What to do when you feel like you don’t matter

”I matter” is a mindset that is absolutely necessary to have in this life. Based on this belief, you are able to justify why you are doing things and why you chose to act in certain ways. You need to matter in order to have your boundaries, meaning your identification of ”self”(what separates you from ”not you”). You need to matter in order to say no to behaviour, people and circumstances that are not in your highest good. You need to matter in order to create a life for yourself that is conducive to a healthy body, and a thriving state of mind.

”I don’t matter” will get you into very unpleasant situations. For example, if you don’t matter, you won’t say no to harmful things. You won’t define yourself and therefore you will act in codependent ways were you enmesh with the people around you so as to please them. Narcissists and codependents are a match to each other, because they enable each others behaviour. Meaning you will end up with people who do not have the ability to act in your best interests because they haven’t even registered you as separate from them. Narcissists live in their own bubble, where no other interest but their own exist. If you don’t matter you will attract those kind of people into your life because they allow you to hide behind their interests. Without people who hold the belief ”I don’t matter”, narcissists wouldn’t be enabled.

The reason you even chose the belief ”I don’t matter” is because that was the only explanation you could give to the circumstances you found yourself if. For this reason I will share with you my own story, with the intention that this example will be enough to bring awareness to any patterns of your own that you are currently holding.

For me, I adopted this belief from my mother, who would say to me over and over again ”you don’t matter here. It’s not about your wants and needs. You are not allowed to be selfish.” I like to imagine that my mother thought she was keeping her inner child safe by projecting her own beliefs on to me. I like to imagine that my mother thought my life would be better if I was of service to other people, in the same way she was. The way she decided to be of service was by completely abandoning her own best interests, and then glorifying this behaviour. She turned self-sacrifice into something sacred so as to get her daughters to approve of her, and thereby maybe even get them to love her.

It might have worked, if it was true. If she would be able to truly become selfless, then maybe. But as you might know, selflessness doesn’t exist. Ego is the reason we are able to experience this separateness, where you and me perceive ourselves to be separate people, even if the truth of higher dimensions is that we are one consciousness. Selflessness implies without a self, and without a self (ego) you are not able to perceive or truly experience this physical dimension.

My mother didn’t manage to act selfless, her play-pretend would crack ever so regularly. Unfortunately, I was never able to predict when or why. Somedays she would hate me so much that all I could read in her eyes was ”I want to be rid of you, I wish you never existed”. She would start conflicts like a dream, where no matter how hard you try you could never remember how they started. She would manipulate you into sharing your secrets with her so that she later could use them against you. And you would never see it coming.

When I was younger I thought I could predict my parent’s ”bad days” by following certain rules regarding how things should be done. But slowly I began to notice that the rules seemed to only apply to me. If I didn’t clean, there would be a fight. If mom didn’t clean and I asked her about it, there would be a fight. If I saw mom didn’t clean and didn’t say anything about it there would be a conflict because I saw mom hadn’t cleaned and didn’t intervene so as to do something about it. If I hadn’t seen that mom hadn’t cleaned there would be a conflict that I wasn’t paying attention, because the house was a mess and since I knew the rules I should have already have cleaned. Even after mom had cleaned there would be a conflict, no matter the cause, there would be something that would be turned into a conflict.

Some days she’d buy me candy, and we would go for walks together. The conflict always came when you least expected it to. Life tried to teach me to always expect a conflict, to always be a little bit afraid of her, to never let my guard down. But she was my mother, and I was a tiny child, so on those days when she would show me affection I would fall for it, and when she turned on me I would hate myself far far worse than I could ever hate her. And I hated her a lot.

When little me tried to explain to herself why this was happening, she only knew what her parents would say to her. And they would say that all of this was happening to her because she had somehow done something so as to bring it about. Her parents were always justified in the ways they were treating her. Little me couldn’t find any other explanation for what was going on other than that her parents didn’t care about her. If she didn’t matter to them then they’d be justified in their actions, because she was simply of no importance. To her, if you love someone, you care for them, you take care of them, you don’t lie to them, you apologise if you hurt them.

The rules of ”how to love someone” meant that somebody loved you. If they follow the rules they love you, if they don’t follow the rules then they don’t love you. If they don’t love you then that means that you don’t matter to them. If you don’t care about someone then how they feel and what they do doesn’t matter to you. If they cry their heart out at night, you wouldn’t be bothered. If you scream at them and hit them, they don’t matter to you.

