Healing The Wound of Believing You Do Not Matter

Tracing unhealthy relationship patterns to their source.

Natalie, both palms raised toward the ceiling, pleaded for an answer to her question,

"Why do I always to get into relationships with people who don't care about the relationship as much as I do?"

Johnathon shared,

"I am the giver in every relationship."

Johnathon's feelings of hopelessness shone in his grey blue eyes.

 Both Natalie and Johnathon grew up with parents who did not make them a priority.

Natalie

As a child, Natalie's father regularly returned home from work after she was already in bed. Natalie's mother suffered from depression and rarely left her bedroom to greet Natalie when she arrived home from school.  The week-ends didn't change the family dynamic. Natalie's mother remained in bed and her father pursued his passion for collectible cars. He attended auctions and searched neighborhood garages for hard to find parts.

Johnathon

Johnathon was the oldest of four boys and was five years older than his next youngest brother. His three younger brothers were born in quick succession. Johnathon's parents seemed overwhelmed with meeting the needs of his three younger brothers. Johnathon learned that the way to earn his parents' approval was to put helping his parents rather than taking care of himself. If he wanted to feel loved, he needed to be selfless.

Did you feel like you didn't matter as a child?

• Did you have parents who were unwilling or unable to hear your needs? 
• Were you praised you for being self-sufficient? 
• When you attempted to get your parents' attention did they expressly state or imply that you were bothering them?
• Did they prioritize work or a hobby over you?
• Did they suffer from an addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling or shopping?
• They may have prioritized the needs of their partner or other children over you.
• They may have yearned to feel important themselves and put themselves receiving attention over meeting your needs. They may have insisted upon being the center of attention and the most important person in the room.
•  

Not being a priority to your parents or caregivers is painful for a child.

You may have thought:

What about me?...

Don’t I matter?...

Why is everything or everyone else more important?

I'm just an afterthought.

Feeling unacknowledged and unappreciated teaches us that we have to do something in order to receive love, affection, or attention. We may feel we must be quiet, unseen and unheard, be a caretaker, or to excel in school or sports.  We believe that who we are isn't enough to warrant being loved.

If we do not learn to heal our past emotional wounds, we take these lessons into our adult relationships.

Feeling like you don't matter shows up in adult relationships in different ways.

• You may feel uncomfortable when someone pays a lot of attention to you and find yourself attracted to people who are more aloof.
• You may be very sensitive when your partner is focused on other things or other people.
• It may hurt to hear about your friends engaging in activities with other friends without including you.
• You may collect evidence that you believe proves that your partner or friend doesn't care about you and use that evidence to start arguments.
• You may engage in behaviors that are uncomfortable for you in order to maintain your partner's attention.
• You might exaggerate illness as a means to be put first.
• You may give friends or lovers litmus tests to determine whether they will do what you want and thereby consider you their priority.
• You may feel everyone else's problems are mere drama while yours are the real deal, making you feel important and more worthy of attention. 
• Passive ways of demanding that others prioritize you include disconnecting, turning cold, or not showing up for others as a form of retaliation.
• The opposite may also be true. You may be someone who gives and gives. Your wounded heart may motivate you to go above and beyond for other people and causes. You may do everything so that people will notice you and all that you do and realize that you matter and that you deserve reciprocity.

MIlena

Milena remembered being 15 and flying from New York, where she lived with her mother, to LA to visit her father and stepmother. She had agonized over her hair and makeup and clothes, wanting them to see how much she had grown and changed since they had seen her the year before.

Milena's plane landed in LA following the 6 hour flight. Her heart began beating faster. This time of departing the plane and walking to where her father and stepmother would be waiting for her in arrivals  made her both very excited and uncomfortably nervous.

As Milena approached the arrivals area, she saw families waiting for their loved ones to appear. She saw a family with the children holding a sign, "Welcome Back Jeremy!" A man with a big smile on his face was waiting and holding a bouquet of orange mums with yellow centers.  Milena scanned the crowd. A woman was holding 3 dolphin balloons.  She did not see here father anywhere. Stanley was 6'4" and easy to spot in a crowd. After waiting a moment, she walked alone to baggage claim.

