A Green-Eyed Orgasm: Dr. Joli Hamilton

 

“A Green-Eyed Orgasm: Dr. Joli Hamilton”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Joli: I didn’t see this coming. I’m not just making a joke. I did not see what was coming.  He started to do this. He was so tender and so careful.  And I felt my arousal actually come online.

This fire in me is fierce and it’s angry. And it’s sad. Like I could feel tears in my eyes and heat pulsing through my clit. And I’m like,  how do I hold all of this? My stomach is kind of in knots. It was like too many emotions to hold all at once. I did the only thing I could think of to do.

August/narration: Joli Hamilton is a research psychologist and certified sex educator who does a lot of relationship coaching. Her life-changing orgasm story is one of my all time favorites. Which says a lot. First, let’s go back to the beginning. [lilting music…]

[music…]

Joli’s sexuality journey started in the small town she grew up in, where she learned helpful and challenging things about sex. 

Joli: Sexuality growing up is a really complex topic for me because

I was lucky enough to have parents who really enjoyed their sex life, but who also didn’t necessarily have the best boundaries.

They would make what I guess are crass jokes. sexual innuendo was a thing that happened in the house between the parents. They were incredibly cautious about how they treated us, but they played around.

We were on a camping trip one time and I was about nine years old and my aunt had taken us all to the pond. And my parents were at the campsite and we were all down swimming at the pond for hours and hours and we finally came back and my parents were not done and I made the mistake of unzipping that tent. And I was like, oh my god!

August/narration:

They were having sex.

Joli: And I just like left. I was gone. I was back at the playground. They didn’t see me till sundown after that.

August/narration:

Joli also grew up on a farm, which brought its own kind of sex education.

Joli: So like sex wasn’t like – it’s just an act that happens. You know, you see the dogs doing it. You see the pigs doing it. Like, oh, well. I know what that is.

August/narration:

She also saw adult stars doing it. In her home, porn was readily available.

Joli: You know, it’s. the olden days. It was like print porn. And then there were like these secret videotapes that we could put in the VCR. If everybody was gone, and I just had girlfriends over for a sleepover, we would be like, “What is this? What are they doing?

It normalized the fact that people look at bodies having sex and yet there is a downside, which is that I normalized it so much without actually knowing what I was taking on, without understanding the difference between pornography and sex education, without understanding that the way my parents literally physically treated the porn in our house was not responsible.

So I had to then piece that together later and be like, Ooh, I want to do that differently. And I want to keep the best part. And the best part was how genuinely calm they were about like, yeah, sex is fun. Just like it’s fun and it’s for grownups.

August/narration:

Joli’s upbringing was challenging in other ways, too. Her parents fought a lot.

Joli: Like a lot, a lot. And they were a very passionate, heated argument kind of couple. I think that I started to recognize that one of the ways that they repaired was sex without having any of that understanding. I didn’t know. But like, Oh, all of a sudden the fighting would calm down. The bedroom door would be locked. We all knew not to go over there and we were in a small house.

So you know, you put two and two together and you’re like, Oh. Oh, that’s, that’s how they did that. So a lot of it is also looking back and being like, Oh, I see. That’s how that worked for them.

August/narration:

All of that impacted the ways Joli developed sexually.

Joli: I was what I think of as an early awakener. I was definitely very sexually awake by the time I was seven or eight years old. I knew what an orgasm was, and I knew how to give myself an orgasm.

August/narration:

She also experienced abuse by another child, outside of her home. But she doesn’t harbor anger toward them.

Joli: I don’t think the person who did it really had any idea what was happening and they were only like four years older than me and I feel like it’s just complicated.

It did, though, kind of alert me to like, Ooh, there’s stuff. My body has feelings. So combine that with what I was seeing between my parents at home and I was awake and aware. And yet I didn’t have what I consider my sexual debut until I was 16. So it didn’t rush me forward. I just had a thriving solo sex life as a child, like thriving. 

August/narration

Throughout all of that, Joli’s parents wanted her to have an understanding about sexuality. And they tried.

Joli: My mom didn’t know how to talk about sex in a calm, cool, collected manner, the way I would.  She knew it was her job to teach me things. And so I can remember her having me watch a PBS special on things like the little fetus developing in the womb and the little sperm.

We sat together and watched it. I remember her being like, “So do you have questions?” And I could tell that she really didn’t want me to, but she also wanted me to have the information. 

And so when it came to things like masturbation, they would just use the word. Masturbation is a word my father would just say, he would say it, when it was either like kind of a quirky funny joke, or if it was just the honest thing, like oh ” That’s what’s happening. Why do you think the dog’s doing that?” [laughs] It was just this normalization of bodies being bodies.

One thing that didn’t get talked about was how pleasure itself was nothing to be ashamed of. And that’s where I felt like the gap was.

I was taught about my body and I was given an environment that was safe enough to experience like.

