Welcome back. It's your host, Brittany. Today we're gonna talk about an emotion that can be very heavy and get demonized on social media way too much. Jealousy. Jealousy, the cousin of envy, the ugly green emotion. Instead of being curious about jealousy and letting it give you information about what your desires might be, we demonize it. Jealousy is termed ugly and people who feel it are wrong. So in this episode we're gonna talk a lot about jealousy, that raw feeling, the painful parts of it, how complicated it can be, and what is truly underneath the kind of jealousy that mothers and daughters feel. You know when you see a healthy mother-daughter relationship and recognize that you didn't have one, you might know the feeling I'm talking about. Maybe it hits when you're scrolling social media. See the brunch photos with captions like Best Day with My favorite person. Love you mom. Watching mothers and daughters shopping together, laughing easily, enjoying each other's company. Hearing a friend casually mention calling her mom for advice. We're also gonna talk about the other version on the flip side of when a mother is jealous of her daughter and how that jealousy comes out, what it looks like, and then what to do about it. Not to explain it away or make it disappear, but to understand what it's really telling you about yourself and your desires, your wants, your needs, because jealousy is not really a problem. It's actually pointing you towards exactly what you need to heal. Jealousy tells a story. There's a lot underneath it. The pain you feel when you see what you've never had, that's not petty or small. That's your heart recognizing the magnitude of what it lost or what it never got, and it's time to listen to what that recognition is trying to teach you. When you get curious about jealousy, you can figure out exactly what you're desiring. Instead, society demonizes, jealousy to be this ugly emotion and it causes you to hide and run from it. Jealousy's only ugly when. Ugly actions are behind it, not just because you feel it. So if this is resonating in any way, stick around. We're gonna jump into today's episode. Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Show the podcast for mothers and daughters who want to build stronger bonds, deepen their understanding and transform their relationships. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. After years of working with hundreds of daughters. And mothers. I've developed strategies that help break generational patterns, heal wounds, and create the loving relationships you've always wanted. Each week I'll be sharing insights from real clients, expert interviews and practical tools you can use immediately to improve your mother-daughter dynamic. Whether you're struggling with communication breakdowns, navigating major life transitions, or simply wanna take your already good relationship to the next level. The show is for you. And yes, the transformation I guide my clients through can be yours too. I'll share more about how you can work with me. It's time to experience the relationship you both deserve. Are you ready? Let's dive in. So before we start, jealousy and envy get intertwined and get mixed up. So I wanna start the episode with explaining the differences. Jealousy versus envy. Jealousy and envy are distinct but often confused emotions. Jealousy involves the fear of losing something or someone you already have. While envy is the feeling of wanting what someone else possesses, essentially. Jealousy is about a triangular relationship, fearing loss to a third party. While envy is a two person experience focused on desire for another's attributes or possessions, Jealousy often involves fear of losing a relationship or something you possess to someone else. It can be triggered by a perceived threat or competition. It may involve feelings of insecurity, anger, and resentment. Envy involves wanting what another person has, whether it's an object, quality, or maybe their status. It can be feeling of longing or discontent with your own situation. It may be accompanied by admiration for the other person, but also a sense of lack. It can be directed at a person's possessions, achievements. Or even their personality. So the key differences here are jealousy typically involves three people. You, the person or thing you fear losing and the perceived rival. While envy can be between two people, you and the person or thing that you envy, jealousy focuses on protecting what you have while envy focuses on wanting what someone else has. So here are two examples with mothers and daughters. A mother might feel jealous if their daughter is spending a lot of time with someone else fearing they might be replaced. A daughter might feel envy if they admire a friend's mother-daughter relationship and wish they had the same kind of relationship with their own mother. You hear the differences in nos and why most people just say jealous, even when envy is probably the better word, both jealousy and envy can fit here. It just depends on exactly what we're talking about. So let's dive into my perception. And my perspective on jealousy between mothers and daughters. I am not going to keep using jealousy versus envy. I am just going to use jealous throughout the rest of this episode because it's easier and it's the word that most people recognize. But I didn't think I would do this any justice if I didn't explain the differences because. When you're feeling jealousy, it's not always jealousy. Sometimes it's envy. Those two feeling, those two words are actually distinct and they do mean different things. That's why I said earlier that jealousy is the cousin of envy because they can be classified underneath the same feelings, but they are distinct and they do have different meanings. But in order to simplify this, I'm just gonna use jealousy 'cause that's the word that we all recognize the most. We are gonna talk about jealousy in two forms or two ways in this episode. The first one is gonna be when a daughter is jealous of other mother-daughter relationships, and the second one is going to be when mothers feel jealous of their daughters. Throughout this, I'm also gonna give tips on what to do about this jealousy and how to manage it, or basically just how to deal with it. First up, feeling jealous of good mother-daughter relationships. What is it really, this jealousy isn't about other women having good mothers. It's about you recognizing what love is