Before anyone can remove or move past their issues of envy, we have to consider what the root of it is. In almost every case, envy arises when we are experiencing dissatisfaction in our own lives. It's when we so badly desire and yearn for success, connection or affection from others, and we don't get it.
Envy is an emotion which occurs when a person lacks another's quality, skill, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it.
Jealousy and envy are a toxic combination of anger, insecurity, fear, and greed. Jealousy is related to desiring what others have and envy centers around resentment of other people's blessings and prosperity.
If you have an insecure attachment style or deal with personal insecurity, this may lead to feeling envious of others or unfairly comparing yourself or your life to others.
When you feel envy, your subconscious is trying to tell you, “I'd like to do that too!” But there's conflict as another part of you is shutting that desire down fast because it seems dangerous or risky. The internal conflict is why it feels bad.
Benign Envy and Malicious Envy
Van de Ven et al. (2009) proposed that there are two distinct experiences of envy, one of which is benign and the other is malicious, and that benign envy and malicious envy lead to different behavioral expressions.
Signs of envy include: You aren't happy for others when they achieve success. Another person's success makes you feel unhappy. You feel the need to diminish someone else's success.
Envy is not an amorphous feeling and can be seen as consisting of four distinct dimensions, labeled identification, confrontive, redirecting, and medea.
Characteristics of an Envious Person are:
They pay too much attention to what other people have, while disregarding their own accomplishments. They struggle with feelings of low self-esteem and insecurity.
Envy is only toxic when a person is unable to feel empathy, love, generosity or even just kindness to the other. Sometimes an envious person can be friendly to others but only direct viciousness towards the one person who triggers extremes of that feeling.
Envy is one of the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder. Many of you may have experienced envy from the narcissist in your life.
Envy is more likely to surface when we feel insecure, emotionally unfulfilled, or deprived. We idealize or inflate the value of something we cannot attain, and overlook what is already wonderful about ourselves. Such comparisons intensify during times of deprivation and loss, but also during heightened competition.
Past trauma
If you've experienced emotional abuse or betrayal from past relationships, that can start to taint your view of future relationships if the trauma goes unchecked. This is where jealousy can rear its head and feed into those feelings, by making you feel anxious or afraid of losing the person you're with now.
On the other hand, envy has been linked with various forms of maladjustment such as interpersonal conflicts, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, and even criminal behaviour such as vandalism and even murder.
Envy is often rooted in low self-esteem – sometimes from very early unmet childhood needs where the person feels inherently not good enough. An envious person may frequently 'compare and despair' and find themselves wanting.
As psychotherapist Rev. Sheri Heller (2016)writes: “Victims of pathological envy carry an insidious inescapable shame, which enforces the edict that ones gifts are a threat, responsible for instigating feelings of resentment, inadequacy and hence, envy.”
Narcissists' Greatest Fear
To narcissists, ordinary people (i.e., nearly everybody around them) aren't worthy of attention, so being ordinary would leave them unworthy of the spotlight and left to suffocate. Narcissists also need to feel special and superior to others.
When it comes to envy, the same mechanism is at play. We compare bits of information about others to ourselves, and when we feel that we do not compare well, it makes us unhappy and often angry. It is only in this comparison that we can experience envy. This is an important observation.
Envy invites comparison of relationships, success, status or image and can make you feel unknown and uncared for, even by those you once were close to. Envious emotions are not productive. They never get you to where you want to be in your career and they don't earn you the relationships you desire.
People with high levels of envy are more concerned about self-deficiency and other people's possessions and are more likely to experience negative experiences such as inferiority and dejection as a result [4-8,20]. These feelings may subsequently lead to depression [12].
Causes of Jealousy
Many situations can make you feel jealous. Some common ones include: A partner spending significant time engaging with someone who feels threatening to the relationship. A new baby joins the family or a parent puts their attention on a sibling instead of you.
Envy is a negative feeling of desire centered on someone who has something that you do not. Envy can also be a verb meaning to feel this way toward someone. Both the noun and the verb imply that you want to be in the other person's position—to have what they have.