Assalamu alaikum - I cut off my family, lost my husband-to-be and friends, and now I feel empty. Please advise me.
Assalamu alaikum. I’m writing because I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom emotionally and I don’t know how to keep carrying this alone. Over the past few years I’ve lost almost everything that made my life feel steady. I cut off close family. I lost friends who used to mean the world to me. And I lost my fiancé - the person I thought I’d build a future with. Now there’s this emptiness that scares me. Nothing seems to bring relief. Leaving my family wasn’t an easy choice. These were the people I grew up with - siblings, cousins - I was there for them constantly and loved them. But the relationship became emotionally damaging. When I was vulnerable I was mocked. When I tried to set boundaries they pushed harder. There was constant provocation and then denial. No accountability, no remorse. What made it unbearable was the lack of basic respect and compassion. I was expected to tolerate disrespect just because we were related. When I finally stopped accepting it, I became the problem. Cutting them off felt like cutting off my own limbs, but staying was destroying me. At the same time I was engaged to someone truly good. He was kind, patient, supportive, sincere. My parents liked him and still do. They respected him, especially knowing he was a revert who came to Islam sincerely. The hostility didn’t come from them - it came from my siblings. They chased relationships that failed again and again, and when I found someone good there was a shift. There was constant antagonism, negativity, resentment toward my relationship. They spoke badly about us, tried to undermine things, and made it clear they wanted it to fail. They even prayed against us openly. One sister in particular showed envy and targeted anything good in my life. Being surrounded by people who actively want your relationship to fail takes a toll that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. The pressure never stopped. Eventually my fiancé couldn’t take it anymore and left - not because the love was gone, but because the environment was so hostile and unrelenting. After that, everything collapsed. I lost family, I lost my fiancé, I lost friends. And I feel like I’ve lost myself. I’ve been in therapy for over a year. I go, I reflect, I grieve, I do the work. Still the grief hasn’t lifted. What scares me most is that I don’t feel much of anything anymore. Talking to friends doesn’t help. Talking to relatives doesn’t help. Even people I once missed don’t bring comfort. I wake up sad and go to sleep sad. Everything feels hollow. I feel numb, lonely, and disconnected from life. I’m grieving people who are still alive. I’m grieving a future I thought I had. I’m grieving the version of myself that felt loved, hopeful, and anchored. People tell me to move on, to forgive, to be strong. But no one talks about how devastating it is to lose your entire support system at once, how isolating it is to choose self-respect and still end up alone, and how depression can settle in even when you try to do everything right. I’m not writing to attack anyone or to seek validation. I’m writing because I feel broken and exhausted, and I need to know I’m not alone. I try my best Islamically - praying, putting tawakkul in Allah, doing istikhara. I so pray my fiancé comes back. He loves me deeply but says my family situation is overwhelming and he doesn’t feel ready to support me financially yet. We’re both still in school and in our mid-twenties. I know he loves me and still prays for me. We also work together so we see each other often. If you’ve cut off family and still grieved after therapy began, how did you get through it? If you lost your partner and friends at the same time, how did you rebuild? Does the numbness ever lift, or do you just learn to live with it? Jazakum Allahu khairan if you read this. I really needed to say it somewhere.