Oprah Winfrey

And the two words they used to describe their pain was useless and worthless.

Yes.

So when we feel like we don't matter, we can turn against ourselves or we can turn against each other.

Well, when you feel like you don't matter, you feel like you're going through this world alone.

Alone, yes.

And we know from an evolutionary perspective that we are wired to matter.

Right.

We are wired to be important to the band, to the group, and to not matter to the group means to be pushed out.

And to our earliest ancestors, that meant death.

And we are wired, and as Gord puts it, it is life or death.

It is life or death.

Yes.

They were very open to talking about it.

What I found often were the people who were saying they didn't feel like they mattered, they were going through a life transition.

So either they had lost a loved one that they felt very valued by or maybe facing an empty nest or maybe they'd lost a job.

or relocated, I experienced that myself when I was a newlywed moving to London.

When you go through a transition, we tend to personalize the experience.

We think, oh, it's so painful.

There must be something wrong with me that I'm not coping well with this change.

But transitions in and of themselves are a hard thing to do, right?