Gordon Flett

And one transition that we focused on was

moving from elementary school to high school, where you might suddenly feel like you're lost in the crowd.

You had special teachers and friends, and now you're just in a sea of other people.

So there's immediate challenges, and that's why it's important for any efforts on mattering promotion to try and get to what I call deep mattering, where you know that despite the world going to hell and feeling that things are going to hell in your own life,

That you still have those people in your life who care about you, who can be sort of like your touchstones in terms of your sense of worth.

And you still want to have as part of that identity that people care about you and appreciate you and indeed will not forget you.

First of all, I should say that when we talk about not mattering and the pain as opposed to the joy of mattering, we talk about a concept called anti-mattering, which is that sense of feeling invisible, insignificant, unimportant.

And in the case of social anxiety,

It's very easy to be too convinced that other people are going to see you in a particular way.

There's a fear of negative evaluation that drives a lot of social anxiety.

But here with a mattering focus, it'd be the fear of a negative evaluation in terms of people don't even think about me.

Or if they do, they just see me as somebody who's irrelevant, who's unimportant.

And as a result of that, you can become very avoidant because you're just expecting you're going to find more of that treatment waiting for you if you happen to encounter these people.

So there's a lot of advanced isolation with people who are socially anxious because they've got a negative expectancy, and that expectancy includes, I'm not going to be significant.

I'm going to be seen as somebody who's less than important.

Yes, it does.

I think especially for young people and perhaps older people as well, that the feeling of not mattering is used as a self-evaluative cue.

So you have the self-criticism and even self-hatred, but you're also confronted with, hey,

My life's not going the way it's supposed to go, and it must be something about me.

And what happens is, sadly, people internalize what they see as the messages in their life so that they can now not matter to themselves.