The Loneliness Of Being Different From Your Family

Being different from your family is lonely, even when nobody is being cruel to you.

Many of the people who describe this to me are surrounded by family. They go to the dinners, they get the group texts, they show up for the holidays. And still, sitting in a room full of people who share their last name, they feel like a guest or an outsider.

This came up over and over in our first Wednesday group this month. A lot of members were struggling with this. The one who doesn't fit. The one who left, or got pushed out, or is still there and lonely anyway. There are a few very different versions of this, and which one you're in changes what you should do about it.

A bag of M&Ms

I’m not sure if this is going to make sense, but try to follow me here…

While the group was talking, I kept picturing a family as a handful of blue M&Ms. Everyone the same color, everyone clustered together the way they've always been. And then there's a red one. That red one is you. The red M&M can be in very different positions relative to the rest of the pile, and the loneliness is different in each one.

In the first picture, the red M&M is right in the mix. It's in the middle of the pile, touching the blue ones on every side, and nobody has pushed it anywhere. The family is close. You're included. You're also, unmistakably, a different color, and everyone can see it, including you.

In the second picture, the red M&M has drifted to the edge. Not pushed. Drifted. The blue ones are clustered in the center doing what they've always done, and the red one is a little bit outside the pile, but there are one or two blue M&Ms sitting out there with it. A sibling who gets it. A cousin. An aunt who was probably a red M&M herself. The family isn't excluding anyone. The center just holds a certain shape, and you didn't fit it, so you ended up on the outside with a couple of people who are willing to sit there with you. They might go back and forth between you and the group.

In the third picture, there's a wall. The blue M&Ms are inside it. The red one is outside, and it did not build the wall. Somebody decided that being a different color was a problem, and the way they handled it was to close off.

In the fourth picture, the blue M&Ms are trying to pull the red one back in, and the red one doesn't want to go. The family keeps reaching. The calls, the guilt, the we just want you home. And the red M&M has looked at that pile and decided it can't live inside it. Not because it wasn't wanted, but because what it would have to become in order to stay isn't something it's willing to be.

When you're different, and nobody is pushing you out

The first two examples I gave you are the ones people feel the least entitled to struggle with. Your family isn't cruel. Nobody has told you that you don't belong. They invite you, they love you in the way they know how, and if you told them you felt like an outsider they'd probably be hurt and confused. And yet you have felt like the odd one out since you were a kid. You're the quiet one in a loud family, or the loud one in a quiet family. You're the one who reads while everyone else watches the game. You're the one who left the town, the church, the industry, or the political party.

The feeling of being an outsider in this kind of family isn't a distortion. It's an accurate read of an actual mismatch. Temperament researchers Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas found that what shapes a person isn't just their own traits or their parents' traits, but the fit between the two. When a child's way of being in the world lines up with what the family expects and needs, things tend to go smoothly. When it doesn't, there's strain, and that strain is hard to fix because it isn't your fault that you’re sensitive and it isn't their fault they’re stoic.

What makes this so hard is that closeness requires a lot of effort, translation, and contorting yourself. You go home and you edit. You leave out the parts of your life that don't have a category in that house. You laugh at things that aren't funny to you and stay quiet about things that matter to you, because it's easier than explaining. And that editing has a cost. Research on people who conceal parts of themselves in order to fit in keeps finding the same thing: hiding reduces your sense of belonging. You do it so that you can be part of the group, and it's a big part of why you never quite feel like part of the group.

So if this is your family, the loneliness is often less about rejection and more about being unknown. They aren't pushing you away. They just don't have an accurate picture of you, partly because they never asked, and partly because you stopped showing them. If you're in the second picture, with a couple of blue M&Ms out there on the edge with you, pay attention to those people. They're often the ones who could know you, if you let them.

