You’re scrolling through photos of other families’ beach vacations, summer camps, and picture-perfect backyard barbecues — while you’re sweating through another day at home wondering if your kids are watching too much TV.

Summer jealousy is real. And it can ruin an otherwise perfectly good season.

In this episode, I tackle comparison head-on — especially during the months when everyone else’s life looks way more fun.

We talk about:
* Why comparison is especially brutal during summer months
* How social media distorts reality (you know this, but you need to hear it again)
* What Catholic teaching on envy and contentment can actually do for your peace
* How to enjoy YOUR summer instead of wishing for someone else’s

If you liked this episode, you’ll also enjoy:
 Why Moms Love and Hate Summer: The Honest Truth
 Summer Goals That Actually Work for Busy Moms
 Get Off Your Phone: Screen Time and Catholic Motherhood
         
If comparison has been stealing your joy and you’re ready to break free from it — that’s the kind of heart work we do inside Mary’s Heart Martha’s Order. Come join us at catholicmomcalm.com/marysheart

We don’t question that. We don’t go, why am I feeling so happy right now? Why am I content? What is leading to that? We just accept those feelings the way that they are. And yet when we have feelings of negativity, and today I wanna specifically focus on jealousy, we get really like, why is that? Why could I be feeling that? What else is going on? 

And then the process of having more negative thoughts, which is what happens when we explore negative feelings, creates more negativity in our bodies. So you’ve heard me explain on the podcast the importance of feeling, your feelings, but I want to separate out the difference between feeling your feelings and prayerfully considering, Hey, what’s going on with me right now?

And I’m gonna break this down, what that looks like versus indulging in mind drama. And letting your brain spin and spin and spin. My friend the other day called them tornado thoughts, tornado thinking, and I was like, yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Where it kind of starts and then it kind of spins and it spins and it gets bigger and faster.

But we’re not really examining things from peace. We’re not looking for what is good and true and beautiful. We’re not doing it with the Lord. There’s just this indulgent tornado. Of thoughts. So, couple examples. One, I had a few friends recently who were talking about their kids going to spend one or two weeks with their grandparents, and I found myself just feeling really jealous of that.

And the jealousy that I have is it’s just unfathomable to my brain that you would have a set of parents that is financially and emotionally stable enough that they could take your kids for a large amount of time, and that you would trust them to take your kids for a large amount of time, which means that they have to be, you know, healthy enough and that they make. 

Good enough life choices that you’re like, yeah, I’m gonna send my kids to spend a week or two with my parents. So just to be clear, it’s not that I’m jealous that you get to have a week or two without the kids. I’m just like, how did you end up with parents like that? That’s where my brain goes.

And I feel very jealous of that. And then the jealousy turns into sadness. It’s like, oh, we’ll never have that and no one helps us. And you know, not only do we not have help, but we really end up having to give them money and help emotionally prop up our parents because they’re just a hot mess. 

So when I have this moment where I notice the feelings of jealousy in my body, okay. I have a few choices now. One of the times that this happened, I was at a dinner with somebody and I chose to do neither. I chose to neither process my feelings nor to spin out in drama. ’cause I was literally there with other people and I wanted to be present with them. 

And so I redirected my brain in that moment and went, Ooh, I noticed. We’re feeling kind of jealous about that. That’s totally fine. We will think about that later. I’m gonna choose to be present with these people right now. So this actually happened, and that was the actual choice that I made. 

And then later as I was reflecting on the night and all the conversations that we had, that one came up again in my mind. And I had the choice to feel my feelings or to indulge in tornado thinking, to let it just spin and spin and spin. And then. When you do that, you are not only upset about the thing that triggered you, let’s say the topic of other people having enough money and stability to watch your kids for a long amount of time.

But then you’ll start thinking, you know. Unhappy thoughts about your husband or your marriage or your overall finances or your lack of freedom, or how trapped you feel in other areas of your life. That’s why it feels like it just keeps going and going and going and it kind of takes on a life of its own. That is not feeling your feelings.

