Do I Matter? I Know I Do, But I Don’t Always Feel Like I Do
Feeling exposed and insignificant is different from not mattering at all, especially when pathological narcissism is a factor.
With narcissism, it’s perhaps not so much whether you matter as whether you “anti-matter”, according to penetrating new research. Not to fear, it has nothing to do with nuclear physics-where matter and antimatter annihilate one another with a big bang. While mattering is “the feeling of being important to other people”, anti-mattering is feeling “insignificant and devalued as a result of neglect or other adverse actions of others”. Worse than not mattering, there is an active process of depreciation.
That sounds partially a function of childhood adversity, which affects how we matter to ourselves and how we see ourselves in the eyes of others. Mattering is measured with two different scales: the General Mattering Scale (GMS) 1 and the Anti-Mattering Scale (AMS) 2. (The five questions from each scale are in the Notes section, below.)
Anti-mattering is the opposite, not the absense, of mattering-unlike the case in which indifference, and not hate-is said to be the opposite of love. When we both don’t matter and anti- matter, it’s a double whammy.
