Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures (29 page)

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The person who suffers from a jealousy problem can repeat the B sentences over and over again for several days, so that the next time jealousy strikes they are familiar and easily accessible.

Albert Ellis uses a similar approach in the application of his Rational Emotive Therapy to the treatment of jealousy.10 Ellis differentiates between rational and irrational jealousy. Rational jealousy is reality based, while irrational jealousy is the result of irrational thoughts such as "It's awful that my beloved is interested in someone else! I can't stand it!" Like all other emotional upsets, Ellis argues, jealousy follows an ABC scheme. At point A there is an Activating event (e.g. Your beloved shows interest in or attention to someone else.) At point C the person feels an emotional Consequence-intense jealousy. Quite commonly the person falsely attributes C to A (e.g. erroneously concludes that "Because my mate is carrying on a hot affair with so-and-so, that makes me jealous"). Actually, contends Ellis, there is no magic by which any Outside event, even a traumatic event such as your spouse's affair, can cause you to experience jealousy. Only your Beliefs (the 13 in the ABC scheme) can do that. Disputing the irrational beliefs is the D in rational emotive therapy. Instead of the irrational and easily disputed beliefs such as "It's awful" and "I can't stand it!" the person is taught to say "I don't like this situation very much. I wish my beloved would be devoted only to me. What a pain in the ass this is!" If people choose to believe this, and nothing but this, promises Ellis, the emotional Consequence at point C may be disappointment, regret, or irritation, but not insane jealousy.

People tormented by jealousy almost always have a specific "traumatic scene" that causes them the sharpest pain each time they think of it. For men, it tends to be a sexual scene: "She is having sex with her new lover, and both of them are making fun of me." For women, it tends to be a scene of great intimacy: "They are walking together in the park with a baby carriage." "They are looking at each other lovingly after making love, smiling and touching tenderly." "lie is offering her marriage. " The behaviorist Zeev Wanderer believes that by eliminating the emotions associated with this traumatic scene, one can eliminate the jealousy problem.

Wanderer developed a technique he calls Physiologically Monitored Implosion Therapy (PMIT).' PMIT is an improvement on a well-known behavioral technique called "Implosion therapy" (or "flooding"), which has been used successfully in treating phobias and PTSD. In implosion therapy, patients are asked to imagine their worst fear or most traumatic experience again and again until the fear is reduced. In PMIT, the therapist monitors the patient's blood pressure with an electronic instrument that records subtle changes. The patient talks about difficult situations, and the therapist keeps a tape recording of the scene the patient described just preceding a peak in blood pressure. This scene is considered the source of the problem. Repeated exposure to the recording reduces the scene's power over the patient, and blood pressure gradually returns to normal. Here is an example of how this process works: A man in his mid-thirties with a job in radio broadcasting had a girlfriend who worked in the same office. One day she terminated their relationship to start a romantic involvement with one of their coworkers. The man's job required that he interact frequently with both of them. I lis intense jealousy caused him to avoid this contact, to the detriment of his work.

During PMIT, the man was asked what he found most difficult about seeing his girlfriend with her new lover. "The fact that they are making love," he responded. What was it about their sex life that disturbed him most? Wanderer measured the man's blood pressure as he recounted his fantasies of the couple's sex life.

Analysis of the blood-pressure data indicated that the largest rise in blood pressure occurred when the man described the special sounds his ex-lover used to make when she reached orgasm. At the time of their own sexual involvement, he thought he was the only man who could make her produce these sounds. Now he was most tormented by the thought that she was making those sounds with her new lover.

The therapist recorded a session on tape in which the man was asked to imagine in great detail his ex-lover's new sexual liaison, dramatizing her orgasms, how "she's making those sounds with him.... He's touching her body in all the places that arouse her, they are laughing" The man was instructed to listen to the tape for an hour a day. After less than a week of listening to the tape, the scene no longer pained but bored him. tie was able to have work-related contact with both his ex-lover and her new man without discomfort.

Another case that Wanderer treated involved a stockbroker who came to therapy because he felt he needed to stop being jealous. He said his jealousy had caused him to lose several girlfriends. The last girlfriend, whom he liked a great deal, was especially nice and understanding, and he was pained by her loss, which lie considered his own fault "One day I saw her coming out of a movie house with a lawyer friend of hers, and I made a terrible scene. She became very angry, and told me she can't have a relationship with someone who behaves that way."

His PMIT revealed that his worst scene was imagining the girlfriend leaving him for that lawyer friend. The man was taught how to relax while imagining this terrible scenario over and over and over again. After several therapy sessions he saw his girlfriend again with the same lawyer. This time he felt calm. He approached them and said a polite, "Hello, how are you?" to both of them. His girlfriend was so impressed by the change in his behavior that she called him up and they started dating again.

In both examples Wanderer describes, repeated exposure to the painful scene severed its connection to the jealous response and replaced it with a new connection between the scene and boredom.

I must add a word of caution to this very glowing amount of the use of implosion therapy. I have seen a number of people who ran away from a therapist who tried to use this approach without adequate preparation. The traumatic scene is extremely painful, and people cannot be flooded with it without proper preparation and support.

"Scrupulous Ilonesty" (which was described in chapter four) is another, less traumatic version of implosion therapy.'2 In this technique, the nonjealous partner is instructed to "flood" the jealous partner with every detail of the day's experiences. The flooding inundates the jealous mate with information that helps dispel anxiety and insecurity.

Another version of implosion therapy used specifically for the treatment of jealousy is the "Dutch cow" technique described to me by the Israeli therapist Tsafy Gilad.15 Gilad used the technique in treating the jealousy problem of a middle-aged couple.