When you're being rejected for being different

The third picture looks similar from a distance and it feels completely different when you’re in it. Here, the family is doing something. The differences lead to punishment like an ultimatum, being uninvited, the parent who won't say your partner's name. Or there are passive aggressive comments and the conversation goes flat when you talk about your life. There are often signs that let you know you've stepped outside the lines and that you’ll be welcomed back the moment you decide to get back in line.

In these families, closeness comes with conditions. You can belong, but only as the version of you that doesn't disturb anything. Your difference is experienced as disloyalty.

Many of the people I talk to minimize this. They'll say, well, they didn't disown me, so it's not that bad. But you don't have to be disowned to be rejected. Being tolerated on the condition that you shrink is also rejection. It isn't just that you're unknown. It’s that they saw parts of you and decided they didn't want to know you.

When you're the one who chose the distance

You looked at your family, you looked at yourself, and you decided that you were too different to continue having a relationship. Their values and yours aren't just different, they're incompatible. Maybe it's how they treat people you love. Maybe it's their beliefs. Maybe there's no dramatic incident at all, you just stepped back. Then it was fewer calls, shorter visits, or none at all. Some families try to pull this person back, some of them let them walk away.

Distance can be the right choice, the necessary choice, and sometimes the choice that keeps you alive. But choosing distance doesn't end the loneliness. People who have taken space from their family still describe pain and loneliness that shows up at odd moments. You made the choice, you'd make it again, and you still grieve the family you would have belonged to if they had been different people.

What rejection and loneliness actually do to you

Many of you have been told to just build a chosen family and move on, but rejection and loneliness can change a person. Years of being the red M&M outside the wall can make you believe that you're unwelcome everywhere.

Loneliness works in a similar way. Research shows that lonely people become hypervigilant for social threat. If you grew up feeling like the odd one out, you may be walking into every family gathering already bracing for that rejection. A meta-analysis of loneliness interventions found that interventions that targeted how people interpreted social situations were the most successful. What helped most was working on the story people told themselves about what other people's behavior meant. For many of you, the first move isn't to find new people. It's to notice how much of the loneliness is being generated by a very old expectation that you'll be left out, and to test that expectation before you act on it.

Your M&M pile matters

If you're in the first two, the family that loves you and doesn't know you, the temptation is to treat the loneliness as evidence of rejection and start defending yourself against something that isn't happening. The more useful move is usually to stop editing yourself even with one person, and often the blue M&M who's already sitting on the edge with you is a safe person to do that with. Let them see something new about you and see what happens. Many people in our groups are surprised by how much of their outsider status was maintained by their own silence in these types of families.

If you're outside the wall, you probably keep trying to earn your way back in by being a little less yourself. You're grieving the family that would have accepted you, and you're deciding how much of yourself you're willing to spend on the family that won't. This is also when finding a chosen family stops being a platitude and becomes necessary, because you still have a need to belong somewhere.

If you're the red M&M that walked away, the work is often about owning your choice and accepting it will still be painful even if it was your decision. Many people who've chosen distance feel they have to defend it constantly, and that any sadness is proof they were wrong.

Being different is not wrong

Dysfunctional families often experience difference as a problem. When you don't fit the family's shared picture of how the world works, they don't register you as different. They register you as wrong or as a mistake. That's where you're too sensitive and that's not how it was and why would you want that become the mantras against difference in the family. They're correcting you, because in their reality you have the facts wrong. And if you grew up inside that reality, some part of you probably still experiences your own difference as a flaw you haven't been able to fix.

Being different from your family is not a defect. It doesn't require an explanation or an apology. In many families, it's the healthiest thing that has happened in generations, and the loneliness that comes with it is the cost of being the first person in the system to try to do something different.

In every single one of these examples, what you are looking for is to be known fully and accurately by someone. That might be one family member who's able to see you even if the rest can't. It might be a partner, a friend, a room full of people doing the same work on a Wednesday at Calling Home. It doesn't have to be your whole family, and for some of you it can't be. But you can't be a stranger everywhere. Finding the place where you're known isn't giving up on your family. Sometimes it can be how you keep them.