Is your jealousy tearing your relationship apart? Are you jealous of
every person in your spouse's life that came before you? Do you have a
hard time trusting your partner because of your past history of being
betrayed? Dr. Phil has advice if jealousy is threatening your future.
- Ask yourself why you are choosing this behavior. Everybody has a
way of being in the world. Is your way being jealous, accusatory,
highly monitoring and smothering? Why are you choosing that?
- Is it because you have a history of being cheated on? There's an
expression: "What I fear, I create." Are you testing your partner until
he just finally fails? If you fear that somebody is going to cheat on
you, you may just push him to a point where someone else may grab his
attention. Imagine if someone else treated your partner with dignity and
respect, didn't challenge his integrity every minute of every hour, but
was in fact accepting and peaceful and harmonious. These are things
that really matter. You need to worry about what you're creating. Ask
yourself: Are you responsible for the previous relationships in which
you were betrayed? Did you run those previous partners off with your
jealous behavior?
- Jealousy is a poorly disguised need for power and control.
Jealous people are tyrannical, controlling, domineering and completely
insensitive to the impact of their actions on their partner. Are you
getting a power trip off of this? Is the payoff that you keep your
partner on a short leash and completely under your control?
- Choose to respect your partner and make some different choices.
You have more power in your love, respect, personality and magnetism
than you do in control. You can't make him come home, but you can make him want to come home.
MATURE DATING OVER 40 - UK
Advice for partners of jealous people:
- You teach people how to treat you. It may be working for your
partner to be jealous because you are paying him/her off. They get a
control fix every time you reassure them, every time you answer the
phone to report on your whereabouts. If he/she calls you 10 times to
check in on you, answer the phone once to offer information, then turn
it off. Stop reinforcing their behavior.
- Although you don't want to pay your partner off for insecure or
controlling behavior, you should be an open book. People who have
nothing to hide, hide nothing. Respect your partner enough to let
him/her know where you are, when you will be back, and what you're
doing.
If you stop to
think about it, you know the difference between those who make smart,
considered choices, and those who seem to let life push them around. You
probably know people who succeed despite difficulties and bad breaks,
and people who seem to have everything handed to them, but still can’t
get it together. You know people whose lives seem full of satisfaction
and accomplishment, and others who don’t feel that they have achieved
anything worthwhile, so their lives are full of regret and complaints.
Cooperating and being congenial with the people you care about
makes your relationships run more smoothly (at least on the surface).
However, when you relinquish your power to decide for yourself, your self-esteem suffers, and you feel out of control and unimportant, even in your own life.
MATURE DATING OVER 40 - UK
As you reflect on the people you know, can you see the
difference between those who know how to make good decisions, and those
who aren’t sure what to do? None of us is completely confident with
every choice we make in life, but those who understand that their
decisions will create their outcome and choose accordingly feel more
secure more of the time.
As a mature adult, you are approaching the time of greater
freedom and greater responsibility toward yourself. Because you’ve lived
long enough to master the basic skills of life, you may be wondering
what else there is. For many in mid-life, going through days focused on
material things and daily chores no longer seems to be sufficient. At
this point, people begin to search for a different kind of meaning.
“What is my life about?” they ask. “I have most everything I want. Why
doesn’t it feel like enough?”
Understanding the
important issues of this phase of your life, and being prepared to
re-evaluate your goals, find meaning, and make new choices are the tasks
you face now. How you meet these challenges will make the difference in
how satisfying and rewarding the rest of your life will be. From
experience, you know you cannot control everything that happens to you.
But you can control the your reaction and response to the events around
you. If you can think clearly despite changes, surprises and unplanned
circumstances, you will make good choices, and succeed in all the ways
you want to.
You can reorganize and restructure your goals to take care of
yourself physically, emotionally, financially and socially, no matter
what your life circumstances have brought you. This is your opportunity
to make the most of your life, to bring long-awaited dreams into reality, and to create meaning and satisfaction for yourself.
MATURE DATING OVER 40 - UK