supposed to look like. When you see a healthy mother-daughter relationship, your heart doesn't just notice it, it remembers. It remembers what you were supposed to have, what you were born deserving. It recognizes somewhere in there that you missed out on something, what should have been your birthright as a daughter. Your jealousy is actually evidence of your emotional intelligence. It means you can recognize authentic love when you see it, it means some part of you knows what you deserved, even if you never received it. If you had never been hungry, you wouldn't feel envious watching someone enjoy a meal. But because you know what it feels like to be hungry or to be starved, watching someone else feast reminds you of your own hunger. The same is true emotionally. Your jealousy is your heart's saying, I know what nourishment looks like and I didn't get it. That recognition can be painful, but it means your capacity for love wasn't destroyed by what you went through. When you see that mother celebrating her daughter's promotion and your chest tightens with jealousy, that's your inner child saying, I wanted someone to be proud of me like that too. When you see that daughter posting a birthday tribute full of genuine gratitude, and it stings, that's your heart saying, I want to feel grateful for my mother's love too. Your jealousy is pointing you towards your unmet needs. It's showing you exactly what your heart is still hungry for, and that information is incredibly valuable for your healing. You've got to pay attention to that. It's telling you something. It's a guide. It's showing you what you need and what you desire, and it's also showing you that you're not broken in any way. You know what love from a mom was supposed to be or feel like you know what it could have looked like, but you didn't get it. So if you can't tell where I'm going with this yet, this kind of jealousy is more than likely grief. It's so complex that you're not just grieving one thing, you're grieving layers of loss. You're grieving the mother you never had. The one who should have celebrated you, guided you, comforted you, believed in you. You're grieving the childhood. You deserved the one where you felt safe, valued, unconditionally loved, but you're also grieving the woman you might have been. If you had that kind of love, that kind of support, the confidence you might have had, the self-trust you could have. The self-trust that could have been your foundation. The ease and relationships that might have been natural to you. Your grieving, the mothering, you didn't get the mothering. You may struggle to give your own children because you don't have a template for it. I'm sure you're learning and putting in work to change things and be different, but there's still that underlying mothering when you weren't mothered properly. That advice you can't call your own mother for, and the support you can't lean on during difficult times when you see other women having what you never had, all of those losses can hit at once. It's not just, I wish I had that, or I wish I knew what it felt like to be loved like that. The jealousy can become so overwhelming because the loss is overwhelming. You're not just envious of the moment. You're mourning an entire relationship, an entire experience of being a daughter that was stolen from you. This is why jealousy can feel so intense and so complicated. And so hard to work through. It's also why it gets demonized so much. It's not just about what you're seeing in that moment. It's about everything you never had and maybe everything you'll never have. But understanding this grief and jealousy that's kind of wrapped up in one, it's part of the work that you have to do. It's your heart acknowledging that what happened to you wasn't okay. It's recognizing that you deserve so much more than what you received. And grief needs to be felt not fixed. Okay? It's not finding an ending to this. It's finding an understanding of it. That way you can fill in the gaps. Grief is just something that sits with this. It's love and longing that has nowhere to go. So you can't rush yourself through this. You just need to honor that the feeling comes up for you sometimes, and it's not anything bad or negative. So what are you supposed to do with this? Like, okay, great, I know this jealousy is most likely grief now, Brittany, but what do I do about it? How do I work with it instead of being consumed by it? So first I want you to get curious. I don't think the world is curious enough about jealousy, and that's the first problem. I think society demonizes jealousy. So I want you to get curious about what you're longing for here When you feel that jealousy come up, maybe some of the examples I gave work for you, maybe some don't. When you feel it, either jealousy or grief, whichever one resonates better with you, what specifically are you longing for? Get curious about that. What are you jealous of specifically? Maybe you're not just jealous that they have a good relationship. Maybe you're specifically longing for someone who listens to you without judgment. Maybe you're longing for someone who celebrates your wins. Maybe you desire someone who offers comfort when you're struggling. Okay? This information is gold. It's gonna help you know what you're going to work to get. Okay? It tells you what you're still needing. What your heart is asking for. Once you have the information, you can start to find the things you're longing for and the things that you desire in other people and other relationships and other spaces. Just because your mom didn't give it to you doesn't mean that you can't find it. And other people or things or places or groups, you know, fill in the blank. The options are endless. Okay. It doesn't mean that you can't create relationships in your life that bring you joy and make you feel valued and celebrated and loved, and supported like you deserve to be. You can do these things, but you have to be willing to find it and get curious about what it is you're looking for. That way you can build the relationships around that. One of the challenges with jealousy is that it can make it harder to build relationships with women who have good relationships with their mothers or with their friends. You might find yourself pulling away from these women. Feel like you can't relate to them or you might feel triggered by their stories. Don't let your jealousy isolate you from potentially great friendships. Like