Yeah, this, this feels good. We’re not going to shame you. I would take very long baths. I am under no delusion that they didn’t know what was going on. But nobody said anything. We were left to our own devices and we had one bathroom in our house. So they would just leave you to it. In fact, they even put a shower door up so that the bathroom section could be separate from the bathtub section because I would take very long baths.

I think there could have been this increase of like, how do we talk about the actual pleasure? How do we talk about what you’re feeling and allowing that pleasure to be yours and to take ownership of it? They didn’t have those words.

And that makes sense. You know, they grew up in the fifties and sixties. So they really didn’t have those words. The metaphor I often use is like they rode the boat ashore as far as they could and then gave it a shove. And then it was my job to really bring it home. And I took that seriously.

August/narration: 

Early in her adulthood, Joli moved toward sex-posivitity – before she knew the word – and she started filling in the gaps:

Joli: Like, oh, pleasure is good. We’re not going to shame this beautiful, juicy, delicious self love and connection with other.

I screwed up a lot of other stuff in my life, but that I feel like I had a good hold of and it grounded me at times when everything else felt like it was a disaster or falling apart.

August/narration:

Some of those challenges happened in her relationship with her high school sweetheart. She was 17 when they got engaged, and 20 when they got married.

Joli: So, you know, we figured out sex together.

August/narration:

Quickly, she realized that she and her husband weren’t on the same page sexually.

Joli: and it was actually me realizing my drive Mine was higher. It was just much higher than my husband’s, like way higher. And so I was left with a lot of, okay what do I do with this? What do I do with all this desire for orgasm? What do I do with the fact that during my first pregnancy I learned to squirt? I’d never even seen that in porn at that point. It was 1999. There were so many gaps to fill and that sounds really lewd, but there were also so many gaps to fill.

And my desire was outstripping his through no fault of his own, like he had his own sexual life, who he wanted to be, but I wanted more. I wanted kinkier. I wanted story. I wanted to tear shit up. Because I couldn’t really get that in that marriage, it led me to have a really rich imaginal life. I was really in that discovery for myself. you know, I wound up again having this really enlivening solo sex life.

 Because he was interested in sex like me somewhere between like one and four times a month. Which, maybe would be okay, but we were 22. And I was horny as fuck. And it wasn’t enough for me. And I was pregnant, and when I was pregnant I was even hornier. It was just not easy.

August: Were you talking about this with each other?

Joli: Yeah, you know, I was the talker in that relationship. Because I didn’t have a lot of shame around it, I would talk about it. I would ask a lot of questions. And, you know, I look back and I, I actually have a little bit of guilt around, I think I was probably even over into the edge of coercive. I believe I was probably desire smuggling, like trying to manipulate him to get him to meet that need.

And so we were talking about it, but again, I didn’t have good language around consent. I didn’t really understand what marital consent even was.

I didn’t know how to say, “This is a non-negotiable for me. And if it’s a non-negotiable for you, you get to have that. If this is your limit, you get to have that, too. So what are we going to do?”  I just kept coming at it: “Well, we got married. And since sex is something that can only happen between the two of us, you have to give me more, please. You have to, you have to.”

It was so hard. And to be the girl. I’m queer and he knew it, but like I was married to a man.

I’m sure he had shame about being the lower desire partner in that particular configuration. And I had shame because I was the girl who had higher desire. I felt so weird.

August/narration:

She felt like a 15-year-old boy, she said — or at least how she had learned teenage boys experience desire.  

Joli: That’s how I would describe myself. Like, Oh my God. I think about sex All. The. Time.

August: Which is so wild. It’s like the stereotype, right? Is that boys never stop thinking about it. And that’s kind of all we hear about thinking about sex. I remember hearing boys think about sex once every eight seconds or whatever. And I’m like, oh….

Joli: Yeah. “Am I a boy?” 

August: Yeah, it’s wild! So how did you end up navigating that?

Joli: We navigated it poorly for many years. There was a lot of fighting and a lot of periods of like, okay, things are really, really good and everything’s really aligned and then not. I look back and I’m like, oh, there were periods of depression for each of us, where everything would get quiet. And then periods of like really heightened satisfaction and we would sort of ride those highs and then just like, okay, we’ll just float and hope that we make it through the lows. 

August/narration: 

That pattern continued for a long time. Like 13 years.

Joli: And then… [half laugh] I heard the concept of polyamory and non-monogamy. Somebody who I was friends with said, “Jolie, I’ve got boy problems.” And I’m like, “You’re married. How do you have boy problems?” And she tells me this story about how they had done what I now would understand as a hard swap swinging situation.

August/narration:

Basically trading partners to have sex. 

Joli: My mind…you know that emoji that’s all blown up?

August/narration:

That was Joli’s head.

