Free jealousy workshop at Feelmore510!

Guest speaker Kathy Labriola, the author of The Jealousy Workbook: Exercises and Insights for Managing Open Relationships, is teaching a free workshop on Monday evening at Feelmore510 in downtown Oakland! Here's more info about it.

MANAGING JEALOUSY IN OPEN RELATIONSHIPS
Monday, April 21st 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Feelmore510 Adult Gallery
1703 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland (near 19th Street BART)

In this workshop, you will learn tools and techniques to help you deal with one of the main obstacles to happy and healthy open relationships: jealousy . You will learn how to accept your own jealousy and jealousy in your partner(s), and to manage it effectively, in ways that help you grow as a person and strengthen your romantic bonds, instead of creating anxiety and insecurity in your relationship(s).

Jealousy is a natural and normal reaction to a potentially threatening situation. If you have some tools and can work cooperatively with your partner, it can bring you closer together and make you stronger, in yourself , as well as in your relationships.

This workshop deconstructs jealousy to help you understand what and why certain situations and people prompt such distress, and will give you some practical tools to help you understand your jealousy and reduce it significantly.

A few of the topics covered are:

  • "Know your Jealousy Pie Chart: Managing the Fear, Anger, and Sadness of Jealousy"
  • "Understanding the Difference between Jealousy, Coveting, and Envy"
  • “Are you in Poly Hell?”
  • “What to do When your Partner is Jealous”
  • "What is Compersion and can it be cultivated?"

Kathy Labriola is a nurse, counselor, and hypnotherapist in private practice in Berkeley, California. Her mission is providing affordable mental health services to alternative communities. She has been a card-carrying bisexual and polyamorist for 40 years. She is the author of two books published by Greenery Press: Love in Abundance: A Counselor's Advice on Open Relationships and The Jealousy Workbook: Exercises and Insights for Managing Open Relationships.

To RSVP or for questions, contact events@feelmore510.com

How jealousy affects poly teens

Sam Fuller, an Oakland high school student writing for Youth Radio, has penned a quite insightful piece on polyamory, jealousy, and evolution. Fuller's interested in the subject stems from a female friend of his who, at one point, was in a polyamorous relationship. Wanting to know more about the role of jealousy, he interviews Dossie Easton (author of The Ethical Slut) and evolutionary psychologist David Buss. Both have different views of jealousy and its role: Easton wonders why jealousy is the sole deal-breaking emotion in relationships, while Buss sees jealousy as a biological defense mechanism that protects relationships.

Deciding to do his own bout of research, Fuller distributes a questionnaire to 21 peers, measuring their jealousy scores. While the average score is a 56, his friend Kina's score is 23 -- making her much less jealous than the others.

Kina's survey results made me wonder: had being poly and working on her insecure feelings actually made her a less jealous person? When I asked her about it, Kina said she thought it had, and she was glad for it. "Jealousy is just a counterproductive emotion," she said. "It doesn't make me happy."

Of course, evolutionarily speaking, jealousy doesn't work by making you happy. It works instead by creating an unhappy feeling, a feeling that your partner is threatening to reproduce and raise offspring with someone else. And once you have that feeling, you need to do something about it, whether it's something immature, like attacking the person flirting with your partner, or mature, like talking to your partner about it.

In Kina's case, she found ways to get rid of her jealous feelings, and that's made her feel happy. In the end, evolution aside, that's the question that mattered most to me.

Read the rest at Youth Radio.