And the way that you know is it feels very fast and it feels very out of control, and it will ruin your day. And you can let it go on for as long as you want. You can let a series of negative thoughts spin and spin and spin until you say, oh, I’m in a bad mood. And if you’re in a bad mood for long enough, then you will call it a bad day.

And if you have enough bad days strung together, you will say, this is a bad season or a bad chapter, and you might convince yourself that it’s happening to you. Like you’re just telling me, Hey Sterling, it’s summertime and it’s been hot out. That’s the way that we often tell ourselves, oh, things have been really hard lately.

But those are two different things. It’s been really hot out. We could pull out the phone and we could say, oh yeah, here, you know, it’s been 79 degrees and 87 degrees and 92 degrees. We could look at the temperature, the high of the temperature in the weather, and we could agree on that. That’s a fact.

And there’s nothing you could do about it, right? Weather is one of the things where we can’t change it. We don’t even pretend that we can change it. We could just have thoughts about it. We can make peace with the season that we’re in. We can resist it. We can be like, oh, I hate it. It’s so hot. It’s terrible.

But there’s no part of you that thinks you are responsible for the weather, but. We don’t realize that we are largely responsible for the weather in our minds, for this tornado of negative thinking, for our mood, for the string of bad days, for the difficult season. We think that is also something that is out there. It is beyond us. It is outside of our control, 

And yet. We are the ones that indulge in this spinning and spinning and spinning of negative thinking. And I’m not saying that there aren’t real things. I have a client right now who has a family member that just went into hospice and her whole family is gonna have to stop whatever they were doing in their lives and focus on this person, loving this person and then grieving this person’s passing. And that’s real.

But what she chooses to think about it will determine her experience of it. And so maybe on the pain scale, it could be a four outta 10, and this person was old and had been sick for a while, so that’s why I’m putting it at a four out 10, right? When you lose a teenager in a car accident, that’s like a 10 out of 10.

But when an older person that you love and that you kind of knew was. Getting older and sick and was probably gonna die when they finally go on hospice is probably a four out of 10, but she could use this as the reason to sit there and think, and I can never. I don’t know what her goals are, right? let’s, I’ll just use me. If it was me, I could just be like, Ugh. 

And I can never count on any time, and there’s always something that’s interrupting what I wanna do with the kids and what I wanna do with my job, and it’s just something terrible again and again and again. One thing after another, right? I could choose to make this be some sort of pattern that I’m thinking about.

And I could feel terrible about it and I could have these tornado thoughts about like, see, I’ll never get ahead and everything is awful and that would be on me. That isn’t even the factual experience of somebody passing. It was this huge story that I’m making, and notice the story isn’t even about grieving the person, right? 

The story is about how it’s inconvenient, it’s disrupting my life and. How I can’t ever control what’s happening around me. It’s this huge story that I think we often make. And really what we’re saying is the things that happen around me dictate how I feel inside. 

So I wanna tell you what feeling or feelings would be like because it’s very different. So let’s say, after the dinner with my friends, I go home and I am reflecting on the night and I notice, oh yeah, that my friend whose kids are going to stay with her parents. I felt jealous about that, and I feel jealous right now just thinking about it. 

I would process those feelings. I like to do it with paper. You really don’t have to. You really could just sit and what you do is you bring that feeling up. You think about it on purpose, the one event. So again, we’re not adding to it. We’re not spinning, we’re not indulging. It doesn’t feel like a storm. 

We just sit there and we go, Hey, Sterling. Yeah, that feels kind of sad. It feels kind of sad. The feeling actually isn’t even jealousy. It’s sadness. I feel sad that I don’t have support for my family because they have financial struggles and health struggles. They cannot watch your kids. 

You don’t have anyone that you can kind of lean on or rely on. And that’s sad. And you sit there and you feel sad and you name whatever it is and you feel it in your body and you’re doing it with the Lord. The Lord is sitting with you in this and you’re like, Lord, and you feel sad about that? And the Lord will say, I know. I am sad that you’re sad. He’ll sit with you in your sadness when it is true. 