Joli: Like the pieces are still on my living room floor somewhere. It never occurred to me that people were doing this in real life. I thought that this was something that happened in movies. I was so insulated. I grew up in a small town. I still live in that small town. I knew about cheating, but I didn’t know anybody was just happily experiencing multiplicity in their sex life.

August/narration:

About six months later, it dawned on her.

Joli: I was like, Oh, that is me. I need that. That’s the fix.

I was like, “Hon, I love you, but now that I know this is possible, that is what I need.” And I genuinely thought that he would be fine with it.

Cause I was like, he’s not playing with this toy. Why does he care who else does? I imagined at the time that it would be a sex only thing. That this would just be like, okay, how else do I get this need met? It is way more complicated than that.

August/narration:

Her husband was stunned by her revelation. 

Joli: So he got poly-bombed. He had no idea that this was coming either.

August/narration:

From there, things changed. Fast.

 Joli: From the day that I first found somebody that I was like, Ooh, and now not just this idea of poly but there’s the person I want to experience this with, first from the day that happened to the day I was separated was 45 days. It was real fast, and we had four kids.

So it was not thoughtless. It was not trivial. It was a huge deal. And it was the harbinger of the rest of my sex life. I could not be happier about that.

August/narration:

Finally, she could love and make love as her true self.

August: It sounds so much like identity. Like you saw, Oh, I see how I can be truly me. And that you had so much clarity that it’s like. There can be that sort of closure is the wrong word, but everything’s so clear that things just don’t get dragged out. It’s like, Oh, here I am. 

Joli: Yeah, totally. And I, I think about all the time how, you know, some people are non monogamous and it’s like, this is at the core of my being, this is like an orientation for me. It doesn’t matter how many partners I have. I’m polyamorous. That is part of my identity. And some of us are like, yeah, I could do that, or not. It’s a behavior that I choose to engage in. Cool.

I’m very much in the first camp. I mean, I went through COVID with just one partner. I’m like, yeah, that did not change my polyamory. Not at all.

And so when I knew that, the huge blessing in it all, and I do not use that word lightly. It felt like it was this ridiculous thing that nobody would ask for, but like that was what I needed was he identified within those 45 days that this was absolutely not for him. It was unacceptable. It dysregulated him so severely. It was not something he was interested in working on. And I am very, very grateful that he was able to draw that boundary for himself because if we had stayed together, we would have hurt each other. We weren’t able to do it.

We were immediately embroiled in a battle. So I’m grateful that he was like, I’m out! Because that meant the battle was short. It was harsh, but then it was over and our kids could experience, okay, well that was a lot, but it was, two months. And then it was done. And now we’re moving through a closure process.

If we had done that for years, oh my God, no way. Not fair to anybody. Not to mention the fact that he didn’t want to have sex with someone who was having sex with someone else. So one of us was going to have to do something that we truly did not consent to.

August/narration:

And the man she’d set her sights on to explore poly with? His name is Ken and Joli is still with him.

Joli: Okay. Here’s the thing. Please do not, do not try this at home. It will not work. But it’s 15 years later. I am married to this person. They are an amazing partner. We are polyamorous.

We’re exceptionally happy. We have our own podcast. You can listen to us. It’s almost disgusting how happy we are. So it doesn’t make sense. This shouldn’t have worked.

We got into a relationship very quickly because my life exploded and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So he and his wife were like, “We’re open. Come on in.” I wound up in a triad that proceeds to occur for three years. Then she decides she’s not interested.

And now I’m in a new phase of life and we’re figuring out okay, so we’re like primaries to each other or something. What are we doing? So we’re figuring that all out. We wind up getting married.

And then we settle into, okay, we’re polyamorous. We have seven children. I was in graduate school, but like, we’re going to date! This is who we are. We’re going to be dating people. We had made a commitment not to live with any other adults while the kids were growing up because we’d already gone through all of that.

We were like, you know what? Okay. So we’re going to date.

August/narration:

As in other people. 

At the time, they’d been together for about 9 years. And Joli was a “full on, gently devoted jealousy researcher.” She’d gone back to school at 35 and gotten a bachelor’s in psychology, and then a masters and PhD in jungian archetypal psychology. She was also a certified sex educator. And jealousy was not what she wanted to focus on. In her life or career.

Joli: And I kept trying, oh my god, August, I tried so hard to have it not be jealousy. I was like, anything else, the rest of sex is so much fun. And jealousy just like, she followed me everywhere I went like bang on my back. She was just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

So I picked it as my dissertation topic, the archetypal nature of jealousy. So when I say I’m a jealousy researcher, what I mean is I literally listen to people’s stories of jealousy and I try to make sense out of the larger patterns we see over those conversations. So I’ve had hundreds of conversations about jealousy. And yeah, it doesn’t stop you from feeling it.

August/narration:

In fact, she would soon have firsthand experiences with intense jealousy. Something about dating other people kicked things into a different gear, compared to the original triad.

