I've been reading a book about emotional intelligence and absorbed a real lot of insights in just a few pages.
Emotions are like reactions inside of you towards everything going on. Its system is shaped mostly by your past. The trigger, the frequency, the intensity, they are set by what happened before. Therefore, yes it's hard to control how they evoke inside of you, but you can control how you react to it. Whenever that jealousy ignites inside of you, you can choose to give in and turn it to rage and other forms of insecurity, or you can choose to rationalize and instead, boost your self-esteem and let that jealousy suck itself up.
In the end, we can't deny the presence of emotions; they are there inside of you, inside people around you. But on the other side, we can't make emotion a definition. You can't blame someone for saying he's angry or has his fist shaking, yet. If he's punching people or slamming doors, blame him. You can't blame someone for feeling jealous if she's not being overprotective. Focus on the reaction, not the emotion. It is also nice to tolerate others' slip of reactions when emotions override them at certain intensity.
We're all learning to control our emotions. They can't define us, as long as we don't give in to them.
