What is Retroactive Jealousy?
Jealousy is a normal human emotion that everyone experiences at times. It often happens in the context of romantic relationships. Usually, waves or moments of jealousy pass, like other uncomfortable emotions, without lingering or damaging your relationship.
Retroactive jealousy is a difficult type of jealousy you feel about your romantic partner’s past sexual and romantic experiences. Although it’s true that hearing about your partner’s past can be uncomfortable or upsetting for many people, most feelings that arise from this still fade. But for some people, these feelings can grow into an unhealthy, jealous fixation on the partner’s sexual and romantic past. When this happens, it can easily take a toll on your mental health and on your current relationship. Fortunately, relief is possible! Read on to learn more about retroactive jealousy and what can be done to help it.
Signs of Retroactive Jealousy
One strong indicator you may be dealing with retroactive jealousy is being overly and persistently preoccupied with your partner’s prior love life. This often means focusing – to an unhelpful degree – on details about your partner’s exes, prior relationships, and sexual history. Along with these worries you may experience anxiety, irritation, anger, and other unpleasant emotions in addition to jealousy. These feelings can lead you to take steps to try to feel better. For example:
- Persistently asking your partner about their past, in detail
- Researching your partner’s exes and past relationships on social media, or by asking mutual acquaintances
- Frequently seeking reassurance from your partner about your current relationship, or in comparison to their exes
- Comparing yourself to your partner’s exes, and your current relationship to your partner’s prior relationships
- Reassuring yourself that your partner loves you more than their exes
- Using “data” from their past, such as their number of prior sexual partners (sometimes referred to in slang as “body count”) or which specific sexual activities they’ve engaged in, to draw conclusions about them as a partner
- Ruminating about the specifics of your partner’s past
- This can also include picturing your partner with their exes or their past sexual experiences
- Growing suspicious of your partner without evidence
- This can lead to behaviors like following them, checking up on them, going through their phone, social media, browser history, etc.
- “Testing” your partner with hypotheticals, “tricking” your partner into admitting wrongdoing, or starting a fight with them
- Imagining a version of your partner’s past that fits your jealousy when you don’t know the actual details
- Avoiding learning anything about your partner’s past altogether for fear it will be too upsetting to hear
Each of these behaviors makes some sense as a response to the discomfort of feeling jealous. Unfortunately, over time, responding to jealousy this way makes jealousy, anxiety, and suspicion stronger. These feelings can, in turn, damage the quality of your current relationship.
Causes of Retroactive Jealousy
There isn’t one thing that alone causes retroactive jealousy. But there are some common factors and experiences that can give rise to it and fuel it:
- Feeling insecure about yourself, or having low self-esteem
- Feeling insecure in, or dissatisfied with, elements of your current relationship
- Having an anxious attachment style and fear of abandonment
- Having a strong fear of infidelity or betrayal in relationships
- Being highly sensitive to rejection
- Having been cheated on in the past
Retroactive Jealousy and OCD (a.k.a. RJ-OCD)
Many of the features of retroactive jealousy are also common to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Struggling with persistent and severe retroactive jealousy could actually be a sign that you’re suffering from OCD. When OCD involves jealous thoughts about your partner’s past, it’s sometimes called retroactive jealousy OCD, (or RJ-OCD).
OCD involves obsessions, which are typically recurrent and unwanted thoughts. OCD typically also involves compulsions, which are behaviors intended to reduce or cancel out the emotional distress caused by obsessions. Compulsions in any type of OCD can lower anxiety and distress in the short-term, but this relief is usually incomplete, and always fleeting.
Both obsessions and compulsions about a partner’s romantic past can sound identical to the examples of common worries and behaviors in retroactive jealousy described above. Because of this, it’s important to consult with a therapist experienced in treating OCD when looking for help for retroactive jealousy. The overlap between these two concerns means that similar treatment techniques are helpful for each – and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the type of therapy proven to be most helpful for both. So, finding a therapist experienced in CBT and in treating OCD can increase the chances that your retroactive jealousy will improve.
Getting Relief for Retroactive Jealousy
Retroactive jealousy doesn’t often go away on its own. It can be tempting to think that the problem is linked to your current relationship, and that if you end the relationship, your troubles will go away. Unfortunately, many people suffering from retroactive jealousy have found that it keeps showing up in their romantic relationships across time. Because of how intense the emotions involved can be, retroactive jealousy requires time and commitment to overcome. Partnering with an experienced CBT therapist can help you improve your mental health and gain control over your retroactive jealousy.
CBT can include various proven effective treatment techniques, many which are helpful for retroactive jealousy and OCD alike:
- Exposure and response prevention
- Reducing anxiety and eliminating behaviors which worsen jealousy over time, while growing your ability to tolerate discomfort and uncertainty
- Focusing on the facts
- Learning to investigate and challenge unhelpful assumptions in your thinking that overlook relevant facts about the present situation
- Shifting your perspectives on relationship and sexual history
- Identifying and challenging thoughts and beliefs that contribute to a sense of threat to your relationship, and fuel feelings of jealousy
- Enhancing self-esteem and reducing insecurities
- Validation, support, and challenging unhelpful beliefs about yourself can buffer you from this common cause of retroactive jealousy
- Acceptance-based strategies
- Helps you gaining mental “distance” from disturbing emotions and thoughts so they aren’t so upsetting
- Helps you face the realities of your partner’s past, and work to accept that everyone has past experiences that cannot be changed
- Mindfulness
- Helps you strengthen your ability to stay focused on the present – not on your partner’s past, or future hurt you may experience
- Recognizing when you’re in wise mind vs. emotion mind
- Teaches you to look at your current experiences non-judgmentally, which can lower the intensity of emotions like jealous and anxiety, and help you cope more effectively in the present
Retroactive jealousy can be damaging to your mental health and your romantic relationships. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be the case. With the help of a trusted therapist experienced in CBT and in treating OCD, you can learn to control it, and improve both your emotional wellbeing and your relationships. If retroactive jealousy is an obstacle in your life, please contact us to discuss treatments that can help.