Joli: Because I first jumped into polyamory, like right into a triad, I was watching like this person I was in love with and one of my closest friends, in their marriage just happily loving each other and I was like, well great! I got to practice compersion, that feeling of joy for your partner’s joy, right up close like I’m watching them kiss. I’m watching them do the dishes together and I’m like, this is great. I love this. I love this for them. I love this for me.

I had some inklings that I could get off on it, that I could take it even to like a, Ooh, this is even arousing for me. I’m genuinely experiencing pleasure because you’re experiencing pleasure with each other. Cool. Then that relationship ended and my relationship with her ended as well. 

August/narration:

 First, once Ken’s first wife was out of the picture, the pair entered an interesting period.

Joli: I think of it as sort of pseudo monogamy. There was a little bit of time where we actually even played with monogamy. We tried it on, you know, it was kind of kinky for us, but we tried it on.

We’re like maybe? No, it wasn’t the right thing. But because we had so much going on in our lives, Ken, he just didn’t date a ton. And so I got out of the habit of seeing it up close and feeling it up close for a while.

August/narration:

Then they entered a stage where they were both dating other people, and jealousy started entered the picture. It was manageable…until it wasn’t.

Joli: I was going to school far away, so I was traveling and I could date when I was out there and he would date when I was gone. And so jealousy would mostly feel like, oh, I feel like kind of squiggles in my body. And I feel kind of nervous that you’re going on a date.

And I would have a sort of intellectual experience of jealousy combined with some weird body squiggles. Sometimes I would get hot, I would get really hot and I’d be like, Okay, that feels uncomfortable, but also I’m okay. Nope, I got it. It was very much like I’d ride a wave, but it was not a tsunami and I’d come back down.

So I really thought not that I had it under control, but that I could manage it.  Then he started dating someone that just set off all my jealousy. All of it. 

August: Why do you think this was exceptional?

Joli: [exhales] We are in a high transparency relationship. So we negotiate with other partners for like, Hey, is it okay if I share details like physical details of how this felt for me? And so with consent, he would tell me how it felt to touch her body, how it felt to kiss her, how it felt to squeeze her and be next to her.

And I have heard him describe this with plenty of people and I’ve seen him have plenty of sex and generally speaking, I am the cheering section. I’m like, “Can I bring you water and towels?” I am so here for it. But this one, for some reason, set off all my jealousy. And I really think it must have come down to a visceral sense of something about the way he was talking about it.

I think it may have felt familiar, like, Oh, I think this is the way he talks about me. I think this might be like how he would describe touching me. Her body shape was fairly similar to mine. Like we had some stuff in common, but she also had a couple of things I don’t. She had dark hair and dark eyes and I don’t have those. I couldn’t be that.

So it woke up both my competitiveness and my sense of like, I can’t be that. And my, Ooh, is that too close to me? Like, wait, if she’s just like me, then he could replace me. It woke up all the things. Usually it’s one or the other.

August/narration:

Plus, she felt like she had to be “cool about it.”

Joli: I was a jealousy researcher. I was supposed to be the cool girl. Like be cool, man.

In poly world, it can be really common to be like, I’m so cool. I don’t have jealousy. Like I don’t feel it. It’s not a big deal. I’ve evolved. Fuck that. If you have evolved past your jealousy, I love that for you. You’re not dead yet. Wait. It could still come for you. [laughs]

August/narration:

Joli’s jealousy around this woman was growing more and more intense. And she tried to cope.

Joli: Ken had been seeing this woman for a couple of months. They hadn’t had a ton of in person dates, but they were pretty juicy. He would come home and I started feeling like I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it.

So I started scheduling my own dates at the same time, which is not like me. That’s a tool you can use, but it’s kind of a crutch. Like I have to be out on my own date while you’re out on a date. Like that’s not a crutch I want to rely on for my non monogamy. It’s okay at the beginning, but that wears out thin and you never know whether you can count on it.

August/narration:

One night, no crutch to lean on, her jealousy did reach tsunami levels. And it led somewhere she never would’ve expected.

Joli: Eventually I had to face the fact that he was on a date. I knew exactly what he was doing because I had seen him making hotel reservations and I just had to deal with it.

So I did. I did all the evolved things. I did all the things I was supposed to do. I sat with my feelings and I regulated my nervous system. I set myself up with a good plan. And, um, it didn’t fucking work. [laughs]

August/narration:

She and Ken had taken all the steps she teaches her clients.

Joli: You know, I talk about the jealousy roadmap and there are these things to do: asking to have your needs met is part of it, you know, identifying the jealousy, I had done those things.

But the thing that is hard to talk about is that working productively with your jealousy doesn’t mean you won’t feel it. And there was some part of me that I think still imagined that I was going to be able to get out of feeling it. I was going to be able to use my intellect to override it or somehow just sort of use those tools to coast through it and never have to feel it. 

