Amanda: Hi guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I am Amanda.
Laura: I'm Laura.
Kendra: And I'm Kendra.
Amanda: And I'm excited today because we get to talk all about Brene Brown's book, “Atlas of the Heart”. A few episodes back we interviewed Dr. Arpita de Palma and we were speaking specifically on anger for that episode. But it got us thinking that emotions serve a purpose, and a lot of us are absolutely petrified to feel negative emotions. That is me. I'm a professional bufferer, but they're for a purpose. So a little background. Brene Brown is an emotions researcher, she's done a lot of work and shame and those sorts of things. In her surveys of over 7,000 individuals over five years, the average number of emotions that people could correctly identify was three: happy, sad and angry. The thing about being able to correctly label your emotions is that it's part of the key of taking ownership of what's going on in your life, in your body, and what's happening to you. Brene says, “language is our portal to meaning making”, oh my gosh, I can't even say this. “Language is our portal to meaning making connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Language shows us that naming and experience doesn't give the experience more power. It gives us the power of understanding and meaning”. So the term applied to the ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is called “emotional granularity”. And that's honestly what this podcast, this episode, is to give us all a little bit more emotional granularity at least in regards to envy, jealousy and resentment today. So, Harvard psychologist Susan David says that “those who are able to distinguish various emotions do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence. That's compared to those who see everything in black and white. Being able to label your emotions leads to greater emotional regulation and psychosocial wellbeing”. So a lot of us might think feeling the feeling, in the first place, is a loss of control. It's the opposite. By knowing how to allow your emotions, gives you more emotional regulation. So another concept that we need to revisit before this, is the idea from metacognition that feelings are not good or bad in and of themselves. They are an experience in your body, not your head, is not what you're thinking about it. It's what you're feeling in your body. It's that, you know, that fluttering in your chest. It's the pressure that you're feeling. It's the upset stomach that you're having. If you're nervous about something. That is what a feeling is, they are just vibrations that are an expression of a message from your brain. Your brain thinks a thought. Your body receives the message, and it's the feeling is the vibration that you're having. So we wanna be able to accurately name what we're feeling. And by the way, if you have problems allowing and processing feelings, revisit our podcast number 17. And it's all about this. But once you're able to allow it and let it pass, what's the message that you are being given with this emotion? It can be a message to tell you what to do next or to just take in more information to use with your decision making. According to Psychology Today, emotions are motivational tools. They can point us in the direction of conversations that we need to have, goals that we need to move toward, and changes we need to make in our lives. Susan David says, “they can be beacons, not barriers, helping us identify what we care most about in this world and motivating us to make positive changes”. So let's talk about some of the emotions that many people struggle with. Today, we're gonna visit jealousy, envy, and resentment. These are grouped in Brene's chapter on “Emotions of Comparison”. It's also coupled with admiration, reverence, Schadenfreude and Freudenfreude. But the ones we're gonna talk about today are jealousy, envy, and resentment, and they're in comparison to another person or group of people. So, Kendra, take it away.