When you are processing something that is true and real, he will sit with you in your sadness or whatever the feeling is. But it doesn’t feel fast. It feels slow, and it might feel uncomfortable because it’s a negative emotion that we’re processing, but it doesn’t feel like you’re out of control. You actually feel very in control of it.

And then it passes through you. It comes out of you. There is an end and you come back to this neutral place. And it really just takes a couple minutes for it to come out, for you to have felt sad about that. And then you’re in this neutral place, and then you get to decide what you want to feel on purpose. 

All right, Lord. In this example, you could think about the things you really love about your parents. I love so many things about my parents and my husband’s parents. I think very highly of them actually. And I could begin to think of that and it could fill me with joy, and it could show me that they were the perfect parents for me.

And that would make me feel, pleased, satisfied, honored. I feel honored when I think of the things that God has done for me. I’m like, oh, thank you, Lord. Sometimes it makes me realize how much I love someone and that I want to connect with them. 

So you can go from feeling hurt and unsupported and sad, which will really lead you to isolating yourself most likely. And instead, you could go to feeling warmth and joy and, I wanna call my mom. I’m gonna tell her what we’re doing this summer. So it feels slow. It feels purposeful. That’s what feeling your feelings is like.

And the same thing with my client whose family member is in hospice. And again, we’ve not talked about it at all. It was just that one piece of information that she gave me. But she, instead of thinking, oh, this always happens, or, Ugh, this is totally gonna disrupt our summer. She could just think, oh, I’m really sad. I’m really sad about this. 

And she might grieve the plans that she had. Maybe they were gonna go on a trip or something and now they’re not gonna go on a trip. Oh, one of my friends had scheduled a trip to Europe. To go see the canonization of Carlo Acutis. And then of course it was moved and they were so bummed ’cause they really loved him. They had a really strong devotion to him and they were taking their teen boys and ugh. Anyway, I was very sad for them.

And so it’s okay to grieve that we had plans and the plans were disrupted. That is not juvenile. What feels juvenile? What feels like emotional childhood is when we go, and this always happens to me and I can never plan anything and even the good things that I plan get taken away from me, right? It’s kind of has this stomping round feeling and we then make it apply to something so much bigger than what’s actually happening.

I think. There are a lot of things that pop up in the summer that are easy to feel jealous about, and maybe that’s true for the rest of the year. Maybe I just don’t notice as much, but my kids actually are old enough to notice that a lot of their friends travel.

And they go on vacation and they go to. Places like Hawaii or Europe, we have a  couple families that we know that are going to Europe and my kids are like, Hey, why aren’t we going to Europe? And that’s like the first time that they’ve asked me. They didn’t ask me that three years ago. So they didn’t have that level of awareness of either vacations or maybe what Europe was enough to know like, oh, that’s a big deal.

And it would be so easy for me to feel bad about that. Now I actually don’t feel jealous about that. To contrast that to those of you that have like grandparents that help you? That’s hard for me to think about, but I don’t have a strong desire to travel. 

I really like how we spend the summers. I like that we, you know, buy a Costco pool and we put that up and we have these slow days on our property and we read a lot of books and we play board games and we just have a very slow, not flashy summer. And that’s what I like. 

So it doesn’t bother me when the kids go, oh, hey, why aren’t we going to Europe? I don’t get puffed up and defensive. Like, why would you ask for that? Don’t you know how much money that costs? And we can’t do that. When you react that way to your kids, it’s showing you your own work. It’s showing you that you have something there that needs to be resolved. 

I don’t have that about traveling because I don’t like traveling. So it’s easy for me to tell the kids, oh, I just liked spending my time and my money differently than that. It’s not a big deal, but you can see that my brain does feel like it’s a big deal when other people, yeah, it really comes down to like money. Money freedom, health freedom, emotional freedom of their parents. 