Jealousy became a problem after the wife discovered that her husband had had a year-long affair. Although the affair was long over, the wife couldn't stop thinking about it. During the process of therapy the couple learned that the wife's discovery of the affair devastated her sense of security in the marriage. Security was what she looked for when she married her husband and was the most important thing the marriage gave her. To restore her sense of security, she wanted to know her husband's whereabouts every moment he was away from her, so she wouldn't worry that he might be spending time with the other wonman.

The husband, who was ready to do anything to restore the marriage, was instructed to call his wife every hour whether she was at home, at work, with friends, or shopping. The instruction also meant, however, that the wife had to tell her husband where she would be every hour so he would know where to call her. The technique is nicknamed "Dutch cow" because the telephone calls serve the same function as the bells Dutch cows carry around their necks: They let their owner know where they are at every moment, so that no fences are needed.

After several weeks of this ordeal, the wife had had enough. She started dreading the phone calls, which intruded on her life. But her husband didn't mind them at all. He was ready to go on long after she said she couldn't lake it anymore. While it is not clear whether the technique helped the wife genuinely trust her husband again, it clearly helped sever the connection between the husband's tempo rary absence and the wife's jealousy, and replaced it with a connection between his phone calls and annoyance.

Another behavioral technique for helping a couple cope with the aftermath of an affair was developed by behavior therapist Bernie Zilbergeld.14 It involves asking the betrayed spouse to write a convincing defense of the spouse who had the affair. When I use this technique, I also ask the spouse who had the affair to write a defense of the betrayed spouse's jealousy. These defenses are extremely difficult to write, but are very effective in helping couples make the empathic leap that is required in order to understand each other's perspective. Ilere, for example, is part of a defense written by a female attorney of her boyfriend's involvement with other women:

A contract is not binding when one party has been coerced or fears negative repercussions for failure to enter the contract. Such is the case here. When Jack agreed to maintain an exclusive relationship with me, he believed that he must acquiesce to my terms or lose inc.

When the first breach occurred, I sent an ambiguous message: I hate your behavior, but I will never hate you, and so I will forgive you and put this behind us and resume our relationship. Again, I exacted the term of an agreement to remain exclusively committed to each other and added that truth was essential to the maintenance of the relationship.

Repeatedly the pattern has been that promises are made, broken, forgiven, cajoled, questioned-unpleasant and painful for both, but put aside. Jack could easily have concluded that I was making empty threats to leave or to require him to leave. lie saw how distressed I was, but saw, too, that I could bounce back and behave as if business as usual was the rule. When he was honest and revealed that he had been with a woman all night, coming home at five in the morning, my behavior didn't change. The pattern was so set that even then I did not act on my threats to end the relationship. These were storms we weathered.

Since he prizes his autonomy and freedom above all else, he was willing to endure these painful confrontations because he knew that they would pass and he would be able to maintain his life according to his preferred pattern. The lies necessary to maintain that lifestyle were lies he told to protect me from hurt rather than to protect himself, he thought, and since his affairs had nothing to do with his love for mc, he told inc about them to stabilize our life together.

After both partners read each other's defenses, they are more able and willing to see the other's point of view in the jealousy situation. This is a version of the role-reversal technique (also described in chapter four) in which partners take turns describing each other's point of view. At the basis of both the written defenses and the rolereversal techniques is the power of behaving as if," which is also evident in a third technique, called "Pretend" (Im et al., 1983).

In this technique, the jealous person is instructed to act as if he or she were not jealous. The underlying assumption-one of the basic assumptions of the behavioral approach-is that if a jealous person can control his jealous behavior and act in a nonjealous manner, he can learn to perceive himself as a nonjealous person. In addition, behaving in a nonjealous manner is likely to evoke a more favorable response from the nonjealous partner. As systems therapists argue, jealous behavior, with its attendant demands, interrogation, whining, and fault-finding, usually evokes a negative reaction from the partner. By behaving more reasonably and positively toward the partner, despite feelings to the contrary, couples can reverse their downward spiral of interaction.

The counterpart of the "Pretend" technique is another technique (mentioned briefly in chapter four), called "Turning the Tables," in which the nonjealous partner is instructed to act the part of the jealous partner. Couples therapists Won Gi Im, Stefanie Wilner, and Miranda Breit (1983), who developed this technique, describe an example of its successful use.

The husband, a physician in his mid-forties, sought help because his marriage of twenty-one years was in trouble as a result of his wife's jealousy. His wife expressed her unfounded jealousy by raging at him and harassing him on the telephone at the hospital where he worked, which caused him a great deal of embarrassment.

The husband was instructed to act the part of it jealous spouse and to keep this strategy secret from his wife. I laving learned over many years how a jealous person behaves, he was able to perform the role of the jealous husband so skillfully and subtly that his wife didn't realize he was role-playing. While he had seldom called home in the past, he now called his wife frequently to check on her, to see whether she was home and to ask exactly what she was doing. He made suspicious and critical remarks about any new clothes she wore, and expressed displeasure when she showed the slightest interest in another man.

The result was dramatic. The wife, now feeling flattered by her husband's attentiveness and newfound interest, stopped her jealous behavior completely. She became pleasant and loving toward her husband and expressed remorse over her earlier behavior. At an eight-month follow-up, the husband reported that his wife continued to behave more lovingly toward him, but as a precaution he still played the role of the jealous husband from time to time.

In both the "Pretend" and "Turning the Tables" techniques, one partner is instructed to behave differently (more like the other partner) as a way of changing the dynamics surrounding a jealousy problem. The following exercise is aimed at getting both partners to work on a jealousy problem together:1'