The Social Network

Last winter, Gabriela, now fourteen, was expecting to attend her friend Sarah's* thirteenth-birthday weekend in New York City. "In front of my whole family, she said that it'd be so fun and we'd have a blast if I came," recalls Gabriela, a high school freshman in Newark, Delaware. But the official invite never arrived, and Gabriela promptly forgot about it—until the Monday in February when a group of her friends returned to school after spending the weekend in the Big Apple. Gabriela was shocked and hurt that she'd been excluded. "What happened? You told me straight up I was coming. This isn't right," she told Sarah. "Sarah said, 'We took a vote. I wanted you to come, but everybody else didn't,'" Gabriela says. "I didn't want to cry in front of her, so I waited until I got home."

While periodically dealing with exclusion is a part of life, to many teens, certain public slights feel overwhelmingly painful. "It's heartbreaking to not feel included," says John Duffy, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist. "It makes you feel like you don't have a place and you don't really know who you are."

When all of your friends have been included except you, it can seem extremely isolating, notes eighteen-year-old Nicole, from Marlboro, New Jersey. "When you hear that a friend is having a party and you realize you weren't invited, it's a slap in the face," she says. "It makes you feel not wanted."

But why does exclusion suddenly feel like a huge issue when you reach middle school and high school—and why does it hurt so much? "When we hit the teen years," Duffy explains, "we define ourselves far more in a social context instead of a family context and look to friends instead of relatives for approval. Our self-worth is derived in large part from how we fit in with our peer group. We think a lot about what other people think of us; our big fear is that they don't."

Olivia, a nineteen-year-old in Alpharetta, Georgia, faced that fear one Friday afternoon this past spring. "I was on Facebook when my news feed updated, and I saw a picture of my good friend Amanda* and everyone I hang out with celebrating Amanda's birthday at a restaurant," the college freshman recalls. "I was in shock. Why didn't she just text me? These are the people I see all the time," she says.

She commented "Why wasn't I invited?" on the photo, and Amanda immediately responded that it was an accident; the birthday dinner had spontaneously come together earlier that day. It was cold comfort to Olivia. "When I saw that on Facebook, I felt like a loser," she says. "By commenting on that party photo, I was announcing to every one of my friends who were tagged: 'I wasn't there, and I want to know why.'"

Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media can make these experiences of exclusion immeasurably worse: You can see exactly what your friends are doing at all times, with or without you. "Past generations of teens have experienced this—rejection, feeling like an outsider," says Georgia Michalopoulou, Ph.D., chief of staff of the Child Psychiatry and Psychology division of the Children's Hospital of Michigan. "But it's much more of a problem now. Before, if a friend betrayed your trust, only that one friend knew about it. Now a whole group of people knows." Adds Olivia: "On Facebook, you want everyone to know that you're out and about doing something—you're not home alone updating your Facebook status."

Social self-worth is, for some girls, a public numbers game, Duffy says. "The more people we are approved by, the better we feel about ourselves." So seeing how much fun others are having via your Facebook feed could easily make you think that you're left out of everything—even things you don't necessarily care about.

But it's definitely worse if you're close friends with the person who excluded you, says Katie, a fourteen-year-old high school freshman. After a big eighth-grade dance last year, the Louisville, Kentucky, native went home and immediately logged on to Facebook. "I saw tons of pictures of my friends getting ready for the dance together," she says. "They had a little predance party and didn't tell me. It was so upsetting because I was good friends with [the host], and I saw people there who don't really talk to her. It's like, OK, she's not going to invite me, but she'll invite people she doesn't really know? It made me feel really bad, like there was something wrong with me."

Olivia admits to experiencing a similar sense of paranoia: "I worried at the beginning that I'd been excluded on purpose," she says. "I thought, Was this planned? Did I do something? I even went back and checked my text messages to see what we'd talked about in the last week."

The best way to deal with feeling left out, say Duffy and Michalopoulou, is to try to modify your reaction to exclusion—since many teens experience it so often and it's impossible to be invited to everything. That's what helped Nicole. "At first I felt like, Oh, poor me, my life sucks," she says. "But then I heard stories from different friends about not being invited somewhere, and I thought, OK, these things just happen. As upset as I was, I know in a few years it won't mean anything to me. And for now I'll hang out with my other friends who care about me and wouldn't exclude me."

Another way to protect yourself from serious postexclusion hurt: Focus on the quality of your friendships. For one thing, having hundreds of Facebook friends or tons of real-life acquaintances isn't as fulfilling as fostering close friendships with people you can trust, Duffy says. "You can be hanging out with 50 people on a Friday night, online or otherwise, and feel lonely," he says, "or be with two and feel great." Michalopoulou adds that it's good to have friends in different groups too: "Develop friendships that aren't just based on status," she suggests. Instead, "form relationships with other kids who have similar interests and hobbies."

And if it's your BFF who excluded you, like in Katie's story? Talk it out with an adult you trust, and if your relationship with your friend has been good so far, ask her—offline—why she excluded you, Michalopoulou says. "Address it face-to-face, not over the Internet." Gabriela says that in her situation, Sarah, who had the New York birthday weekend, apologized to her a few different times after everything happened. Though Gabriela was hesitant to trust her again, she eventually believed Sarah's feelings of remorse were honest. "I forgave her and the other girls, and I felt like the bigger person," she says.

While being left out can be devastating, girls say there's often an upside—the experience makes you more compassionate toward and understanding of others. Olivia doesn't post her whereabouts on Facebook if she's going somewhere that's not an open invite; Gabriela says that she's now much more inclusive. "There are times when there's that one person you don't want to invite—but I still do," she says.

It's also worth remembering that your social circle shouldn't dictate how you feel about yourself. "Don't internalize negative comments. Try to make your own decisions about things," says Michalopoulou. "It's important to remember that you can't change how people behave, but you can change the way you deal with these situations."

Exclusion can surely lay bare the cracks in your friendship—but it can also make it clear who your true allies are. Being left out, Nicole says, "made me realize that the girls who've excluded me aren't my good friends. It's kind of like a blessing in disguise. It helps you let go of people who aren't healthy for you."

*Name has been changed.