparity. Envy often contains the unconscious assumption that the more love, wealth, success etc. others have, the less there is left over for us, which unleashes hostility towards others. Frustrated rage and helplessness are key components of envy (Gaylin, M.D.)
Even though envy has been tagged as one of the seven deadly sins by absolutists, it is a human and universal emotion experienced by all of us to one degree or another. All of us carry the ‘Mark of Cain’ on our foreheads. One source of envy might be attributed to the child’s need for exclusive love and possession of the mother, which always leads to disappointment and deprivation. If mother is cold, distant, not fully connected to her maternal instincts, or chronically envious herself, a deep wounding occurs. The child not initially nurtured with unconditional acceptance and love by mother is left with a hunger so deep it sometimes shows up later in life with oral addictions like eating disorders, alcoholism and drug addiction. The need for loving nourishment gets displaced on food and drink. This hunger is bottomless, never healing the original wound of being emotionally abandoned. In addition, if deprived early in life we arrive in adulthood with a desire to take from others what had been taken from us. Eventually all of us need to learn to mother ourselves and no longer project mother on food, drink, or on our spouses for that matter. If it is a virtue to love other human beings, it surely must be a virtue to love ourselves as well as we are human beings also (Erich Fromm).
The very people we envy, we judge mercilessly. One malicious component of envy is the notion that I not only want more for myself, but also the wish for others to have less. It’s not enough I have success, my friends have to fail! When we’re consumed by envy, what is actually consumed is our joy, our pride and our self-confidence. We become ‘grievance collectors’- it is always us who have the worst seat in the house or are driving in the lane that is the slowest.
Whenever we get caught in anything ‘negative’ that is universally human , Thomas Moore comes to the rescue and asks, “What does envy want? Can we give this deadly sin an open-minded hearing?” When we’re locked into envy we have no personal vision of our own, we only have other people’s visions, of which we’re envious. In the thick of envy we’re blind to our own nature and our preoccupation with the lives of others leads to a neglect of our own. We become attached to envy and try to get everyone drawn into it. “Aren’t you as outraged as I am?!” We resist our own path, feel cheated and deprived, because envy is a resistance to what our heart really wants. We’re out of touch with the potential value of our own fate.
Envy is a defense and protects against deeper pain like grief, sadness and emptiness originating in childhood neglect and emotional abuse. We make excuses for family members who wounded us, “They did their best, they didn’t know any better.” This protection serves as a resistance to not feel deep sorrow, rage and emptiness. Therapy is not about ‘parent bashing’, but it is about having genuine and appropriate emotional responses to what happened to us in the reality of our childhood. The only reason we journey into the past is because we’re stuck and living out our wounds from the early years right now – in the here and now. An understanding and genuine emotional response to what happened to us in childhood liberates us in the present. We have to go underneath envy and hang out with that emptiness in patient awareness. We need to experience the void before it can be filled up with renewed passion, love, creativity and a new vision. Envy can be a lifelong repetitive detour, or if we’re conscious of this emotion, it can lead us to look within and find gifts we never thought we had. Envy like all pathological symptoms is a sign of grace if we truly listen, because it invites us to dive deeper into soul and mystery. We begin to live with greater depth, maturity and flexibility. Ironically, pathology can be a route to a soulful life.
If you’re stuck on the envy treadmill, you need to understand the following cycle. Envy = leads to frustrated rage, which leads to hostility towards others, which leads to rejection by others, which leads to depression and loneliness, which leads to greater envy. Envy is the result of competition gone wrong. We need to get off the ‘envy cycle’ because it doesn’t allow closeness and intimacy. In closing, here is the poet Johann Wolfgang von Göthe’s take on envy, “Against another’s great merits, there is no remedy but love.” Our neighbor’s victories are our victories.
Dr. Peter Milhado ©2010
