How To Start Letting Go of Jealousy In Your Relationship [VIDEO]

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In today’s video, I discuss how to beat jealousy in your relationship.

Zachary Stockill: Many of the people in my audience are not only dealing with retroactive jealousy, but also dealing with what’s considered more traditional or “normal” jealousy in your relationships.

If that sounds like you, in today’s video, I have a very, very important message.

My name is Zachary Stockill, and since 2013, I’ve helped thousands of men and women from around the world overcome retroactive jealousy and save their relationships.

If you’d like to learn more about my work or are interested in working with me one-on-one, please click here.

For the people here for the first time, the term retroactive jealousy refers to unwanted intrusive thoughts, often obsessive curiosity, and what I like to call mental movies about your partner’s past relationships and/or sexual/dating history.

You can suffer from one of those symptoms. You can suffer from all three.

But that, in essence, is what we’re talking about when we talk about retroactive jealousy.

A lot of people have issues with the term jealousy in the context of retroactive jealousy, use the term, or use the word loosely.

Jealousy can mean many different things.

But one of the things that jealousy refers to, obviously, is feeling threatened that your partner is cheating on you, or being a little too flirtatious with her coworker, or worried that she’s on her phone texting some other person, etc

This is more kind of normal, standard jealousy that many people deal with in relationships.

And so in today’s brief video, I just want to present some kind of big picture thinking about how to let go of more normal jealousy in a relationship, and it all starts with this.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you can only take responsibility for your words, your actions, your half, shall we say, of the relationship.

A lot of people, and I have to say in particular men, who engage in kind of mate guarding behaviors.

In other words, texting their partner all the time to see where she is, who she’s talking to, or going through her phone, or keeping a close eye on her.

She’s never allowed to go out without you, that kind of thing.

A lot of guys doing this are playing into a cognitive fallacy.

This basically says something like, “I can control this person”.

If I just monitor them closely enough, keep a close enough eye on them, or just control them enough, I’ll eventually be able control over this person.”

And that does not work, needless to say.

I often say the only way to truly ensure on a deep, deep fundamental level that your partner is 100% physically faithful to you.

The only way to truly know that is to spend 24 hours a day, I mean that literally, 24 hours a day in the same physical space as them.

However, this is going to be impossible for 99.99999% of every human being on the planet, right?

It’s impossible.

But when you feed into that fallacy, when you engage in this kind of mate guarding behavior,

When you’re always monitoring your partner, or trying to see where they are and who they’re talking to.

And all these things, you’re kind of playing into that fallacy. It’s ultimately counterproductive, and it doesn’t work.

From a purely practical level, that is not the way to make sure your partner is faithful.

And ultimately, you can’t really know with 100% certainty if anyone is faithful.

That’s not the way life works.

It’s about taking a bit of a risk, deciding to believe and to trust.

It’s an active decision, rather than this constant state of paranoia that I think is optimal for everyone watching this.

Another thing that I think is very important is, when it comes to more regular jealousy in a relationship, sometimes there’s a lot of smoke and no fire.

For example, sometimes because of someone’s past trauma, their past relationship history.

Maybe they’ve been betrayed in the past by someone else, or have some childhood wounds they haven’t fully healed.

Sometimes a person can feel incredible jealousy and have really intense instincts to go through their partner’s phone monitor their actions, or try to hover around them all the time.

Sometimes there can be a lot of smoke, but there’s no actual fire. In other words, this person’s partner is not cheating.

She’s not fooling around. He’s not fooling around, not being dodgy and not being shady.

It’s really the, a problem on the part of the jealousy sufferer.

It’s really irrational jealousy.

However, other times there’s a lot of smoke, there’s a lot of jealous feelings, and there is indeed some fire. In other words, sometimes people are shady.

It’s not pleasant to say, but I don’t think everyone in the world is capable of having a mature, grounded relationship.

Some people just thrive off attention from the opposite sex because of their own wounds.

Yet they can never really show up and commit to someone fully.

Those people exist, and to be honest, I think it’s better to avoid relationships with them for obvious reasons.

And sometimes those people can change, but sometimes they can’t.

So again, this comes back to a point I wanted to make earlier, which is, you can only take ownership of you.

That’s it.

And ultimately, if your partner is routinely violating your boundaries and you’ve communicated those boundaries clearly,

Yet they’re still taking advantage of you or taking you for granted, or being really shady and being really dodgy,

And your mom and your best friend and your colleagues are all telling you like, “Dude, like this is not normal.”

This is not okay.

There’s something seriously wrong about this picture.

If you have that perspective and are in that kind of a situation, sometimes the only thing you can do is walk away.

‘Cause you can only control what you can control,+ which is yourself.

That’s it.

So I guess I say that not to be pessimistic, but just to present a bit of a reality check to some of the people who might be watching this.

It’s a really, really, really bad strategy for relationships to commit to someone in the hope that they’ll change, in the hope that something really important to you will change.

And that isn’t just regarding jealousy or someone who’s a bit too flirtatious or outgoing or whatever.

That regards everything.

If there’s something that’s really important to you in a partner, like, a libido,

If you have relatively similar libidos, or trust, things like this, and those things do not improve over an extended period of time, there’s a very good chance, unfortunately, they will never improve.

A big mistake I see people make in my work as a coach is people committing to people in the hope that something fundamental is going to change eventually.

“Oh yeah, she’s working on it and eventually it’ll get better. Eventually this thing will change.”

Cause quite often, change never comes.

Finally, just kind of in closing, beware of the sunk-cost fallacy when it comes to relationships.

What I mean by that is,

Obviously the sunk-cost fallacy is if I’ve spent three years in a relationship and these red flags are still red and my partner’s still just as shady as she was a year ago…

Nothing’s getting better.

I’m feeling disrespected, boundaries are being violated, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I might want to break up.

You know, at least there’s gonna be a part of me that wants to break up. But I might think, “Well, then the whole, the past three years have been a waste,” right? It’s, you know, like, “Why would I do that?

I need to keep investing, because maybe she’ll change and then that, if she changes, or if I keep investing, that will make the past three years worthwhile.”

You see what I mean?

When in truth, sometimes, again, take the lesson that you need to learn.

Those three years are not necessarily a waste at all, as long as you learned something important.

And again, sometimes you have to walk away.

So beware the sunk-cost fallacy when it comes to jealousy in your relationships, when it comes to relationships in general.

Sometimes, once again, walking away is the best option.

If you don’t want to walk away, and if you’ve identified that your jealousy is a problem and you’re willing to put in the work to solve it…

Sign up for my free four-part video mini-course on how to start overcoming retroactive jealousy.

It’s completely free, with no catch, and it includes videos and content you won’t find on YouTube or anywhere else, so be sure to sign up for my free four-part video mini-course to start overcoming retroactive jealousy.