And then this date happened. And he was out and I was home and I was so numb that I could feel the fire crawling up inside me. Like the outside of me was numb. I could barely move. I could feel my sternum rising and falling. I was like, you’re still breathing. You’re not dead because you’re still breathing. And the fire was just licking me from the inside. It was brutal.

August/narration:

The date ended. And the last thing she wanted to do was tell Ken what she had been experiencing, but…

Joli: …the moment he walked in the door, he saw it all over me.

And it was so hard because I wanted to be good at this. I wanted to be good to him. I wanted to receive his story. I wanted to be there and uphold our agreements about how we would treat this beautiful experience he had just had.

August/narration:

 But, she couldn’t.

 Joli: I failed. I could have faked it, but I would have been lying.

 He was trained as a physicist and sometimes his analytical mind really comes in handy. So he looked at me and appeared to be going through a checklist. I can feel myself on the bed and he’s looking at me and I can see him like, okay. Do I walk away? Do I check in with her? What do I do? 

I felt myself ready to start a fight. It was like the ignition switch just got hit. And I was like, Oh, okay! And I started to rail at him.

 Jealousy is made of all these other emotions, right? It’s made of rage and fear and sadness and grief. Rage is my easiest emotion. Of all the big emotions for me, anger is the easiest.  

August/narration:

She found herself picking at trivial things, like how he was a tiny bit late.

 Joli: I mean, I think he was home like four and a half minutes late. That’s bullshit. I’m sorry. That’s like, get over yourself, Joli.

August/narration:

She took a breath and calmed back down.

 Joli: And I said, how about you just tell me just the mild details from your date? You know, let’s reconnect and then do some mild sharing.

He started to share the mild stuff. So he’s sharing about having a drink together at the hotel bar, you know, they’re just sitting there and he was just describing the environment. He wasn’t even describing her. It was just describing the environment.

And I felt, for the first time in my life, this absolute clarity of like, Oh, I am creating porn in my own mind. He’s describing the scenery and something in me was reminded of those VCR tapes I would pop in and watch. Like, this is naughty. I’m not supposed to be watching this. But also it’s right here and I get to watch this. And also it’ll feel good if I watch this.

August/narration:

She paused for a second, wondering what to do.  Maybe hearing more would help? Could she feel good “watching” this? 

Joli: I asked him if he would tell me the whole story. He’s like, “Yeah, I can tell you what happened. Are you sure you want to hear?”

And I was like, “I do, but I’m afraid I’m going to hit you. I’m afraid that I’m going to get out of control and I’m just gonna be flailing around or something.” And he was like, “Okay, well, so what if you sit there? And you listen. I’ll check in with you as I’m telling details. I’m going to check in with you every few minutes and just ask you how far,” and we were using a red light, green light scenario. If I got to yellow, he was just going to slow way down.

August/narration:

Joli did not get to yellow.

Joli: I didn’t see this coming. I’m not just making a joke. I did not see what was coming.

He started to do this. He was so tender and so careful. He’s describing the situation. How he’s moving in pleasure, and I felt my arousal actually like come online.

This fire in me is fierce and it’s angry. And it’s sad. Like I could feel tears in my eyes and heat pulsing through my clit. And I’m like, how do I hold all of this? My stomach is kind of in knots. It was too many emotions to hold all at once.

I did the only thing I could think of to do.  I was like, there’s my vibrator. So I got my doxy out. I looked at him and I’m like, “I think I just want to masturbate and find out what happens.” It was like, Yeah, let’s, let’s go. Let’s do this.

So I put it on like a really low setting, lower setting than I typically would. And he’s telling me the details sort of iteratively, like he’s going back to the beginning and then forward and back to the beginning and then forward.

And he’s slowly laying this out. And as he is, I start crying. The kind of Charlie Brown tears are like flying out of the sides of my eyes. But the pleasure is starting to also moving in waves up and down my body.

I can feel how it’s neither good nor bad. It’s this neutral sense of erotic power. I turned up the vibrator, step by step. And every time I would turn it up, he would share more details. He knows the speed I usually use this at. I could feel him timing himself to that. and I’m crying now.

But he trusted that I knew what I wanted. And we stayed in it. And this has now been going on for like an hour. This is like the slowest unfolding and I’m ramping up, and I’m getting closer and closer to the speed I tend to use.

You know, we get habituated a little bit to like our particular vibe. And I turn it up And he starts getting to like where he is down between her legs and he can feel the pressure of her thighs on him. And he’s describing this, the taste and the scent.

As he’s describing this, I start to feel the fire in my face. It was this bizarre sense of this tingling heat. It just wrapped me all up. It started in my face and it just wrapped around my body. I felt like a Phoenix. I felt like I was literally immolating. I felt like I was spontaneously combusting. And I started to have an orgasm.