that's really gonna suck if you let that keep you away from having successful and joyful relationships outside of your mom. Remember that women who have healthy relationships with their mothers can be wonderful and amazing friends if you let them. They know how to give and receive love. They can model healthy relationship patterns for you. Also, consider being honest about your triggers with safe friends. Hey, not everybody's gonna be safe for you to bring that up to, but some will. You don't have to go into all of the details. You don't have to overshare or I guess trauma dump, but you might say something like, I'm still healing my relationship with my mother. Or I just don't have a good relationship with my mother, so sometimes it's hard for me to hear about close mother-daughter relationships. It's not about you. It's about my own grief. I do love seeing your relationship with your mom, but sometimes it's just a reminder of what I didn't get. Most compassionate women will understand and can adjust how they share about their mothers when they're around you, if that's what you need. But you have to understand what you need. And last, try to separate the woman from her relationship with her mother. She might have a wonderful mother, but that doesn't mean she hasn't struggled in other ways, or that their relationship hasn't always been perfect. She might be dealing with anxiety or relationship issues, or work stress or parenting challenges. There are other ways you can relate to this potential friend. She's a whole person beyond the relationship she has with her mother. While not every woman has a mother wound, many do. You might find that building relationships with other women who are also healing their relationships with their mothers or with themselves, if healing with their mother is just not an option, you might feel safer and more connected to them. There are women who understand you and get you and share some of your same experiences while you're navigating jealousy. I also want you to navigate celebrating other people's good relationships. Even when it's hard. This doesn't mean you have to pretend it doesn't hurt, but try to hold both, both of these truths together at the same time. Your grief for what you didn't have and what you desire and genuine happiness for what they do have, and you didn't get all of this can exist at the same time and they can all be true. Okay, let's move on to the second one. Some mothers are jealous of their daughters, not all mothers, of course, but far more than we talk about openly. And if you grew up with a mother who was envious of you, It can be really confusing. And if you grew up with a mother who was envious of you, it can be really confusing and painful. So what does maternal jealousy look like? This often shows up as competition rather than celebration When you achieve something like getting good grades, receiving some kind of recognition or praise success in relationships, instead of being proud, your mother may have seemed threatened. She minimized your achievements or found ways to make it about her. She competed with you about your appearance, comments about your weight, your clothes, your attractiveness. She seemed to need to be the prettiest woman in the room. Even when that room included her own daughter, she may have been jealous of your youth or opportunities may be saying things like, you have it so easy, or I never had chances like that. You don't know how good you have it. Instead of wanting to give you what she didn't have, she resented that you had it. She may have been jealous of your relationship with your father or other family members. She might have tried to interfere, create drama or position herself as a victim. when others showed you love or attention, she may have been jealous of your potential and tried to dim your light, discouraging your dreams, telling you that you weren't special. That you shouldn't get your hopes up. Instead of being your biggest cheerleader, she felt threatened by what you might become. So why does this happen? Why is this a phenomenon? Mothers who are jealous of their daughters are usually women who never healed from their own mother wounds. They're carrying deep insecurities, unprocessed trauma, and unmet needs from their own childhoods. they might have grown up with limited opportunities and instead of wanting something different for their daughters, they feel bitter about the disparity. So for example, and like one thing that we have to remember. Is that with each generation of daughters, of girls and women, every new generation, we are getting more and more rights and more opportunities and more power to do things. Like if we look through history, every generation girls and women are getting more rights and they're, they're getting to do more things, more and bigger and better opportunities. So of course, a daughter's gonna have more opportunities than her mother had because that's. Just a part of history. But I think sometimes mothers don't understand that history and that, this is natural and it's going to happen. But yeah, so that's just an example I wanted to throw in there. But this mother may, have been taught that women compete rather than support each other. Like your mom might be dealing with her own aging process, feeling threatened by, you know, her daughter's youth or vitality. Maybe she has unfulfilled dreams and instead of living vicariously through her daughter's success, She feels envious of it. I don't think any mom should live vicariously through her daughter. 