Jealousy is usually treated as a complicated feeling with a long history. Peruquois takes it apart briefly and reduces it to one belief a woman carries long before any particular trigger shows up. How that works, and what moves jealousy into trust, was explained by Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
One belief underneath every form
“Jealousy is a very simple thing. It is based on one single factor,” says Peruquois.
She names the factor immediately: “That there is not enough love in the world. That there is not enough love in the world, and that you are not whole. It is just a virus.”
Both familiar forms grow out of that virus. The first runs inside as a list: I am not pretty enough, smart enough, slim enough, and she has more of it. The second turns outward and looks like aggression: she is worse than me, I will be the better one.
“All these qualities of aggression or vulnerability, jealousy in the form of vulnerability or aggression, they are all links in one chain,” says Peruquois. Both forms report the same thing, and neither of them is about the other woman.
A test at the extreme
She describes her own experience directly. She joined a large household where the man had several wives, and she arrived there as a successful jazz singer, a woman of the stage.
“I had a very healthy ego,” she says. On stage she was the one woman among the musicians, admired by the room and by her band, and she brought that state with her.
What happened next was fast. She flew into the high desert and found two pregnant women in the house, one in her eighth month and one in her sixth.
Pregnant women, in her observation, are very strong and very vulnerable at the same time, and the combination is remarkable. They had stopped being pin-ups, because at eight months a woman is preparing to give birth. She walked in wearing tight jeans and heels, assuming she was number one here.
“But I am not the only one who thinks I am number one there,” says Peruquois. At that point jealousy stopped being something to reflect on and became a daily fact of life.
The principle that turned it around
The household ran on a principle she passes on in his words: every woman is the mother of every child.
It meant literal participation. If your sister gives birth, you automatically become a mother to her child, because you care for that child as an equal. When a baby could not sleep, Peruquois would sit and rock him and sing lullabies while the mother, exhausted after birth, slept.
“I became a mother the moment I arrived, essentially,” she says. Within three months she was a co-mother to two children.
Her ego did not disappear, it was given work. She had to move through many states of humility in which the only task was to support the woman next to her.
How trust got built
Trust did not arrive by deciding to trust. The women made the first move and told her plainly that they knew her position was not easy and that they would try to make it lighter.
“And gradually, gradually, gradually, trust began to build,” says Peruquois.
Every time a new wife arrived, the dynamic shifted sharply. The new woman considered herself number one, which was natural, since she got her own period of special attention. The others could see how hard it was for her ego to accept the shared order, and they could see it because they had been through the same thing.
“We were wrestling with our ego, and she was wrestling with hers,” says Peruquois.
What her own anger taught her
She does not soften this part. She was angry at the man, and she used that anger.
“I am a very strong person, and I am not a quiet girl,” says Peruquois. On one occasion the force of her anger knocked him off his feet.
The lesson came from him and became one of her central ones: “You have to know how to use your power without causing harm to others.”
A woman has power, and the question is how she handles it. The same force that knocks a person down can be turned toward support, and that skill does not arrive on its own.
What this means in an ordinary life
A household with several wives stays a rare experience. The mechanism it exposes works in any group of women.
As long as a woman carries the belief that love is scarce and that she herself is not enough, every other woman near her becomes a threat. The colleague at the next desk, the friend with the new job, the mother in the school group chat, a man's ex-wife. The comparison starts by itself and always ends the same way.
The way out opens where a woman stops topping herself up from outside. When the sense of her own fullness holds from within, another woman stops being a rival and becomes someone to share the hard and the funny with.
Trust between women gets built slowly and out of small things: a difficult thing said out loud, help offered, a pause held instead of a jab. Peruquois describes this as work that real women did under conditions that made it difficult.
If you want to build that inner fullness so that other women stop registering as rivals, take the Peruquois course Meditation for Women Level I, available on her website under Courses.
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