ETHICAL

THE ETHICAL SLUT
I notice that jealousy comes and goes, depending on how good I feel
about myself. When I'm not taking care of getting what I want, it's
easy to get jealous and think that someone else is getting what I am
not. I need to remember that it's my job to get my needs met. I feel the
jealousy, but I'm not willing to act on it, so it mostly goes away.
Once you have made a commitment to refuse to act on your jealousy,
you become free to start reducing the amount of power you let
your jealousy have over you. One way to do this is simply by allowing
yourself to feel it. Just feel it. It will hurt, and you will feel frightened
and confused, but if you sit still and listen to yourself with compassion
and support for the scared child inside, the first thing you will learn
is that the experience of jealousy is survivable. You have the strength
to get through it.
A large part of our difficulties with jealousy comes from our attempts
to avoid feeling a scary or painful emotion. Perhaps long ago when we
were children, truly powerless in the world and with a very limited set
of tools for dealing with our emotions, we felt something scary and
told ourselves, "I will never feel this again, it's too awful, I'll die, I'll
kill myself." So we stick the feeling, and the event that inspired it, into
something like a pot, and put the lid on good and tight. As the years
go by, whenever something comes along that reminds us of what's in
the pot, that rattles the lid a little, we push down on that lid. "Gatta
keep the lid on that pot," we tell ourselves-we may not even remember
why. And the pressure builds and builds, not so much from what's in
the pot as from our frantic struggles to keep the lid on.
When we grow up and we need to take the lid off so that we can
deal with our emotional reality as an adult, it can feel really scary.
But surprisingly, often when we actually look at what's in our pot and
feel it, it's much more manageable than we had feared. You can indeed
open your pots, look at what's bubbling away in there, and then put
the lid back on. Your old defenses will continue to work just fine when
you want them to.
We have heard sluts accuse each other of being jealous as if it were a
crime: "See? Look at you! You're jealous, aren't you? Don't try to deny
it!" It is particularly important that you own your jealousy, to yourself
and to your intimates. If you try to pretend that you are not iealous
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