I’ve had a lot of orgasms in my life, but this one started with this low rumble and it built and it ebbed and it built and it ebbed and it built and it ebbed. I could feel how I could stop at any time and I would have felt this peak. I would have had this spike climax. But I just kept powering through the way like a really, really powerful sadist might just hold a vibrator to you when you’re like, “But I’m done! I want to finish. I want to finish finish.” There’s like finishing and then there’s finish finishing.

And I stayed with it. I was the one holding the vibe to myself. So I was in control. He’s telling this story and he’s holding me and he’s not allowing my tears to be anything. And I’m covered at this point. I’m sure with snot, too, like everything’s gotten messy.

Thank God for waterproof blankets, because I just started squirting out everywhere. There was water on the front of our glass closet. It was everywhere. 

I could see my stomach undulating in waves. I can feel the burn in my own arms from just holding this tension and I just scream this guttural, fierce scream. At the end of it is just this, yes, yes.

And then I drop the vibrator and I hear it hit the floor. And he’s perfectly still and he moves nowhere. And he just holds. He doesn’t drop the container. He doesn’t let go of the energy. And we just stayed.

I have no idea how much time passed. The orgasm itself was like this balm. I don’t even understand what happened, but the transformation in that moment, there was a completion, something finished. I have no way to even understand it other than to tell the story.

August/narration:

Jealousy wasn’t gone from her life, but something had changed. And she had an urge to go outside.

 August: That is so mesmerizing. It sounds like you released all of these emotions. Afterwards, did you feel at peace? Were you still jealous at all?

 Joli: In that holding time, I had this sense of time suspension where like I really was just, I don’t know… I don’t know how long we were there. And then I desperately wanted to see the moon. So I stand up. I’m completely naked. So he throws a robe over my shoulders. It’s literally three o’clock in the morning, and we go downstairs.

There’s no moon. The moon has set at this point, but I’m outside and I’m like, this is it. It’s cold. the middle of the winter in New England. There’s no snow on the ground and we just went to the back deck and we just laid down on it and just laid in the darkness out there. And I searched everywhere for the jealousy. And it was just gone.

It’s not that jealousy was gone from my life. I was like, no. I still understand intellectually, it’s going to come back. But all the sensations were just processed in that moment. This person, who I had been locked in this idea of competition and comparison, was now a person again.

And my person, who was next to me right now, was holding my space and witnessed my complete dissolution and what must’ve seemed crazy from the outside and just held it with such clarity of vision. He trusted me to just be in the experience- with no plan, we didn’t know where it was going.

We just laid there for like 40 minutes outside. That was when I decided that jealousy didn’t need to be solved. I didn’t need to be looking for a cure in my research. I didn’t need to be looking to get rid of it. I just needed to learn how many ways I could come up with for people to be with it. Just be with it, till it would resolve on its own.

August/narration:

It’s been six years since that “green-eyed orgasm.” Just as Joli predicted, she still feels jealousy – but differently. She pointed to a quote from a famous psychotherapist:

 Joli: You know that Fritz Perls saying that fear is just breath. I love that statement. I think it’s really helpful because you can work it from two directions. One is when I’m afraid I can take a breath and remind myself like, wait, this sensation in my body that I call If I breathe through it, I may be able to find there’s actually excitement there.

I can do that and I can, I have enough awareness of what jealousy is and that I could potentially find arousal in it. I could potentially find something I need, a need that’s not being could name and then get met.

Or I could find out that this relationship doesn’t work for me. Great! I don’t want to be in relationships that don’t work for me. 

About 30% of the people I talk to understand that their jealousy does have a tinge of arousal. I don’t ever expect to the feel the phoenix burning again. That was remarkable.

That’s in my top five lifetime peak experiences of sex. But I do get off on it. So when he goes out on dates, one of the things I’m looking forward to is seeing how to play with it. How can I play with this while he’s out? How can I play with it when he’s home

August/narration:

Because of that, Joli often looks forward to jealousy.

Joli: I do. Some people get frustrated with me when I say that. What I mean is I have done my work with this particular partner. And when I say I’ve done my work, I mean this man, like he shows up to seven hours of classes that I teach on relationships every week, as my tech assistant.

He has done his work and then he continues to. So there is this profound trust that I have that no matter how rough the jealousy is, he will not discard me because of the jealousy. And so it’s quite safe for me to feel it. He might find this relationship isn’t a fit, absolutely, but he’s not going to discard me because Joli’s a jealous person. So it’s very safe for me in this container to feel jealousy.

August/narration:

That’s not to say jealousy is exciting or appropriate in all of her relationships.

Joli: In the past, I have found myself in relationships where people have tried to inspire jealousy sometimes because they know I’m a jealousy researcher and they’re kind of an asshole and they want to see if they can get a rise out of me.