Once Milena retrieved her luggage, she was not sure what to do. People were being paged over the loudspeaker but noone was reaching out for her. Milena tried to remain optimistic. Relieved she thought maybe they were in their car at the curb waiting for her.

Milena walked out to the arrivals car pickup area and was immediately hit with the smell of fumes and the sound of impatient drivers honking. She looked for the maroon Mercedes her father and step-mother were driving last year. It wasn't anywhere to be found.

Maybe they were driving a different vehicle. Milena stood in the fumes and noise and waited in a prominent spot so that when they did arrive they would see her, even if she didn't see them. She felt embarrassed to just be standing there and wondered if the traffic cop thought she seemed suspicious looking. She had dressed up to impress her dad but now felt foolish in her short skirt and high heels. She hoped the cop did not mistake her for a sex worker.

This was before the days of cell phones so MIlena believed waiting was all she could do. She remaindered herself how atrocious LA traffic was.

An hour past and then 2 hours past. When it was nearly 3 hours since she departed the plane, a middle aged man with a handle bar mustache pulled up in a long brown Oldsmobile and called her name out the window. This wasn't anyone she had ever met. He got out of the car and came onto the curb to shake her hand. "Hi, I'm Bill, your dad's friend. Your dad called me and asked if I could swing by and pick you up because he got caught up in a meeting. We can go back to my place and wait for him to come get you." 

Milena was nervous to get in the car but after waiting 3 hours in the heat, noise, and fumes the scenario Bill presented seemed entirely in character for her father. This was exactly something he would do.

Milena got in the backseat of Bill's car as if it were a taxi. She was too shy to sit up front. Bill drove her to his home. Milena entered and saw Bill's wife, who looked like a model, sitting on the sofa reading the newspaper. She was clearly not expecting Bill to show up with a 15 year old and looked at him quizzically. 

"This is Stanley's girl. He got caught up in a meeting with contractors for that restaurant he is designing. I don't know when they will be coming to get her but it shouldn't be too long." Milena blushed and felt like a bother. Milena imagined she looked like a sight after the 6 hour flight and the three hour wait.

Milena was relieved that Bill and his wife went about their day without trying to engage her in conversation. She sat in their lazy boy chair and pulled out the book she had carried on the plane and pretended to read. Two hours later her father and step-mother came by to pick her up, apologizing profusely to Stanley and his wife but barely addressing her. It was as if they had swung by to see their friends instead of picking up the daughter they hadn't seen in a year. They launched into talk about the restaurant opening scheduled for next month. No apology was ever made to Milena.

The story Milena told me had occurred 4 decades earlier and yet her eyes watered as she shared it. The pain from 40 years before was there but also a newer feeling of pain. She always met the man she dated at the location of their proposed meeting. She hated that she was always the first to arrive and would sometimes move her car to an unnoticeable area where she could remain until she clearly saw her date arrive and then walk into the place following him. This helped her to hide her shame about being "unimportant." She was divorced from a man who was a workaholic and now dating another.

Healing The Wound of Believing You Do Not Matter

If you experienced this kind of wounding, know that, with time and your attention, you can heal.

Here is a two-part exercise to begin doing just that.

Part 1

Begin by naming the wound.

Acknowledge any memories that arise of feeling like you weren’t a priority.  Look back at the details within those memories.

• With whom in particular did you feel that you were not important?
• Did you have a particular parent who was exceptionally distracted, self absorbed, or focused on something they seemed to treat as more important than you? 
• Was there an incident or specific moment that you remember thinking that you didn't matter.  Or maybe, like Johnathon, who perpetually took a back seat to his younger siblings, you had an ever present feeling of not being important.

Close your eyes and reflect. Notice what you experience in your body as you remember the younger version of yourself in the situation where you did not feel cared for. Have compassion for that version of yourself.

Tell your younger self that they do matter and that they have always mattered.

Journal about this memory and the feelings it evokes. Journal about the younger version of you who began to question why you felt unimportant. 

Allow yourself to grieve the many types of loss you experienced around not being a priority. 

Part 2

Come back another day and read what you wrote in your journal. 

Now close your eyes and reflect on the way this wound still shows up for you. What triggers the feelings?

 Journal about the different behaviors and patterns in your adult relationships that support you in feeling like you matter.

How can you bring more of those into your life?

How can you surround yourself with people who support the truth that you matter immensely?