Nick Kemp Blog

Not a week goes by in my private practice without me seeing a client with jealousy issues. Jealousy can appear in many different forms including personal jealousy and professional jealousy. In the wonderful Amadeus movie where Antonio Salieri is so jealous of Mozart that he actually spends his whole life plotting against him! Salieri is deeply unhappy about Mozart’s achievements and seeks to emulate his nemesis, but simply doesn’t have the talent to produce work of the same quality.

In personal jealousy situations this behaviour is often between two people in a relationship where one of them gets into a pattern of obsessive thinking about what the other person might be doing. I use the term “might be doing” here, but a jealous person “feels” that they “know” that what they imagine is actual fact and nothing will sway them from this assertion. The feeling of jealousy overwhelms all thinking and no amount of discussion alone will change this particular feeling.  The best way to resolve is to change the process that creates the ultimate feeling. It’s important to remember that a person can’t simply “get a feeling” there has to a thinking process that generates any kind of feeling. There are essentially four main ways in which a feeling is usually generated – seeing something externally, picturing something internally, hearing something externally, thinking or saying something to oneself internally.

I was warned some years ago that as I ran more events and released more products,  I would be the subject of other people’s jealousy. I thought this was quite ludicrous at the time as I don’t in any way consider myself as a high profile trainer and am really only interested in figuring out what is useful in helping others in a therapeutic and business context. I’m also not especially precious about “being right” but have provoked a lot of discussion about my blogs on some of what goes on in NLP and self help circles. I have some wonderful examples of this that I will publish someday!

I have have noticed that most jealous individuals are deeply unhappy and seem to constantly be searching for something in terms of an identity. They are often restless and fixate on other individuals rather than develop insights into their own ways of thinking. They also find it difficult to relax and tend to flit from one activity to another. Many such individuals have control issues and seek approval from others and are often obsessed with status. In their attempts to control everything and everyone around them they are often unwittingly advocates of censorship and spin, so get what “they feel” is appropriate.

Personally I am not a fan of censorship and spin and the only spin doctors I would endorse are the band of that exact same name! However jealousy is great for business in private prctice and I have excellent results with clients who seek help with this issue. It's great to help people become free from this kind of obsessive thinking.