Kendra: Okay. Well, first. According to Brene, she actually admits that she had been using jealousy and envy all wrong. And when we kind of started to bring this up, I think a lot of people are gonna relate to this as thinking one is the other and the other is the other. So, envy occurs when we want something that another person has. So when we're saying like the 2022 version, we're jelly, we are usually meaning we're envious. So we want something someone else has. On the other hand, or you know, another branch to this tree is jealousy. Jealousy is actually when we fear losing a relationship or a valued part of a relationship that we already have. So to put it succinctly, envy involves two people, and jealousy actually involves three. Brene says, “Ask yourself, am I fearful of losing something I value to another person, or do I want something someone else has?” So if you can kind of see that distinction is either I'm wanting or I'm coveting something somebody already has or I'm fearful or I feel that I could lose something that I value to another person. Sometimes that could be identity, sometimes that could be like loyalty, that could be a lot of things. But see how the relationship is either just you and the other person that something has, or you're fearful of losing something of value to another person. Jealousy is actually a threat to a valued social relationship. So Psychology Today says, “jealousy is not always about you. Narcissistic and borderline personalities are so fearful of abandonment that they evoke jealous reactions in a partner and then blame the partner for being jealous.” Brene Brown says, “that people who are more satisfied in the romantic relationship are less likely to be jealous. She suggests noticing if you're feeling afraid or sad or angry, and ask yourself, if I'm scared I'm losing something important to me, what kind of conversation do I need to have with that person?” When we talk about envy, envy is when someone has something that we want, but we currently don't have. Envy kind of gets a bad rap, but there's actually different kinds of envy. There is an evolutionary social psychologist, Bram Buunk suggests that there's a benign envy and a malicious envy. Malicious envy is the pursuit of sabotaging others, but benign envy is actually pushing people to work harder, almost like a motivator to obtain the goal or get what they want. We can use envy positively like you when you take the person out of it and just see what the actual thing you are admiring. So, like if you look at another marriage and see a happy marriage and you're like, “I want that”. Then you start to do the work on what it will take for you to eventually have a happy marriage. Or you hear about a partner coming back from an amazing vacation. They go on and on about it. Then you think to yourself, “Wow, I want to enjoy an amazing trip”. So then you work towards blocking the time in advance, doing the research, finding the place, blah, blah, blah, and work towards taking that amazing trip and having that same experience. If it's money in the bank account, then you start learning what it looks like. I need some better budgeting tools, some better money management, and a mindset that says “I can” and you just start to ask yourself better questions. Brene Brown says, “Ask yourself this, if I want something that someone else has, do I want to see them lose it, or it is not about that, it's actually a goal that I wish to attain.
Laura: So then she goes on to talk about resentment, and Brene says that she used to think resentment was in the anger category, which I probably would've thought it would be in the anger category. She is a perfectionist and was constantly irritated at people who she perceived to not be sacrificing, grinding, working as hard. That's a, I think, a relatable set of feelings. But when she was interviewing emotions researcher, Mark Bracket for her “Unlocking Us” podcast, she asked him to confirm if resentment is indeed part of anger. He said, “No. Resentment is part of envy”. And that kind of blew my mind too. She says her mind was blown and it became clear. And she realized what was going on in her own life. She says, “I'm not mad because you're resting. I'm mad because I'm so bone tired and I want to rest. But unlike you, I'm going to pretend that I don't need to”. Sound familiar to any perfectionists out there? “I'm not furious that you're okay with something that's really good and imperfect”. So that B minus work that we like to talk about. “I'm not furious that you're okay with something that's actually good but is imperfect. I'm furious because I want to be okay with something that's really good and imperfect”. So that's, I think that's just so interesting. She identifies when she's feeling resentful, when she's rehearsing all the mean and critical things she fantasizes saying to a person. Anyone else rehearse all kinds of conversations in the shower?
Kendra: Were you in the shower? How do you know? How did you do that ?
