Psych in Practical Application

I read something somewhere that resonated with what I learned in my psych class last semester, so I'm going to attempt to apply it now. What was it exactly? When attempting to cure someone of an irrational fear, a behavioral therapist may choose to repeatedly expose the individual to the object of fear in an attempt to eradicate the stimulus-response pathway. (Am I saying this right? Winter break kind of erased a lot of the knowledge I crammed into my brain just before finals...)

So here's the application: I am a very jealous person, so I tend to avoid situations where I could possibly get jealous. Instead, maybe I should face those situations more often so that jealousy isn't an issue. Or is there something else beneath the surface? After all, correlation doesn't equal causation. Perhaps my jealousy + situations that incite jealousy are caused by a third agent... In which case, perhaps Freudian or cognitive therapy techniques would be better...