'cause then we're gonna get into enmeshment. But you get what I mean? Instead of enjoying the success and being proud of her daughter, she's envious of it instead. So these mothers often have a scarcity mindset. They believe that there's only so much love, attention, success, or happiness to go around. So if their daughter has it all, then that means there's less for them to have. And this is simply, simply not true. So this impacts daughters in many ways when you grow up with a mother who's jealous of you, it creates confusion. Like I said earlier, you learn that being successful, beautiful, happy or accomplished can be dangerous or have love taken away from you. You learn that shining your light threatens the person who's supposed to love you the most. You might learn to dim yourself to keep the peace. You downplay your achievements, you hide your happiness. Make yourself small so that your mother doesn't feel threatened and that she continues to love you. You might have learned that love is conditional on not being too much, not too successful, not too happy, not too much of anything that's gonna trigger your mom's insecurities, so you stay small. Okay. This puts you in a really bad bind. Like, what are you supposed to do about it? You wanna be successful and happy. You wanna share this with your mom. you want her to celebrate you and be your biggest cheerleader and be there right alongside of you, but you learn that doing so risk, actually losing her love. So you might sabotage yourself or feel guilty when good things happen, or struggle to fully celebrate your win. You might also struggle with trusting other women because your first experience with a relationship between, Your first experience of a relationship with another woman was with someone who saw you as competition rather than someone to nurture and support you. And this person was your mom. Like the only thing you're supposed to receive from her is nurture and support, and you didn't get that. You got the opposite. Hey, if this is resonating with you in any way, you might recognize some of these patterns. Feeling guilty when you succeed or are happy, automatically downplaying your achievements or hiding them. Feeling like you need to choose between being successful and being loved, that the two can't come together. Struggling to trust that other women genuinely want good things for you. Feeling like you're too much when you're just being yourself. So understanding that your mother's jealousy is about her wounds and not your worth is crucial to your healing. You didn't do anything wrong by being young and talented or full of potential, or just having the opportunity at your fingertips that was supposed to be celebrated, Not competed with, If you're listening to this and recognize that you've been competitive or jealous with your daughter, first, thank you for your honesty and showing awareness. It takes courage to see these patterns and your awareness is the first step to healing. Here's what repair can look like. Take full responsibility without making excuses. Don't say, I was jealous because my mother did this to me. Instead, say something like. I was competitive with you and that was wrong. You deserved my support and celebration. Be very specific about what you did. I minimized your achievements because I felt threatened or I minimized your achievements because I wanted them for myself and not for you, or. I made comments about your appearance because I was insecure about my own appearance. I made comments about your appearance because I was worried or insecure about how other people would see you. Specificity shows you truly understand the impact. Acknowledge the bind you put her in. This can sound like I put you in an impossible position where you felt you had to choose between succeeding and keeping my love. That was never a choice you should have had to make. Tell her what she deserved. This can sound like you deserved a mother who celebrated your light. Not one who felt threatened by it. You deserve to shine without worrying about my feelings. Don't expect immediate forgiveness or trust. Repairs a process, not a single conversation. Show consistent change over time. Celebrate her wins. Genuinely support her dreams without making it about you. And then go do your own healing work. working with someone like me to understand why you felt competitive, to help you heal your own mother wounds, so that way you can stop the cycle and have the relationship with your daughter that you desire to have. Your daughter will probably need time and space to process this. You must respect that. You can't move her faster than she's ready to move and you can't move her at your pace. The relationship you build moving forward can be different than what it was, but it's going to require sustained effort and genuine change if you can start to put in the effort to show her that. You can take accountability for what you did and where you messed up. You can move on and have a beautiful relationship with your daughter, should you choose. These are the kind of things that I help moms and daughters through. Not everyone does this work together. Some people do it separately on their own and take what they've learned and their new skills back to the relationship and they try again. Some work together and do a lot of the healing and the. Skill building and the new communication styles together. It really just depends on where both of you are and how ready you both are. But. Yeah, this can be different if you desire for it to be different. You don't have to stay stuck in a broken relationship if you don't want to, But it does take acknowledgement on your end to show and to say, Hey, I messed up. Hey, I didn't mean this, but this is how it came out, and I would love an opportunity to try again. And when or if you're ready, I have availability open for you to help you through this and to help you build new skills to create a lasting relationship with your daughter that doesn't remain broken, or doesn't remain strained, or even estranged if you're not currently talking. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and that I was as thorough as possible on jealousy. I think jealousy does look a couple ways and I tried to make sure this episode was robust to show that it's not just one thing There are layers to this. So thanks for being here for another episode. I do hope you enjoyed it and I will catch you in the next one. That's all for today's episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you picked up some valuable insights that you can start using right away in your own relationship to create deeper connection and understanding. If something from today's episode resonated with you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with the mother or daughter in your life who needs to hear this message. And while you're at it, please consider leaving a rating. And review so we can reach more families and transform the way mothers and daughters relate to each other. For those ready to take the next step, you can visit my website to learn more about my private coaching programs and my program designed specifically for mother-daughter pairs. Whether you're dealing with communication challenges, life transitions, or just wanna strengthen an already good relationship, I'm here to help. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next one.