[afcapel]

In my experience, trying to push away these feelings of shame, jealousy and inadequacy won’t help at all. By sheer will, or by using “mental hacks” from pop psychology you might be able to push them out of consciousness for a while, but that won’t last for long. Or worse, it will last and the feelings will stay out of consciousness, even though, since their root cause hasn’t been solved, they don’t really disappear. They just become unconscious and part of what Jung called The Shadow: the aspects of ourselves that we can’t accept and we push into unconsciousness. From the unconscious they act up and make us behave in irrational ways without being able to understand what’s happening.

Instead, try to approach these feelings with an attitude of compassionate curiosity.

First, notice that there’s nothing wrong about having these feelings. It’d be wrong if you were mean to your friends because of their success. But you can have these feelings and not be mean to them. The feelings are not the problem.

Second, understand that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re having these feelings for a reason. There's a casual chain of events that's making you feel this way. So, why are they happening?

The obvious -and wrong- answer is because your friends have money and you don’t. But surely there are plenty of people in the world that have less money than you, and still manage to be reasonably happy. And even your rich friends could compare themselves with even richer people and feel inadequate about how small their swimming pool or their yacht is. Are they feeling this way?

You can ask other more meaningful questions: why do you feel the need to compare yourself with your friends? Why do you feel that you need a ton of money to validate you and make you happy?

These are not easy questions to answer. They often touch deep wounds -otherwise we wouldn’t be so keen to avoid them. But approaching them with curiosity and compassion is the only way to find the root causes of what’s making you so miserable.