That’s bullshit. Don’t do that. Don’t do that to anybody. Trying to inspire jealousy, that is literally an infant and toddler move. If that’s your game right now, I encourage you to look at how that is actually inner child work that needs to be done.

 August/narration:

She also looks forward to learning what jealousy will reveal.

Joli: But I also I look forward to what it reveals. I’m a depth psychologist. I care about bringing unconscious material into my conscious awareness. And we never finish that work. I’ve been doing psychological work so long and so, so hard. Like it is so central to my life. There are areas where I’m like, wow, I feel kind of complete on that, but jealousy is the gift that just keeps giving like, there’s just so much.

So now if I have a partner who does inspire jealousy in me and I don’t feel safe with them, I don’t necessarily work on that in that relationship the way I work on it with Ken. They may not have the capacity to hold that container. They may find jealousy to be a turnoff. They may be intimidated by my sexual intensity around it.

Like this is a thing for me. We negotiate. And a lot of people are not into it. So I just don’t do that with them. I take that into my solo sex life and I bring it back to the sex that I have with Ken intentionally then, because I don’t like to bring jealousy out of nowhere, if I can help it. I want to say before we’re in the incident, like “I think jealousy is awake. I think she wants me to work with her.”

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August/narration:

By the way, Joli uses female pronouns to describe her jealousy for a reason. 

Joli: I do a lot of inner counsel work and my jealousy is very tied to that little girl who learns to masturbate very young. It’s very tied to that. So for me, I describe her, I personify her, like she wants me to visit.

So I will orgasm. I will pleasure myself. I will talk directly to her while I’m doing that. I call it orgasmic imagination. It’s very similar to active imagination, to lowering of the consciousness so you can really converse with this personified other.

August: I love that. And the compassion that that must inspire to be thinking of little girl who deserves care.

Joli: Yeah, yeah. And whose parents were absolutely not equipped to give it to her. So it also brings me into some compassion for how hard it must have been to try to do all the things of parenting and then have this really intense little girl who wanted all these things and they couldn’t meet those needs. They just, they couldn’t.

To meet my jealousy now is to meet that ungrown person. She’s not just even a child. She’s also the teenager. She’s that 22-year-old who was furious that she couldn’t have the sex life she wanted, but also only knew monogamy and had no idea that divorce was even possible. It’s all of them. It’s all of these past versions of myself and you know, I’ll get kooky here.

I think that there is an archetypal layer of jealousy, which means I do believe I’m tapping into the collective unconscious and I’m touching jealousy as it exists in our cultural consciousness. I don’t think I’m fixing it. I don’t think I’m solving it, but I think I’m touching it and I think it’s ignored most of the time. So I’m glad to touch it. Find out what’s going on in there.

August/narration:

I appreciate that so much – that Joli, as she put it, touches jealousy, and speaks openly about it – as a relatable person and as a researcher, especially given that jealousy is such a demonized emotion. I had to ask her about that.

August: Why do you think jealousy is so vilified? I feel like we allow other people to have all these other emotions and people get so judged. You know, I’ve heard people say, I just don’t tolerate jealousy. Like if I have a jealous partner, it’s like a whole label. It’s not, they’re feeling jealousy. This is a jealous person.

Joli: Yes! That’s it. So, I’ve had thousands of conversations about jealousy and one of the questions I ask, I’ll ask “When you were a kid, did your parents talk to you about how to deal with anger and sadness?”

Some people are like, “Yeah, they did!” And so my followup question is, ” Did they teach you how to deal with jealousy and envy? Did they sit you down and talk about it?” They’re like, “No.”

And I talk to people all the time who were raised by therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and we don’t talk about it because I believe it is in our cultural shadow. This is an emotion that our society has demonized for thousands of years. 

Look at Shakespeare calling it the “green eyed monster.” Flick on “Love is Blind,” right? We both hold jealousy up as proof of love. We want our lovers to be just jealous enough, but if they’re too jealous, yeah, now we demonize them for that. And now they’re a jealous person.

We ask them to wear the veil, the mantle of jealousy, because then we can project our own jealousy onto them and they can hold it for us. We just don’t know what to do with it. And we think it’s supposed to be fixed and solved. But here’s the problem. Jealousy is an emotion that shows up as young as five and six months old. It’s hardwired. It’s supposed to be there.

So what do you do with an emotion that’s in there right from infancy? You start feeling it that no one ever teaches you how to deal with. You start having big issues with it. Usually when you have siblings, right? We deal with envy and jealousy, getting tangled up, and then it comes up again in teen age. Nobody tells us what to do with it as we deal with our first relationships.

 And then we’re grownups and now we’re repeating the cycle because we don’t know how to talk about it either. And then we have disastrous music lyrics and mythology and literature and all the stories about jealousy are either terrifying or, ick, gross. Why would I want to be associated with that?

