Behind the Gossip: The Truth About Jealousy

Jealousy isn’t the villain, but gossip often becomes the getaway car. In this episode, I want to show you how to catch that moment and turn it into real self-trust instead of self-sabotage.

This show is for women who’ve been labeled, misdiagnosed, or misunderstood. Whether you have a diagnosis or just know deep down that you experience life differently, this is your space to stop fixing yourself and start trusting who you already are. My name is Amanda Hess. Let’s go.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the podcast.

I had this epiphany today where I wanted to talk to you about jealousy, and I wanted to talk to you about gossip. And it came up for me because jealousy is something that I have been feeling over the past week. And I just want to be really authentic and honest with you, sharing that with you, because jealousy is a normal human emotion.

And I think that the world has done us a disservice by telling us that we should never feel jealous, because then when we do feel jealous, we reject it. And what I know about emotion is when we reject a feeling, when we won’t let it through, when we decide to brace against it, that feeling is going to show up in ways that we don’t want it to show up.

And the first thing that I was really thinking about today, and the first thing that I really noticed when I was looking at the jealousy that I was experiencing and watching the jealousy that other people in my world were also experiencing, was the gossip. And I have just really noticed that when we feel jealous, we want to gossip.

And I see this in so many different areas. You know, I have a guilty pleasure of loving reality TV, but not just all reality TV. I really love shows like Dancing with the Stars. I love shows like The Voice. I love shows like American Idol. And I know they have their good parts and their bad parts, and there’s many things about it that are not the greatest. But at the same time, I do love watching people have the opportunity to have a platform and excel. I think that that’s really amazing.

But what I also notice is the online chatter that goes on about the people that are out there. And one thing that has become very apparent to me is how we love to tear people down. And, you know, it was said to me a long time ago, I think that I heard another podcaster talk about how when we gossip, it is ultimately a very quick way to form connection, but it’s also a very toxic way to form connection. Because what we end up doing is we end up speaking to other people about other people in a very negative way. And it’s a very low vibe connection.

And what I will say to you is that when we gossip, it doesn’t mean we’re bad people. Everybody wants to gossip. So I want to preface this with, gossip is normal. And if you find yourself in gossip, if you’ve seen yourself gossip, if you find yourself feeling compelled to gossip, I don’t want to have you put a lot of judgment over gossip, okay?

But I want to shine a light here because a lot of people will say they hate gossip, but a lot of those people will still gossip, including myself. I have gossiped in the past. I probably will gossip in the future. It happens. But when we gossip, where does it come from?

And the truth is that gossip, speaking poorly about other people, speaking behind other people’s backs, saying things that we would maybe not say to their face to a group of other people, why do we do that? There’s typically two reasons. Number one, we feel insecure. We feel insecure and we don’t want to feel insecure. Number two, we want to feel connection. So even if you’re involved in a conversation and other people gossip, we will want to engage in the gossip to feel connected.

And to me, it’s just, first of all, understanding why we do it. It’s very important to understand why we gossip. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s not because you’re doing horrible things. It doesn’t mean you have terrible character. It just means that you’re feeling insecure and you’re trying to form connection. But I do want to look at it, and I want to shine a light on it, and I want to make a case for how jealousy and gossip are interconnected.

So when I feel jealous, I can feel jealousy in my body, right? I know where the jealousy sits. I think thanks to social programming, it’s green, but it is green. And I feel it in my chest. It’s quite large. It’s very tight. And it wants me to act. It wants me to do something so that I no longer have to feel jealous, right? That rejection of that feeling, that feeling is trying to get you to do something so that you don’t have to feel it anymore. That discomfort is trying to push you into action.

But what we tend to do is *snaps fingers* act very quickly. We take quick action when we’re feeling jealous because it feels like something that is the truth about us. We start to internalize what’s happening for the other person in comparison to us. There’s a lot of judgment that goes on when we’re experiencing jealousy. We’re judging ourselves, and then the experience of judging ourselves is so painful that we try to deflect that to judging somebody else.

And then if we then take the additional step of bringing people into our jealousy and sharing our jealous thoughts and having somebody validate and approve that for us, then we don’t have to feel jealous anymore. And that is the truth. We gossip to get rid of the feeling of jealousy almost always.

