Uplifting Ways To Stop Feeling Alone Every Healthcare Professional Should Know.

What if your client’s sense of failure isn’t about effort but about believing they’re in it alone? How might our systems of care reinforce the isolation that fuels diabetes distress?

Jun 17, 2025

When Isolation Feels Like Identity

“I’ve never thought about how other people are managing their blood sugar. I feel like I’m the only one dealing with this.” Mike explained at our recent session.

It’s a sentence many of us have heard but don’t quite know what to do with at a session. Is it right to lean into empathy? Perhaps we have felt it ourselves because we are human and share similar concerns with our clients. Yet, communicating how we are connected isn’t easy, especially when dealing with a chronic condition like diabetes. Maybe you’ve wished that there was a way to check emotions as easily as we monitor A1C.

When the feeling of being alone transforms into a belief about identity, it becomes more than a passing emotion. It becomes a story. One that forces our clients to turn inward and tightens the knot of stigma with silence and shame.

This is the “I’m the Only One” fallacy. It takes a common human emotion and distorts it into a solitary truth. For clients living with diabetes, especially those in marginalized bodies or communities, it is a deeply felt experience. It’s also a dangerous one. When isolation goes unexamined, it fuels diabetes distress, disengagement, and despair.

The Universality of Aloneness and the Weight of Marginalization

It is easy to forget that feeling alone is part of being human. It’s neither pathological nor unusual. However, when isolation is reinforced by stigma, exclusion, or clinical oversight, it stops being a human emotion and becomes a barrier.

The “I’m the Only One” fallacy is especially potent for individuals navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind. Clients in larger bodies, clients of color, queer and trans clients, clients in poverty, these are the individuals most likely to feel like they don’t belong. And often, they’re right. Their lived experience in healthcare has taught them that they are judged, overlooked, or pathologized.

This feeling can start young. Research from the SEARCH study of adolescents and young adults living with diabetes found that higher diabetes stigma scores were associated with elevated HbA1c, a greater likelihood of severe hypoglycemia, and long-term complications, independent of treatment or insurance status¹. Stigma and isolation don’t just hurt feelings. They hurt outcomes.

The Role of Systems in Shaping (and Shifting) Belonging

The Inclusion Pyramid explores how the foundation of safety, trust, and representation supports meaningful participation in care². The reality is that most diabetes care programs focus on the top of the pyramid, goals, numbers, and behaviors without ensuring clients feel safe enough to be present. If your body is constantly being scrutinized or if your identity is questioned at intake, no amount of education will undo the core message: you’re not welcome here.

A diagram titled "Inclusive Diabetes Care Pyramid" from Inclusive Diabetes Care LLC (2024), showing a pyramid with six horizontal levels, divided vertically into two sides. The left side represents unsustainable self-care, behaviors, and systems; the right side represents engaging in renewing and sustainable thoughts, behaviors, and systems. From bottom to top, the left side layers are: "Othering & Stigma," "Lack of ease," "Not feeling seen and heard," and "Judgment from self and others." The right side layers are: "Belonging," "A sense of ease," "Feeling seen and heard," and "Non-Judgment from self and others." The pyramid illustrates how belonging and non-judgment support sustainable care, while stigma and judgment contribute to unsustainable care.

This is how isolation becomes institutional. Clients internalize it. Providers replicate it. And systems normalize it. Pausing to ask, “In what ways could our policies or protocols be reinforcing the feeling of being alone?” is not a soft skill. It’s a structural necessity. The article Diabetes and Belonging explores how community, not compliance, is often the missing element in chronic illness care³.

Reframing Care: Dropping the Fallacy Ourselves

We, too, are not immune to the “I’m the Only One” fallacy. How many professionals have quietly felt, “I’m the only one in my organization who cares about stigma”? Or, “I’m the only one who sees how these practices harm our clients”? We carry our own versions of aloneness. And if we don’t recognize them, we risk replicating the very patterns we hope to change.

Inclusive care requires us to acknowledge our vulnerability. To say, “Everyone feels alone sometimes. But the stakes are higher for our clients who face discrimination.” When we name the pattern, we interrupt its power.

The IDC has already written about this in the article, Discover What Happens When Clients Feel Safe. Clever interventions don’t create belonging. It’s created through consistency, care, and co-regulation⁴. It begins with presence.

Practicing Connection at Three Levels

With Ourselves

We start by noticing when the fallacy shows up in us, when perfectionism kicks in when fatigue makes us withdraw and when we feel responsible for fixing everything.

Try: “I am not the only one doing this work. I am part of something larger.”

In the Clinical Relationship

Clients don’t need to be convinced that their feelings are irrational. They need to be seen. Validating the feeling of aloneness is not about confirming its truth; it’s about offering an alternative.

Try:
“That makes sense. It’s easy to feel like this. There is a lot on your shoulders.”
“You’re not alone, even if it feels that way right now.”
“What would help you feel more supported today?”

In Our Institutions

Isolation is often policy-driven. When BMI gates care access, when weighing is done in public spaces, and when health education erases entire groups of people, it creates a sense of aloneness. Not metaphorically but structurally.

The 2025 ADA Standards of Care explicitly name weight stigma as a factor that must be addressed through education, environmental modification, and changes in care delivery⁵. Inclusive design is not optional. It is part of evidence-based care.

Ask:

“Where might we be amplifying a sense of being the only one?”
“How does diet culture amplify this feeling of being alone?”
“What does belonging look like here—and for whom?”

From Isolation to Inclusion

The “I’m the Only One” fallacy is a subtle yet powerful belief that can take time to untangle. It tells clients they are separate because they are uniquely flawed. That their struggle is proof they’re doing something wrong.

But we know better. We know that isolation is often a response to how care is delivered, not a failure of the person receiving it.

Inclusion is not a buzzword. It is the antidote to this fallacy. As professionals, our job is not just to provide information. It is to create connection, because no one should have to navigate diabetes alone.

Cited Articles

Eitel, K.B., et al. (2023). Diabetes Stigma and Clinical Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults: The SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study. Diabetes Care, 46(4), 811–818.
Fletcher, M. (2023). The Inclusion Pyramid. Inclusive Diabetes Care. https://inclusivediabetescare.substack.com/p/the-inclusion-pyramid
Fletcher, M. (2023). Diabetes and Belonging. Inclusive Diabetes Care. https://inclusivediabetescare.substack.com/p/diabetes-and-belonging
Fletcher, M. (2023). Discover What Happens When Clients Feel Safe. Inclusive Diabetes Care. https://inclusivediabetescare.substack.com/p/discover-what-happens-when-clients
Bannuru, R.R., et al. (2025). Weight stigma and bias: standards of care in overweight and obesity—2025. BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, 13:e004962.