Little me decided these rules for herself, because she read books, watched movies and she cared for her toys and the animals around her. If people around her were upset, she would get upset, that’s how she knew she cared. She wouldn’t scream at someone or hit them because then she would hurt them and it would upset her to see them in pain.

Little me’s parents didn’t get upset. Little me made it mean ”I don’t matter to them”. To a child everything is very simple in its explanation.

Later that same belief ”I don’t matter to them” would be applied to everyone around me that was supposed to care for me and could provide me with what I wanted. God, The Universe, teachers, friends, boys. Through the law of attraction, my belief would reflect in the external. I would assign meaning to every action somebody took, every circumstance that occurred, every words somebody said, through the lens of ”I don’t matter”.

When a person holds the belief ” I don’t matter” what is being reflected to them is everything that is a vibrational match to that belief, anything what would serve as a mirror for that belief. Therefor with years and years of experiencing the same things over and over again the person will start to identify with the belief and lose all conscious awareness that that belief was created by themselves.

”I don’t matter” isn’t a very pleasant belief to hold, but when it was created in was. Compared to not knowing what was going on, having an explanation for the abuse felt like relief. The belief was created as a coping mechanism to a very distressing situation. The aspects of a persons consciousness that could adapt to the belief and continue to mirror it, would follow through with their expansion, whilst the aspects of consciousness that couldn’t would split of from the stream of consciousness and stay frozen in that state of trauma (distressing event without resolution). In order for me to be able to continue with my day to day life, and find some relief, I had to take the belief as my own truth. The aspects of me that could not take that as their truths, had be suppressed, denied and disowned from the conscious awareness otherwise the coping tool wouldn’t work. I had to fragment into aspects of me that were okey with ” I don’t matter” and aspects of me that were not okey with ” I don’t matter”. The aspects of me that were not okey with ”I don’t matter” were rejected and ignored. I was left with an explanation to why things were happening to me and why I wasn’t getting what I wanted. Choosing to identify with the belief was in order to mentally survive the situation.

Now thinking back I realise it might not even have been a fully conscious choice.

Fast forward to today, you might be familiar with how trauma integration and parts-work works. If you have something suppressed it will get larger and larger in the external until you are forced to deal with it so as to bring it into your conscious awareness. Once you are aware of what within you is a vibrational match to the external situation, you can exert your free will so as to bring about a change regarding the external situation. ”I don’t matter” can take the shape of many different scenarios in your life.

What to do when you feel like you don’t matter

First of all, what you can do is become clear about what it looks like to you when somebody matters. This is very individual so ask yourself, who matters to me?*[click here] Why? What do I do so as to show them that they matter? What would I need in order to feel that I matter? Highly likely the opposite of what made you form the belief ”I don’t matter” is what you are needing right now. Try to identify what that might look like.

Secondly, ask yourself, how can I make sure that I matter without pushing against or rejecting someone else? If you’ve been brought up in a narcissist/codependent style of parenting, you might swing the pendulum to narcissism as your only way of having a boundary. Here you have to decide for yourself what is healthy for you to do depending on your current situation in reality.

Thirdly, what if you couldn’t change the external? What if you could not do anything so as to bring about the wanted behaviour in the people around you? What then? I want you to imagine that scenario. Even if you matter, their behaviour towards you will not change. Does the external have to serve as proof for your innate value?

If you choose to practise the belief ”I matter” what might that look like to you? What would it feel like to you to matter? Envision a future version of yourself that matters. What does that version have to say about your current situation, through their eyes of ”I matter”, what has changed?

In my case ”I matter” and the future version of me, looks like stability in my core foundation (my values). It looks like certainty in my own moods, words and actions. It looks like having a routine that is completely controlled by me. And if that routine would fail, there is a back-up. I am able to always be certain about some elements in my life. And if all external elements are beyond control, I am in full control over what I choose to focus on and what thoughts I choose to enable.

Draw up a version of yourself that matters and ask that version how it feels. Sit in those feeling-signatures. Become aware of any sensations that you are experiencing. Acclimatise to them. The point is to remember what it feels like to matter, so as to create a new point of attraction. Start simple. Pick which belief serves you best at this current moment in time ”I matter” or ” I don’t matter”.

