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Many years ago, long before I could even spell the word “psychotherapy,” let alone had any experience with it, I stumbled on the therapeutic power of wallowing while driving on a Los Angeles freeway. No one was hurt in the process, I’m happy to say!

In my mid-20s, I was nurturing a dream of becoming an actress, mostly because I wanted a job that didn’t feel like work or require me to wear a uniform. If I’d known I could achieve those aims as a counselor in private practice, I could have gone right back to school and saved myself a bundle on headshots.

Anyway, there I was in 1995, living in Hollywood, following the dream. But driving home from acting class one day, I was not happy.

I was thinking about a young woman in my class who was not only a talented actress, but also smart, funny, utterly charming and easily twice as pretty as me. She was seriously cramping my style; I wanted to be the best actress, the “phenom,” in that class. She was upstaging me just by being there. Her hair had more talent than I did. I was miserable.

The acting teacher, on whose opinion I’d hung my career hopes and dreams, seemed to delight in her, while being apparently incapable of remembering my name even after three months of weekly classes. Compared to her, I felt as exciting as a fake fern. How was I supposed to “wow” the producers in the movie biz if my own acting teacher looked right through me?

As I drove home from class that day, I was aware of vaguely “icky” emotions trying to rise up inside me. I didn’t exactly know what I was feeling, I just knew it was bad. I didn’t want to feel bothered by the situation in acting class. But I was bothered.

I tried distracting myself by turning on the radio, but that didn’t work. I still felt awful, and I couldn’t find anything I liked, so I turned it off.

Unpleasant memories sprouted in my mind: The enthusiastic applause for the Other Woman’s scenes, compared to the lukewarm reception of mine; the teacher’s warm smile and high praise for her, and his distracted, more critical comments to me.

I pushed the bad feelings away, but they didn’t get the message; they hung around and kept pestering me while I drove. They were there whether I wanted them to be there or not.

Spontaneously, I decided to speak my feelings aloud. There I was in my car, sitting in traffic – this was before everyone had cell phones, let alone hands-free devices for the car – speaking to no one.

“I’m jealous.” I said.

There. It was out of the bag.

Nothing bad happened, so I said it again.

“I’m so jealous,” I said, with some curiosity about where this was going, but also with more heat this time. “I’m jealous of her and her talent and good looks. I’m jealous because the teacher thinks she’s brilliant and thinks nothing of me!”

I was on a roll now – as bizarre as it sounds, this was starting to feel kind of good, just saying exactly what I felt. “I hate that she’s the teacher’s pet. I hate that I feel like chopped liver in that class. I want what she has. I’m so jealous of her!”

Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered that I felt not worse, but better! The poison inside me was gone for the moment. While I’d been wrestling with those painful feelings, I felt toxic. But once I stopped fighting and just acknowledged them, I felt cleaner.

And then there was another weird surprise. The next feeling that came to me was actually affection for this Other Woman. She was, after all, a genuinely nice person with a cheeky sense of humor, who had made overtures of friendship to me (which I’m sure I’d rebuffed because of my insecurities).

It was as if by claiming all of my stinky feelings about the situation, I’d made room for all my other feelings, including a very real appreciation for this charming budding actress.

It turns out that’s not really too surprising; later we’ll talk about how feelings are like a cloud of trapped butterflies – it’s hard to let one out without accidentally freeing a few others.

I was flabbergasted by how much relief it brought for me to just accept how I felt. And shocked that I ended up feeling friendly toward a woman whom I’d thought of as Public Enemy Number One just a short while earlier.

I didn’t feel the need to tell her about my feelings, but I wasn’t going to lie to myself anymore. I felt jealous and small in that class. That was the truth. And in a very real and practical sense, it set me free.

I was able to see clearly for the first time how important the teacher’s approval was to me, especially since I was using his attitude to measure my chances of success as an actress. I understood why I felt so jealous of my classmate; she had something that was terribly important to me. The picture of the situation that I held in my mind became clearer, more nuanced, and less threatening.

Does that mean the difficult feelings went away? No. They lost much of their force, but they didn’t stop coming up until the class was over. Until then, the situation remained the same; the teacher continued to go back and forth between apathy and criticism toward my work, while evidently being enchanted with everything my classmate did. The situation was inherently painful. The difference that wallowing made was, the actual feelings were manageable in a way that lying to myself about them was not.

With my emotions out of the bag, ironically, they felt more under control. I had chosen to own them; they didn’t own me anymore.

The talented classmate and I became acting class buddies. We’d sit together, do scenes together and gossip about what happened in class and beyond. In the end, because of her, I looked forward to being there.

I didn’t completely stop being jealous of her. It’s just that it became okay with me if I felt jealous. It was only a feeling; it didn’t have to be a policy. There was nothing I needed to do about it. I certainly didn’t have to struggle against it.

I had to wallow in my feelings to help my jealousy integrate with the rest of me. Not to do so would have meant stuffing that jealousy down deep inside my heart somewhere, where it would remain and create a vague sense of “yuck,” keeping me from not only being happy, but enjoying a new friendship.

I had spontaneously wallowed, and it had been constructive. And all because of a random decision to stop fighting with myself and just go with what I was feeling for a moment. It’s a good thing I’m insecure and petty or this book might not have been written!

I long ago lost touch with my talented friend. A recent Internet search turned up nothing at all as far as TV, film or theater acting credits under her name, but I did find a photo of a beautiful real estate agent with a cheeky smile full of confidence. I’m not sure it was her. But I suspect she went into something that doesn’t feel like work to her, or require her to wear a uniform.