Retroactive jealousy, what is it? It is when you feel threatened by your partner’s past relationships and exes, although your partner may no longer even be in contact with them.
Retroactive jealousy usually has several very distinct characteristics. Intrusive thinking about your partner’s past, stalking your partner’s exes, constantly feeling like you cannot trust your partner, questioning their feelings, constantly asking your partner about their ex and needing reassurance and comfort.
You can read more about the symptoms of retroactive jealoousy here in this post.
RJ can be painful and it can feel like it’s incredibly difficult to “escape” from. It’s like a never-ending cycle that repeats itself constantly.
So are there ways of healing from RJ? Certainly, I outline many strategies in my book linked below, including options for therapy.
But in this post I’d like to talk about how you can start to reframe some of these thoughts that lead to RJ in the first place. RJ usually stems from certain perspectives around love, relationships and the past, as well as feelings we have towards ourselves, self-worth, low self-esteem and much more.
Let’s see how we can reframe some of our thoughts and perception of our relationship dynamics.
Struggling with retroactive jealousy? Or not sure what it is? Take this quiz to find out!
#1 How can I challenge negative thoughts about my partner’s past?
At the heart of RJ is you feeling threatened by your partner’s past and his/her exes. You feel as if they may have had a better relationship than your current one or they were just better than you in every way and because of that, your partner does not love you as much as they did their ex.
You are just very convinced of the above, as if it were fact. But it probably isn’t. Ask yourself this:
- How would you be able to confirm that your partner’s ex was/is a better person than you? Based off what criteria?
- What makes you think for sure that their relationship is better than what you have now?
- What do you think about you? Do you think you are deserving of someone’e love? Do you think you are “worthy”? (You may or may not be surprised, but alot about RJ comes down to self-worth)
Whenever you have doubts or you think you are convinced by a certain line of thought or belief, stop yourself and ask if what you are thinking if true and can be proven to be so.
Many times, you’d realise that your belief or thought process may actually be faulty.
#2 How can I communicate better?
Interestingly, many times, I’ve noticed that individuals who develop RJ within their relationship, it was usually because there were some things that were glossed over or not discussed between the couple at the beginning of their relationship.
There may be some things about the past that one or both individuals were not comfortable with and chose to ignore although they felt hurt (i.e. one having more sexual partners compared to the other partner).
When one is in an RJ episode, it could help alot as well if the person suffering from RJ were to explain this to their partner and let them know that their behaviour/thoughts are a result of an RJ episode.
Letting your partner know how you feel about their past also allows conversations to open up, allows the both of you the chance to clear the air and gives them a chance to comfort you as well. Expressing how you feel can be cathartic too.
#3 How can I heal from insecurity?
One of the most important pieces of work that I did on my Self when I was going through RJ many years ago is to examine why I was so insecure in relationships, especially since my partner gave me no reason to doubt or mistrust them.
So why was I so insecure and felt that they would run off with their ex or someone else all the time? For me, it took some reflection and time to realise that essentially I had low self-esteem – I felt that I didn’t really believe I deserved love, I had issues with my self-worth and felt unworthy of people’s attention and care.
I also didn’t really like myself back then. So it was hard to see why anyone would like me.
Some other things that helped me included affirmations, which I used to think were so dumb. Hyping myself up every day, telling myself specific reasons why I was great really helped to boost my confidence after some time.
I also re-examined some of my beliefs around romance, especially when it came to accepting my partner’s past. All these helped to turn around my insecurities and made me feel more myself around potential dates.
#4 What are some healthy perspectives?
Underlying RJ is usually some unhealthy perspectives about love, relationships, exes, the past and so on. As we’ve seen in point #1, there can be some faulty perspectives about your self-worth and the love that you deserve.
What I find helps immensely is to just take some time and write our every single belief that you have on love, relationships, partners and everything romance-related, include beliefs about your Self too.
Once that is done, go through the list and try to flip those into something more positive. Keep doing this often and practicing it – you will find that your perspective will start to shift.
Need 1 on 1 support and help to heal from your painful retroactive jealousy episodes? DM me here on instagram and we can set up something!