Laura: Yeah, I could, you know, I have ADHD. I discovered this later in life and I've never really been good at hiding these things. If I had these nasty things to say, I would often just say it because I don't have as much frontal gating, I guess, as maybe I could, but I'll say that coaching helps so much with this, that through coaching and the work that we do. Actually, I have way less negative things that I even wanna say anymore. It just doesn't, it doesn't even seem to come up. So that's just a plug for coaching. It's miraculous what it does for your brain. So now Brene says, “instead of feeling resentful and thinking another person is doing things wrong and should be doing things differently, she asks herself, what do I need but I'm afraid to ask for?” I think that's really good. So, definition from Atlas of the Heart of resentment. “Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, better than and or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness of injustice”. So, side note here, this to me speaks directly to the manual or the prescription as we like to call it. If you look back, I can't remember what number of podcast it was. We talked about that. But when we have these expectations of other people, and we don't even say what our request is and then expect them to do things that we didn't even ask them to do. We're setting ourselves up for disappointment and we don't remember that the only people that we really can control are ourselves and same, setting ourselves up for disappointment. So resentment, Brene says, resentment is an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, and that's what we're talking about. Setting a boundary or saying, “Hey, you know, if you raise your voice at me, I am going to leave the room. I'm not going to have a conversation with you.” Instead of setting a boundary, developing resentful feelings or instead of making the request, “Hey, would you mind picking up your socks” or whatever it is. Instead of doing those things and making the boundaries and requests and developing resentment, then we're gonna have our expectations a hundred percent of the time not met. Nobody knows our expectations. They are not going to be met. So if we have expectations based on things that we can't control, like other people, for instance, and we can make requests and they may not fulfill our requests, but we still have control over ourselves. We do not have control over other people, but we have control over ourselves. But if our expectations let us down because they're based on things we can't control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they're gonna react. Then we might feel resentment. So if that's a feeling that we don't wanna feel, it's something that we can really ponder. Identify any manuals or prescriptions that we have for other people. Ask ourselves, “Are we making the requests we need to request? Are we setting the boundaries we need to set?” Or do we just want to feel resentful? Maybe you're in that space right now. I think I've probably been in that space a few times.
Amanda: One other just minor caveat with resentment that I heard somewhere else. I don't even know where, but it is over time. So it takes repeated episodes of lack of boundaries and repeatedly feeling down because you have made your expectations in something that you can't control. You don't just start out resentful. It takes repeated episodes. So it's over time if these things keep happening, then you can become resentful. And I thought that was kind of interesting. So you don't just get triggered one time and you're resentful. You get triggered several times. And then you become resentful.
Laura: Yeah, and I would say too, being resentful is kind of like a cancerous type of emotion. In terms of if you have a lot of resentment in relationships with people that you love, or if you have a lot of resentment around your workplace. It's a good idea to really try to root that out, get to the bottom of it, and figure out how to process that and deal with whatever manuals or boundary violations you're having so that it doesn't just eat away at the whole situation. Resentment can be just very damaging.
Amanda: Yeah, that's absolutely true. Kendra, take us home.
Kendra: Okay, so we covered a lot. Kind of some big wow factor today. So just wanted to recap real quick. Remember that feelings aren't really good or bad. People like to label them as good or bad, but they're allowed, and you want to allow them, and you want to observe them because they're telling you something. It's a signal from your body telling you something. And the good part about that, once you allow them or you notice them and you observe them, then you get to decide what happens next. So that's very empowering. Feeling jealous. We talked about jealousy. What conversations do you need to have when you start to feel jealous? Is this about coveting something that somebody else has, or is it a fear of losing a part of a valued relationship? And then we talked about envious. What is it that you want for yourself? What do you need to start doing to create that result? So if it's something you don't already have, like you wanna go on a vaca, or you wanna have more money in the bank and early retirement, whatever it is, start asking the questions. Okay, how can I get there? What do I need to start doing in order to create that desired result? And then resentment. Resentment is over time, it's not just one, one or two times, but over time we start to develop feelings of frustration, judgment, anger, some hidden envy. So then the questions we need to start asking are, what boundaries do we need to set? What requests do we need to make? What are the expectations or the prescription or the manual that we are having for people? And what do we need to challenge? We need to start challenging it and say, “okay, it's not serving me anymore to have these expectations constantly not being met”. And so now I'm developing this resentment. So a lot is covered today. Might have to listen to this thing, you know, one or two or three or four times. No problem. Play it on repeat. You got this! But we are so glad you joined us today. We're so glad you found us and we want you to stay connected. So go to our website, www.thewholephysician.com and sign up for our weekly well check. It’s delivered right to your inbox and you will also find our CME course. It is a 12 week self-guided course plus one-on-one coaching that is live right now. You can go there now as soon as we get done and sign up.
So until next time, you are whole, you are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
