Think about the time when you first met your partner or ex-partner. What did you like about her? Was it her liveliness? Her confidence? The way she enjoyed your company and felt relaxed with you because you trusted each other? Did she laugh at your jokes? Did she make you laugh? Did she make people around her feel good? Now have a think about how many of these things are still true for you and her: if you’re lucky, maybe most or all of them are still true. But be honest, if you are being jealous and giving her the rough end of this, probably she doesn’t feel so relaxed around you anymore. Or doesn’t feel she can tell you what’s on her mind. Or make jokes and have a laugh in company when you are there. Does any of this sound familiar?
If you carry on being jealous, making your partner feel uncomfortable or even scared if other people talk to her or worried about going out with her friends or with you or at all, she’ll eventually start to lose the things you liked about her and the things she likes about herself. All the things that make her unique, the person you fell for. It’ll be hard for her to enjoy being with you. It’ll make your children anxious to be around the two of you and not sure what it all means. She will perhaps learn to keep things from you, or just to avoid talking to anyone, or she may eventually decide that she can’t stand your jealousy and leave you. Why not decide now to change instead? You don’t want to lose her or, if you already have, you probably want to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Ask yourself what you are afraid of when your partner has a good time without you and then whether your behaviour is likely to make this more or less likely. If you don’t trust her when she goes out without you, won’t this just lead to her keeping more secrets, the opposite of what you want? Or perhaps not going out, which will make her sad and isolated, again, not what you want.
Ask yourself what you like about her, what your liked about her in the first place. If you liked or like her liveliness, focus on how proud you are that she is such a fun person to be around, that people like her so much they want to be around her too.
If you are worried that she is going to go off with someone else, ask yourself how shouting at her and being angry is going to make her want to be with you more. If she is going to leave you, shouting at her won’t stop it. But she almost certainly isn’t about to leave you, she’s just enjoying being out or talking to her friends, or maybe chatting to a man you don’t know or a friend of yours. If she’s going to have a secret relationship, she wouldn’t be telling you about it nor talking to them in front of you or her friends, would she. So why not take the choice of trusting her?