I know somebody else whose parents rent, I think, three Airbnbs on the beach every summer. And then all their adult kids come with their kids and it’s just, again, it’s unfathomable to my brain that their parents could have that level of like financial security and freedom to do that. And it sounds so fun. That sounds so fun to get to go with all your siblings and their kids to the beach and have somebody pay for it. 

That is much more triggering to me, which shows me that I still have work there. It shows me that I still don’t fully 100% trust the Lord’s choice for me and my family, where I don’t feel any jealousy about people gonna Europe for the summer. ’cause I’m like, oh, that’s nice, but I don’t wanna do that.

And so I wanted to share this with you. In detail, and I really wanted to slow it down so you could see the difference between feeling your feelings and indulging in tornado thinking like a swirling of thoughts that not only applies to whatever thing that you’re going through, but then picks up with it all these other aspects of your life. And that’s why it feels so big.

Because we make it mean so much more than the thing that’s actually happening right in front of us. And that is not feeling your feelings. It is indulgent and it is harmful, and it is making you unhappy about your life and no one is doing it to you. And this is a hard message. 

Sometimes my husband says that to me and I’m like, I wanna claw your eyes out, Lexi. You have to pick your moment for yourself. You have to pick your moment for yourself when you are willing to challenge yourself lovingly about what’s going on. 

So I might catch myself swirling, and I might even let myself do it and be like, girl, swirl on for a little bit more. I love you. When you’re ready to come down, I’ll hold your heart. You know, we do that with children too, right?

When a child is just so emotional and so upset or tired or whatever they are, and we just know that they’re gone, they’re not in their brain anymore. We don’t fight it. We just kind of like, I love you. Here’s some food. Take a nap. You’re gonna feel better later. So I do that with myself sometimes, but lovingly.

So what you don’t wanna do is use this work against yourself in an authoritarian yell at you kind of way. Like just get it together. Can’t you see you’re just being indulgent in this right now? I don’t talk to myself like that. It is so much more loving and gentle. I either just give myself space because I can tell that the three-year-old in me just needs to thrash around for a little bit and I’m like, I’ll see you in the morning.

Or there are times when I feel like I can get a hold of myself, but it sounds like this. It sounds like, Hey, I can see that that was really upsetting to you, and it kind of set you down the path where you started thinking about a lot of upsetting things. And I just think some of those things that are feeling really terrible right now might not be true.

So notice I just go in so gently and I’m just walking myself back like, okay, yeah. I understand why you would feel that way. And then that’s where I’m starting to say things like, you know, but you actually have a really good relationship with your parents. You really love them and they just support you in different ways.

And the Lord has supported you in so many ways. And that’s often what I think about when I have, when I see the poverty of whatever relationship I want with my parents, I see that the Lord has really stepped in there in so many ways. He’s not watching my kids for two weeks in the summer, so not like that.

But he has allowed me to have a beautiful slow summer with my kids. I have such a life that I can sit in my backyard and watch them swim in that pool and read books, and it’s very slow and I don’t have to be anywhere else. And the Lord has given that to me. And so whatever it is that you’re going through, and I think jealousy is just such an easy trigger for our unresolved things.

Notice what’s coming up for you and then decide. Remember, the three options are, Hey, we’ll think about this later. You might actually be doing something that requires your attention, and we’re not thinking about it at all at the moment, but then later it will come up because it’s an unresolved issue.

Then you can either feel your feelings, which is slow and grounded. And it just feels very therapeutic. It feels like the pain of a massage where it can be painful to feel sadness or rejection or fear, but it’s like you’re working it out and it’s working its way out of your body. 

And then there’s this indulgent, emotional childhood tornado thinking that feels fast and bigger, and it catches more and more things as it goes and grows. And it doesn’t resolve anything. It just makes you feel terrible about more things, and you have control over that. 

And so I want you to just pay attention. Pay attention to how often you are allowing this to happen, and can you lovingly pull yourself back? Can you begin to speak to yourself with so much love? That you calm that storm and just feel the actual pain of what’s happening. 

Alright, my friends, I love you. I hope you’re having a wonderful summer. Feel your feelings. Thank you so much for listening, and have a blessed day.