People Who Ignore You // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 3 A Different Perspective Official Podcast

You get back to your desk after a long meeting – and everybody else – well, they’ve gone out for lunch together and left you behind.  It’s not easy being ignored, is it?
One of the most painful experiences we've all had is when other people ignore us. When we're the last ones to be picked on a team at school, when our friends all go out for dinner but we're not invited we feel like the ugly ducking, we feel so alone. We go through anger and resentment and then this sense of failure and worthlessness. They're all out there having fun, I'm stuck at home, how dare they, I mean it's not fair. Maybe they don't like me. You know what I'm talking about. Being ignored hurts, it can hurt deeply, so deeply in fact that it can ruin a relationship but sometimes being ignored is a fact of life, sometimes we have to deal with it. So exactly how do we do that?
Being ignored is hard because it means being left out, means being left alone. Being ignored is a double sided coin because one side of the coin is the other people who are enjoying each others company and enjoying whatever they are doing, the ones that are leaving us out and on the other side is I'm left alone, forgotten and my side of the coin of being left alone and left out and forgotten is made so much worse by the fact that the other crowds out there enjoying themselves, you know what I mean.
Why does it happen? Why is it that sometimes people ignore us? Well sometimes it's just circumstances, sometimes maybe you're single and you're home alone and your friends are married and they're at home with their family. It's just the way it is, married people go home to their families. Single people often go home to an empty house, I've been there, I know exactly what it's like so sometimes we feel as though we are being ignored, we feel as though we're being left out but it's just the circumstances we're in, no-one's fault, just where we are.
The second thing is oversight. Sometimes the people at work go out for lunch and you happen to be at a meeting and you get back late and you don't know where they've gone and no-one left you a note and it just happened. No-one meant it to happen it's just the way that it happened, you just missed out somehow and we can get angry about that but well, you know, it just happened and sometimes it's deliberate.
Sometimes people deliberately avoid us. You know when you go into a group of people and a person in that group who you see time and time again never eyeballs you, never looks at you, never talks to you, never engages in conversation with you and there's almost like there’s an emotional ostrisization going on. That is a really hurtful thing.
Whatever the cause, they're over there having fun and I'm over here alone and it hurts, being left out hurts. Can I encourage you, when that happens, to figure out the reason? Because if it's just circumstances we were talking about before or if it’s just a simple oversight, it’s so easy for us to get hurt and injured and resentful for nothing. We read more into the situation than is there. Married people go home to there families, it's what they do.
Sometimes people accidentally miss out on stuff, it's what happens. We get all miffed and uppity and offended and angry and hurt and we question ourselves because we got left out, it's just the way it was, no-one meant anything by it, it just happened that way. Sometimes we think that we're being different or being the odd one out or being left behind, it's like we're lepers.
I remember when I was single, and on Sundays after Church, all the married couples used to go home maybe one couple had another couple over for lunch, somehow they didn't quite engage with single people and I'd go home on Sunday to an empty house thinking, "Well you know, gee it would have been lovely to catch up with someone for lunch or this or that." Well, married people want to go home with their families and have lunch on Sunday, they don't always want someone el