In general, the study of marginality adopts two major orientations: the external structured exclusion, which focuses on contextual marginalization, and the internal mental experience, which emphasizes psychological marginalization. It is believed that the social marginalization of individuals follows the conventional pathway of “from structural to psychological”. This paper analyzes the marginalization process of parents who lost their only child based on the paired concepts of “structural marginalization” and “psychological marginalization”. Due to the seismic change in their “living context”, these parents actively constructed and gradually fenced their psychological margins in a strong sense of self-awareness. This led to structural marginalization, which evolved from “a desperate heart” to “extreme isolation”. The dual-pathway model of individual marginalization is thus constructed on the basis of the non-conventional “psychological-structural” pathway of individual social marginalization. The key to dealing with individual social marginalization is to establish a staged cut-off mechanism in accordance with the evolution rules of marginalization. In addition to external structured assistance, we should pay more attention to psychological marginalization.

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