Envy and Feelings: We look away from ourself and find someone else prospering. While we should be pleased that they have succeeded, the feelings that emerge are often not so generous and outward-directed. Our reactive sense of regret or loss may evoke intense feelings of shame and grief. These feelings grab at us or stab us like a knife plunged into our gut.
I would note that our body experiences both shame and grief as if they are inflicted physical wounds. We are then mobilized to react physically to this wounding. The neurobiological reactions to shame and grief can themselves be physically wounding (e.g., excessive activation of the sympathetic system). Furthermore, physical adjustments lead inevitably to psychological adjustments and a distortion of our view of the world. We are wounded and now view our world from a hypervigilant, wounded perspective. Put simply, Envy can wound us and wound our relationships with other people.
Envy and Appreciation
Envy need not be a damaging force. As in the case of risk management, we can be thoughtful and reflective about our Envy. We can use our Envy to learn forward. Specifically, we can engage in appreciation regarding the features we envy in the other person. We can look for these features in ourselves, identifying times in the past when we “did it right” and exemplified similar strengths. We can project forward our aspirations about finding similar success when doing it in “our own way” (Bergquist and Mura, 2001).
Appreciation best takes place in a collaborative setting where we engage with other people in joint recognition of distinctive expertise and potential to be found within each of us who work within this setting (Bergquist, Creating appreciative). Even in the context of potential competition, appreciation can transform Envy regarding another person’s expertise into learning from this expertise. Personal achievement and individual contribution of expertise are transformed into a sense of overall purpose and the collective valuing of this expertise.
The remarkable essayist Roger Rosenblatt (1997) revealed just such a process in candidly describing his sense of competition with other writers. He suggests that the sense of admiration for the work of other writers can play a critical role in his own life:
“Part of the satisfaction in becoming an admirer of the competition is that it allows you to wonder how someone else did something well, so that you might imitate it—steal it, to be blunt. But the best part is that it shows you that there are things you will never learn to do, skills and tricks that are out of your range, an entire imagination that is out of your range. The news may be disappointing on a personal level, but in terms of the cosmos, it is strangely gratifying. One sits among the works of one’s contemporaries as in a planetarium, head all the way back, eyes gazing up at heavenly matter that is all the more beautiful for being unreachable. Am I growing up?”
