Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Leaving The One Way Street. Episode 2.Envy’s Quiet Violence

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Leaving The One Way Street. Episode 2.Envy’s Quiet Violence · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and thank you for coming back.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and this is episode two in the series entitled Leaving the One Way Street.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: This episode in particular is what I'm calling the quiet violence of envy.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, every relationship begins with a shared sense of reality, but relationships are also shaped by something far less comfortable, and that's the human capacity for envy.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, most people think of envy as a simple feeling, a passing moment of comparison, but psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described something far more destructive, and she spoke about envy as an attack on goodness itself.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Envy arises when another person possesses something that feels deeply valuable, so warmth, generosity, success, emotional stability.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of experiencing appreciation, the envious mind experiences pain.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the goodness in the other person highlights something that feels absent within oneself.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that experience can become intolerable.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than acknowledging the goodness, the mind attempts to destroy it psychologically.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this attack often appears in subtle ways.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Kindness is interpreted as manipulation, generosity is maybe dismissed as self-interest, and warmth is treated with suspicion.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: In this way, the goodness itself becomes the target.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Klein recognized that envy is particularly destructive because it attacks the very qualities that sustain relationships care, kindness, generosity, love.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when these qualities repeatedly evoke hostility rather than appreciation, something painful becomes apparent, and that is that the relationship can't receive goodness.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I remember saying to someone a while back, you are very probably the hardest person to love that I have ever met because you have nowhere for it to live.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is nowhere inside you that can reside.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why you maintain a pattern which ends catastrophically.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now that might sound like a very harsh thing to say to someone, but in fact it was it was a voicing of the truth.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we don't have a sufficient amount of appreciation and regard for our own positive attributes, perhaps because they've never been voiced or never been acknowledged, then perhaps what happens is that when we come into contact with people who behave generously, that simply has nowhere to go.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so the other person becomes emotionally barren.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: What you'll also find is that their interpretation of that won't be to do with themselves, it will be to do with others.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most difficult lessons in adult relationships is recognizing this reality because not every person can receive what is offered.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes evokes gratitude, and sometimes it evokes envy.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Understanding the difference protects us from giving endlessly where goodness will only be attacked or diluted.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Think of the bottomless pit.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: But when truth becomes distorted, the mind eventually has to choose between illusion and reality.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Many people will assume that their generosity will be experienced and acknowledged and reciprocated because it's an entirely reasonable assumption.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But in fact, in those relationships which I have described the one-way street, that seldom happens because the other person, for whatever reasons, isn't capable of reciprocity.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Something within them destroys that.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Such people come across as selfish, they are frequently regarded as takers and users.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look at the psychological structure within those people, and this isn't an excuse for that behaviour by any means, if we look at the psychological structure, we can see that something inside them does not exist.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when they come into contact with someone in whom it does exist, it creates this activation of a mechanism which is destructive.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in the next episode, I'm going to be looking at the psychology of ingratitude.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think follows on neatly from this.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be posting that soon.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again for listening.