And once we see it, I feel like we can’t unsee it. It is just something that we now have an awareness of. And for me, as a coach, as your coach on this episode, when I’m coaching myself, when I’m coaching others, what I like to start with is really starting to grow some capacity for feeling jealous. We are in too much of a rush to get rid of emotions like jealousy. And what I mean by that is the vibration of it, we do have the ability to feel it. I do, you do, everybody does. We all have the ability to feel it. But we might not have the capacity.

And capacity is a really interesting thing. When we talk about emotional capacity, there’s so many factors that go into your emotional capacity. So let’s just like begin with what is emotional capacity, just in case you haven’t heard me talk about it before. Emotional capacity is simply your ability to experience an emotion and not have it tip you into a stress response, into fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And once you kind of can see that, what we can do is we can start finding ways to sit with that feeling and not be in a rush.

The first step, of course, always is going to be having a regulated nervous system. Now, I’m going to preface this with, a lot of times we want to solve this when it’s happening. And you can, and I’m going to talk about how to do that. But we also want to be building up our ability long term with day-to-day action, things that we’re doing in the every day so that we aren’t as exposed to the emotion tipping over on a scale from one to 10, one being low, 10 being high. We’re not being exposed to it flipping into a nine or a 10.

When you’re experiencing it in the moment, when you experience jealousy, and it’s an eight or it’s a nine or it’s a 10 out of 10, which is something that I experienced for myself very recently, it was combined with a lot of other emotions as well: sadness, disappointment, overwhelm, a lot of very heavy, hard emotions that came with the jealousy.

However, what we tend to do is try to out-think ourselves when we’re in that scenario. And what I will tell you is that no matter what emotion you’re feeling when it comes to negative emotions, we can’t get in that tug of war with our brain. It will not work. It never works.

When we’re feeling an emotion at an eight or a nine or a 10 out of 10, when we’re feeling jealousy at an eight or a nine or a 10 out of 10, we are going to feel that strong urge to act. But instead, what we want to do is slow it down. So taking some big, deep breaths. In for three. hold for three. Blow out for three. Doing that three times.

But the second part of this is understanding emotion, understanding that when we’re talking about jealousy, jealousy is an emotion. So that means that vibration in our body, while it’s very intense, isn’t going to last. That emotion is going to come up and it’s going to peak and then it’s going to come down like a wave if we let it run through our body.

Now, it’s going to come back, and it’s going to happen again and again and again. But as we allow and process the emotion in our body, then it will become less and less intense. And we can bring that down with using nervous system regulation, tapping into our senses, moving our body, going outside. As we’re doing those things, we can pull that emotion down as we’re allowing it. And once that emotion comes in at like a seven out of 10 or even a six out of 10, we have more access to our logical brain.

Getting through jealousy is really very much a solitary processing. And what we tend to do because we feel jealous is we want others to help us through it. We want somebody else to say, “No, it’s okay. You’re better than her. She doesn’t deserve all that. She’s not all that. She’s not all that pretty. She’s not all that smart. She’s not all that good. Look at all the fucked up things she does.” We think we want that.

But in fact, when we’re participating in that, unknowingly, what we’re doing is telling ourselves that we don’t have the capacity to get through feeling the jealousy. Instead of tapping in and really just letting yourself ride the wave of it, knowing that this emotion is not going to last. And I promise you, I promise you the feeling won’t last. No feeling lasts forever, not even this one, and no feeling stays that intense forever.

Once you can start understanding that when it comes to emotion, and you get that practice at allowing the emotion, you can start seeing these urges to reject that feeling, the urge to gossip, to speak badly about other people, to tear down other women. And when you see it as, “Oh, this is just me not wanting to feel jealous,” we can start to solve it.

So instead of getting rid of jealousy, like, jealousy is so horrible and I should never feel it, instead of that, jealousy is something that is a normal human emotion, and it comes up when I feel threatened and when I feel insecure and when I’m craving connection. So I get to decide what I’m going to do with the jealousy, and I’m going to take care of that for me. And I’m going to let that take as long as it’s going to take. And I’m going to regulate the shit out of myself on the way there.