 There’s never a story about somebody who’s just like, you know, they were a jealous bitch, but you know what? They really did their work on that. [laughs]

August: No! Or if somebody asks you, “How are you feeling?” I’ve never heard someone just say, “Oh, you know, I’m okay. I’m a little jealous.” Like, it’s not a word we can say. Maybe if you’re talking to a really good friend about like a secret you have of like, “Oh, I’m jealous of this thing that my partner’s doing or whatever.”

Joli: Right.

August: “How are you feeling?” Happy, sad, even angry might be okay.

Joli: Right. Yeah, if we’re in a monogamous relationship and we say we’re jealous, now there’s something wrong with our relationship because monogamy is supposed to protect you from jealousy. It doesn’t. And if you’re in a nonmonogamous relationship, you’re not supposed to feel jealousy because you’re supposed to be mature and do your work and evolve out of it.

So that’s no good. So a lot of times people don’t feel safe talking about their jealous. There they want to be cool about it. I think the non monogamous community is by and large making strides there and normalizing conversations about jealousy.

So if I go to say a local poly meetup, I might be able to say like, you know what guys, I’m just really struggling with jealousy right now. And I’m probably going to be met with like, yeah, okay. That’s a feeling. But even so it’s not going to make me feel real good about who I am in my relationship. And it’s hard not to care what other people think about our relationships. They’re status symbols for us.

August/narration:

On top of that, Joli said, most of us conflate jealousy and envy. 

Joli: We treat them as the same thing. They’re not the same thing. People are often actually really comfortable saying things like, “Oh, I’m so jealous of her. She got this thing. She got a promotion or she got a Birkin bag,” or whatever. That’s not jealousy. That’s envy.

August/narration:

Envy is simply wanting what someone else has.

Joli: So we conflate these things, we make them kind of a mess, and then it’s hard to talk about jealousy because we actually don’t know what we’re talking about. 

August/narration:

If you’ve been struggling with jealousy, Joli offered this advice.

Joli: Try to move out of fixing jealousy. And we usually have one of two methods.

Either we want to fix it, as in we’re going to try to fix something in us. We’re going to bust out the tools and like, I’m going to go sodder on, I’m going to go fix it. We treat ourselves like a machine.  

Or, and this is actually more common, we point our fingers out at our partner and we’re like, I’m feeling jealousy. And since jealousy is about our relationship, you fix it. Or we just keep breaking up with people over and over again.

None of these is the same as being with the jealousy long enough to at least understand what’s the tone? I think of them as flavors. Like what’s the emotional tone of this jealousy? Is it angry? Is it sad? Am I struggling with anticipatory grief? I’m so terrified that I’ll lose something that I’m like pre-grieving it. Nothing’s even happened. Am I in anxiety? I’m making up stories.

Can I just be with it long enough for that? Long enough to notice the sensations in your body and name it and name the flavors of it. That right there, that’s a huge step forward. Usually we go right to the, I’m going to go right to my partner and talk about my needs. But we don’t actually know what our needs are if we don’t even know how to be with the feeling long enough to receive its energy, its intention, like what does it want from us?

So, slow down and practice being with the jealousy in a sort of state of suspended judgment, just long enough.

 August/narration:

There is a caveat, though. An important one.

Joli: Sometimes your jealousy is rational. Sometimes your jealousy is doing its exact job. Jealousy is fear that our valued other will be interrupted. Our relationship to the valued other will be interrupted. And sometimes there truly is a reason. There is an objective threat to your relationship from a third party.

And it’s only jealousy if there’s a third party, there has to be an interrupting force. If you can’t spot the triangle of me, my valued other and the perceived interrupter, it’s not jealousy. It’s envy different thing.

But if it’s jealousy, I want people to be able to both sit with it and to be able to understand that sometimes jealousy is doing its job. It’s meant to be an indicator that we see. We perceive a threat.

I might be imagining that threat. So if I’m imagining the threat, now I have to start teasing apart, okay, this is mine to work with. This is in my imagination. I got to go to therapy. I got to do my work. I got to unpack that.

But if it’s real and it’s happening and somebody is either intentionally violating relationship agreements, they are not showing up for you in the ways that you’ve negotiated. They’re just being a dick. They’re intentionally inspiring jealousy, no, do not sit with your jealousy night after night, after night, after night for that. Sit with it just long enough to get a couple lessons and then get yourself the hell out of there. 

[acoustic chord riff]

August/narration: To learn more about Joli Hamilton’s work, visit openeasier.com. If you’re planning to open your relationship, or in that process and struggling, sign up for her free salon. To learn more about better navigating jealousy, visit her other site, jealousyroadmap.com. There you can download a free step-by-step guide based on her research. Find Joli’s podcast, Playing With Fire, co-hosted by Ken, wherever you listen.

If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, I’d love it if you’d share links with your friends. Ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify are also super appreciated. Thanks so much for listening.