If you pick ”I matter”, how does that feel? If nothing in the external will reflect that back to you, how might it still feel on the inside? Do you have access to the feeling of ”I matter” regardless of what the external shows you”?

The quest here is to see if you can decide upon changing your own belief. You first have to identify where this belief comes from, then seeing the value it has brought you (meaning how this belief has benefitted you). After that you can question if that belief is of benefit to you today. If nothing in your external changed, would you choose to keep your current belief of ”I don’t matter” or would you choose ”I matter”? What would feel the best to you internally, regardless of external mirrors?

In conclusion, I am making a repeated point of nothing changing in the external, because sometimes we want something to happen outside of us so badly that we agree to pretend that we hold a belief that in reality we do not. Self-value is something that can’t be faked. The real deal-breaker here is what if nothing changes. You can’t make somebody ”bad” so as to uphold your boundary, you are not allowed to burry yourself in a narcissistic bubble so as to keep yourself safe from external rejection. No, you only get to pick ”I matter” or ”I don’t matter”.

In case this is your first time on Apprentice of Silence, I’d like to thank you for lending your focused energy towards reading this article. I specialise in channeling and InnerChild healing. I also enjoy Tarot, Crystal healing and Herbs. If you like what I do and would like to work with me, you’re welcome to book a reading with me or a session. During a reading we will do similar to the process you read about today, and if you’re interested in the trauma-resolution aspect (soul-retrieval) of the healing I’d recommend booking a Soul-Healing session as those take a little bit more time. In all honesty, most of the time, awareness is 90% of the solution, the rest is to consciously make a different choice/ choose to question your current beliefs. If you want my help, I’m here for you. Click (here) to get to my service page.

Light above Dark, Apprentice of Silence

* Sometimes, you might have grown so numb that nothing matters. Nobody matters. There is not one single funeral that you could not survive, you don’t care about anybody because you have been so incredibly hurt. There’s a trick you can use, that I use too.

What if you really truly care very very much? And that that’s why you’re feeling so numb, because you are trying to prevent yourself from caring and being hurt? Play a game with the Universe! What would it feel like to have people matter to you? Can you find someone (a friend) that your intuition tells you really doesn’t want you harm?

I want you to practice feeling positive emotion toward that person. Try to feel some appreciation for them. Focus purely positively on something about them. When you focus positively on something you bring it closer to you, and when you focus negatively on something you push it away. Due to your past pain you might have become so accustomed to pushing things away that you identify yourself as someone who doesn’t care about people. That’s not true. You care, you care a lot. That’s why you’re here reading this today, because you are trying to figure out how to have relationships that feel good with people who deeply matter to you. Now, once you focus positively on a person, see if anything about their interaction with you changes. I’d advise you to not do this with people you severely want love from (like your parents), chances are, when something is that extreme, you also have a lot of resistance towards those people. If something changes, like they feel more soft in the way they interact with you, take that as a sign that people truly matter to you but you’ve been so hurt that you have chosen to become cold now. This works because sometimes we don’t even see that we are not surrounded by assholes anymore. We have our walls up even if what we’ve been asking for is in front of us now, within our reach. That’s why ”believe it before you see it” is worth practicing. It might have been there before you, but you weren’t able to see it. I, however, trust you to use your judgement. If you’re dealing with an asshole, stop dealing with them. Cut them out of your life. Let the process of healing decide if it comes a time when you’re ready for them again in your life. Or if your life simply gets better without them there. I’d say, look at reality. Have they been rude? Have they hurt you? Does it feel the same as your childhood? Try this out. If you feel no softness in return from them, you know what to do. From my experience you actually can tell when a person wants you no harm, but they simply don’t know how to treat you. If you’re somebody who has been working on yourself, you’d be a match to a person like that simply because you’re trying to figure things out. And so are they. Imagine the feeling of ”you matter to me” and project that feeling onto them. Imagine it being like a sphere of light that you push over them, so now they can feel your ”you matter to me”. Sit with that for as long as you can. And when you’re feeling as if you don’t matter, do this exercise again.

(hint!”You matter to me”, ”I matter to me” and ” I matter” are all the same frequency.) [click here to resume reading]