And I might need to have somebody help me with that too. I coach on this with my clients all the time, right? This is something that comes up in coaching conversations, and we grow this capacity for this experience of shame in the body and being able to process and allow it.

Once you become the person that can handle jealousy, oh my gosh, you’re unstoppable because then when jealousy comes up, it doesn’t make you shrink. It doesn’t make you small. It doesn’t make you have to fight like an animal to get out of a cage because you’re not in a cage. You’re just a human having a human experience. Nobody is putting you in a cage. Nobody is putting you in a hole. Nobody is holding you back. That person succeeding has nothing to do with you succeeding. Nothing.

You are the only person you need to worry about when it comes to you succeeding, because the person that wins here, the person that gets to really love their life, is the person that is fully willing and able to feel all the feelings that life has to offer.

Life is always 50/50. And things that you want to know about your brain, number one, your brain has a negative bias. That is how it’s built. That is how we’re made. So we’re always going out in the world, not meaning to, but looking for problems. We’re judging everything around us, including ourselves.

And so what happens is negative judgment is going to occur. That person did that better than me. That person is smarter than me. That person got a promotion that I didn’t get. That person has more friends than I have. That person has a better husband than I have. That person blah, blah, blah, right?

We have that experience because of how our brain works. So if we say to ourselves, “You should never feel jealous, and if you do, it means something’s wrong. And so we have to get rid of jealousy and you better start tapping into gratitude,” I’m like, maybe, maybe.

But actually, you missed a step. You missed a step. You missed the part where we process the jealousy and just notice it and notice like, “Oh, I have all of these thoughts about this other person.” So first, I’m going to process the emotion. I’m going to regulate my nervous system. And then I can get curious about, what does that person have that I wish I had? What do they have that I wish I had and why?

Because when you start asking yourself that question, you can see where there’s gaps in your own life. And what the real issue is is not what that person’s doing, but what you think you can’t have. And this is a beautiful place to start.

Now, it’s going to create all kinds of other negative emotions, okay? It is. However, the process is the same. The more emotion we can allow and the more capacity that we can have for emotion, the more we get to meet our own needs and meet the things that we want to have in our own life. It is going to allow you to create results that you want in your life. And that’s awesome. Awesome. Because that’s how you start getting more of what you want in your life.

So rather than pushing jealousy away and dipping into gossip so that you don’t have to feel this jealousy and then living in this life that maybe you don’t want, you could allow the jealousy in your body, regulate your nervous system, and ask, “What does that person have that I want to have?” And then you can get curious about how to create that.

Sometimes it’s physical things. Sometimes it’s simply their demeanor, the way they are in the world. Sometimes it’s the fact they have the courage to do something that you didn’t have the courage to do. Sometimes it’s their willingness to be bold and you wanting to be as bold as that. Sometimes it’s them being the boss when you want to be the boss. That’s good to know. If you want to be the boss, you can be the boss. Now we can get to work listening to the two episodes before this and set some goals.

And what happens is we’re not dipping into that jealousy and using it as a buffer to not feel jealous.

So this is what I’ve got for you this week. And here’s what I want you to know. I know this is a challenging topic. And if you want some help, I’d love for you to come over to Instagram, okay? That’s where I spend a lot of time. It’s @theamandahess. And I’d love for you just to DM me and say, “Hey, I’d love some help processing some jealousy.” And I’ll help you right in the DMs. You don’t even have to book a call. We’ll do it right in the DMs.

I want to help as many people as I can. You know, it’s funny. I was having a conversation with a colleague today, and we were just talking about, you know, building our businesses and marketing and all of those things. And she said to me, “Well, you know, you want to make sure that you’re creating clients from this, that, and whatever.”

And I just let her know, like, actually, I just want to help people. Like, of course I want to make money, you know, because we need money to live. But also, I’m really, really focused on helping as many women as I can. So if that is you, send me a DM. Let’s talk about it.

All right, my friend. That’s it for now. I will see you here next week. Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today. If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review. It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you. I’m excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode. Until then, take care, friend.