The Double Exclusion: How difficult times can quietly change our place in other people's lives

There is a particular kind of loneliness that can happen when you are going through a difficult phase in life.

The first exclusion is often obvious. 

Your circumstances themselves may already have pushed you to the edges of life. Stress, loss, uncertainty, disappointment, financial difficulties, grief, or simply a period when nothing seems to be working can change how much you participate in the world around you. 

You may withdraw. 

You may have less energy. 

You may no longer feel able to show up in the same carefree way.

Then comes a second, quieter exclusion.

People around you begin to edit what they share with you. They hesitate before telling you good news. They leave out stories about celebrations, achievements, holidays, relationships, plans, or other happy developments. They may assume that the contrast between your difficult time and their good time will be too much.

The intention is often consideration. The impact, however, can be isolation.

You are already excluded by what life is putting you through. Then you are gradually excluded from the good things happening in other people's lives.

That is the double exclusion.

When someone is struggling, people often become careful around them. They wonder whether talking about their own happiness would seem insensitive. They may feel guilty sharing something positive while the other person is dealing with something painful. So they filter themselves. They share less. They stop mentioning certain things. Sometimes they stop inviting the person altogether, assuming that participation might be uncomfortable.

This leads to something subtle. The struggling person is still present in everyone's life, but they are no longer fully included in the whole of those lives. 

They may still be asked how they are coping. People may know their problems and try to support them. Yet the celebrations happen somewhere else. The happy news is shared with others first. The plans are discussed in circles they are no longer part of.

No one necessarily intended to push them away. Yet they are still standing outside something.

One of the assumptions behind this kind of exclusion is that someone going through a bad time cannot fully participate in someone else's happiness. But it is important to remember that people are capable of holding more than one emotion at once.

One can be worried about their future but genuinely celebrate a friend's success. 

One can be lonely and happy that someone they love has found companionship. 

One can be grieving and still laugh. 

One can wish their life were different and still want good things for others.

Someone's happiness may occasionally touch a sore point. That is part of being human. But that is often more about the reality of their own circumstances than a reaction to your happiness.

Sometimes being included in another person's joy is exactly what makes them feel connected. It reminds them that you are still part of their life. That their difficult chapter has not turned them into a person who must only be approached through sadness, caution, or concern.

Going through a bad time is something happening in their life. It is not the entirety of who they are.

And then there is another side to this dynamic.

When people do share their difficulties with us, especially when we have been through hard times ourselves, we often feel an immediate need to say, “I understand. I went through something similar.”

Sometimes this is genuine. We are trying to build a bridge between their experience and ours. We do not want them to feel alone, so we reach into our own memories and look for something that resembles what they are going through.

But occasionally, we stretch that resemblance too far.

Deep down, we may even know that what we experienced was not really the same. The circumstances were different. The scale was different. The consequences were different. Yet we still try to make the comparison work.

“I know exactly how you feel. When this happened to me…”

And suddenly, their experience begins to disappear behind our own story.

This is not always selfishness. Often, it comes from the human need to relate through familiarity. Someone else's pain can make us uncomfortable because we cannot fully enter an experience we have never had. So we search for the closest thing we know: ourselves.

We may overstate our struggles because we desperately want to establish a point of connection.

Sometimes the most honest response could be, “What you're going through isn't the same as what I went through, and I may not fully understand it. But I'm here, and I want to understand.”

There is a difference between finding shades of ourselves in another person's experience and forcing their experience to fit our own.

Perhaps that is where these two behaviours meet.

When someone is going through a bad time, we may assume we know what hearing our good news will do to them. So we decide not to share it.

When someone tells us about a struggle, we may assume we need to understand it immediately. So we search for our own version of it and try to make the comparison fit.

In both cases, the intention is often connection.

Yet both begin with an assumption about another person's experience.

Someone can be going through a terrible chapter and still want to remain part of everyone else's story. And when someone else's pain does not resemble our own, we do not have to force a resemblance in order to care.

Perhaps, in trying so hard to connect, we sometimes leave too little room for the other person's experience to remain their own.

Their own pain.

Their own happiness.

Their own version of what they are going through.

And perhaps a deeper understanding and a stronger connection sometimes begin with allowing that.