Private Posts with Public Excerpts, please

Use the “pre_get_posts” action to add “private” to the “post_status” query var array, but only do so for main queries which are archive queries that result in only excerpts being output. Coding the proper conditionals to only add “private” when it’s appropriate is the critical part, and is partly theme dependent.

There may be additional things to address with the actual output from the templates involved, it depends on your theme. But the pre_get_posts hook is what gets private posts to the template in the first place. A very important first step. It’s difficult to speculate what happens on the template. It appears you are using a commercial theme, so we’re unable to help you with that part of this puzzle.