When Someone Seems To Love You Too Much

Jealousy

The green-eyed monster. We’ve all had moments of feeling jealousy in our lives. It’s just one facet of the great range of human emotions that we all cycle through over time. But a partner who is chronically jealous and aggressively possessive isn’t acting out of love. That kind of behavior comes from deep-seated insecurity that can eventually lead to controlling or even abusive behavior.

Feeling Valued and Protected

If your partner’s raging jealousy makes you feel valued and protected, it may be time to stop, step back, and take careful stock of the situation. Out-of-control possessiveness is never actually about you. It’s about your partner’s own sense of inadequacy.

Scarcity Mindset

Both people involved in this kind of relationship are operating from a scarcity mindset. The person who is the object of the possessiveness and jealousy is usually afraid they aren’t valuable enough or worthwhile just the way they are. And the jealous person is afraid that they aren’t good enough to earn their partner’s true loyalty and respect.

Sometimes this jealous pattern starts with the insecure person feeling like they aren’t getting enough attention and time. Maybe they do something either consciously or subconsciously to make the other person jealous, just to make sure they really care. But reacting with jealously and anger to a situation that was set up to make them feel jealous doesn’t prove love. And it can set up a negative and sometimes even dangerous precedent for the rest of the relationship.

Or maybe the jealous person has been cheated on in the past and has developed a negative life script that says that “lovers always cheat and leave. No one can be trusted.” If this is the case, the insecure person doesn’t even need to do anything at all for the jealousy to be triggered. The jealousy was probably there from the start.

Trust and Respect

A healthy, happy, soulmate relationship is built on a foundation of trust and respect. You have to trust the other person’s words, actions, and intentions. You have to respect their boundaries and their established relationships with friends, family, and colleagues. Without trust and respect, the relationship will fail.

Can Your Repair A Jealous Relationship?

So what do you do if you are with a jealous person? Or if you are the jealous person yourself? The first step is to triage the relationship. Where are each of you at in relation to the other? Are you willing and able to openly communicate about the problem? Are you both able to own up to and admit responsibility for your part in the problem? Can you agree to work together to fix things? If you cannot agree on at least some basic ground rules to start working toward a better, happier, more trusting and respectful relationship, then it is possible that it may be time to part ways.

If you feel that the relationship has potential and is worth saving, you start the hard work of building trust and respect. For any relationship where trust and respect have already been broken, it may require the help of a neutral third party to mediate and referee. Not because it is impossible to do on your own, but because you have probably fallen into some communication patterns that may be hard to spot and break out of without someone else there to observe them.

If you aren’t able to or don’t want to attend couple’s therapy with your partner, it might be a good idea to seek therapy on your own to get the support you need while steering the relationship back into the healthy territory.

Self-Awareness, Self-love, and Gratitude

Whichever route you choose, you will need to use self-awareness, self-love, and gratitude to get you through the tough times and come out better on the other side.

Self-awareness will help you to recognize when you are falling into one of your emotional scripts. Self-love and gratitude will help you reframe, to be gentle with yourself and to appreciate all the good you have in your life.

This article was brought to you by PS I Love You. Relationships Now.