Are jealousy and envy more typical of neurodivergent women?

Cast your mind back to the last time you felt jealousy or envy.

I remember it vividly.

For me it starts when my mind is automatically focussed on a particular person and a a sudden preoccupation with them.

Followed by a train of thought

"I don't like the attention person (A) gave to person (B)."

Within a couple of minutes I had blown my whole life up in my head.

Within seconds i'm filled with negative fantasies playing out in front of my eyes.

A minute later, free-fall anxiety, closely followed by fear.

I pass feelings of incompetence and finally transported into that place of unworthiness, self-loathing and ultimatley questioning my very existence.

This feeling does not go away immeditely, sometimes never.

It has been thinking are these emotions more powerful in neurodivergent women?

Jealousy is a powerful emotion which we begin to feel from 6 months old. It usually involves three people in that the jealous one feels deprived of the attention given to a rival or competitor.

Jealousy can also be rational and usually when trust is broken. It can also be pathological and is often more prevalent when there is an underlying mental health issue such as anxiety (although as yet there is very little research in neurodivergent women).

The evolutionary origin of jealousy is derived from threats to reproductive survival, as women it’s built into our genes.

Pathological jealousy can include extreme insecurity, a desire to control and manipulate. There is an absence of rational thinking and it doesn’t take much to provoke extreme jealousy.

Although very different we tend to confuse jealousy and envy.

Envy is typically when we want something another person has. It probably has it’s roots in survival too such as the distribution of wealth, status, belonging and food.

In evolutionary terms jealousy and envy are survival mechanisms, particularly for women. They contain a degree of anger, fear and often hatred, emotions designed to galvanise us into battle or to warn off potential and actual threats to our survival. Natural selction (predominantly via women attracting men) means that those of us who reproduce will pass our genes onto others, the next generation. Designs that hamper survival in youth tend to be weeded out once we pass our reproductive years. If not it becomes a declaration of our inferiority.

Given that both jealousy and envy are fuelled by obsessive loops of rumination and the inabilty to focus attention, they are arguably more probable in neurodivergent women.

We report more intense experiences that we are unable to turn off. We brood, overthink, over analyse and allow the internal monologue to dominate our waking (and dream) life.

Once we are caught in the ruminating pattern it can feel impossible to stop.

Alexithymia, the lack of awareness to notice, understand or accurately judge our internal state can make feelings such as jealousy and envy hard to identify. We just know we feel desperate and instead of expressing this we fester allowing the emotional intensity to build and become out control. As pro-maskers we can hide or disassociate from our feelings masking with over politeness "I'm fine,' (smiling with the mouth, not the eyes) a common signal of an emotional undercurrent beneath the superfically calm surface.

There are also some behaviours that may look like jealousy or envy such as pathological demand avoidance that produce behaviors that look possessive but these are more rooted in fear.

These powerful emotions can therefore reflect part of survival mechanism. If we don't act on them they fuel tension in the body which longer term causes stress, guilt, shame and keeps us from being who we are.

To work with them in a more healthy way we must ask ourselves if this emotion is coming from a place of lack - we want something and if we don't get that thing we feel inferior, or a place of genuine longing and desire?

For example, I may feel envious of someone's job or career and if it's coming from a lack of self-worth even if I achieve these things I will not feel feel happier.

On the other hand if we are prepared to look inside at our own longing and desire then perhaps we can use this as a source of inspiration.They can give us hints about how we would like to spend out time, the kind of character we want to develop and the lifestyle that we desire.

Allowing jealousy and envy can therefore in the short term give us signals as to the story we are telling ourselves, longer term they steal our peace of mind and we spiral into inferiority.

This increased torment dysregulates our nervous system and it's as if we are back on the Savannah plains in survival mode competing for resources.

As always learning to pay attention to those tiny singals, the tightening of the chest, the shallowness of the breath...interoception is key. This is one area us neurodivergent women may struggle with a little more than a a neurotypical woman but it is still a capability that can be developed. This is always time well spent especially given the pervasive use of technology today. This means our brains are living through a time of comparison that has never before been experienced. Jealousy and envy are hiding behind every social media post. We are continually triggered.

Ultimately we have to decide if we want to subject ourselves to the possibility of such a painful experience or whether we want try something different.