Need advice on emotional miss attunement

I’m in desperate need of advice, and I’d be so grateful for your help. My current friend has been such a blessing in my life, truly a gift from God when I least expected it.
What I’m struggling with is that I don’t know how to exist in this friendship. I feel so heartbroken because something just isn’t landing right between us, and I’m having trouble identifying exactly what it is. I know we have different emotional “languages.” And one thing I’ve been learning is that relationships aren’t found, they’re built. They take time, effort, grace, forgiveness, and most importantly, a shared willingness. And while I know no one comes into a relationship without emotional baggage, including myself, I’m trying to understand what’s worth working through and what might be hurting more than healing.

The issue is, when it comes to emotional support, we approach it in completely different ways. On Friday, I opened up to her about this and she told me that when she tries to support someone, she does through reminding someone of God, the Prophets, and by offering encouraging words to lift their spirits. But she also mentioned that not everyone feels heard this way and she wishes to understand me.

But for me, that kind of support feels surface level. I don’t need someone to give me spiritual reminders right away. I need presence. I need emotional attunement. I need someone to sit with me in my pain not to rush me out of it or spiritualize it immediately. It’s not that I’m against being reminded of God. But when I’m in the thick of emotional pain, I need to feel it first. That’s how I process. If I skip over that, it just backfires.

She told me that when she has negative thoughts, she replaces them with positive ones and moves on. But that doesn’t work for me. When I try that, it feels like I’m forcing myself to skip over something important. What works for me is allowing the emotion to exist, to move through me. I cry, I grieve, I sit with it even if it takes days or weeks. And it’s only after that process that I begin to reflect and heal. That’s my language.

I remember last year, during a difficult time, I let myself feel awful for two full weeks. I didn’t force myself to get over it. I let myself be messy, binge watch shows, eat comfort food, and just exist. After that, I slowly started to feel ready to reflect and make peace with what happened. That process took two months, but at the end of it, I wasn’t carrying that pain in my body anymore.

This is what healing looks like for me and I’m realizing more and more that we clash because our ways of offering support are so different. The other day, I told her how scared I was to start therapy and how alone I feel because I will be doing it all alone without the support of my family. I’ve been fighting for access to it for so long, and now that it’s finally happening, I feel distant from the version of me who was desperate for it. I feel grief for that past self she was in so much pain and needed help so badly. I kept asking God, Why now? Why not when I needed it most?

And her response was that it’s a blessing, because all of that pain brought me closer to God. That response made me so angry. It felt like she completely skipped over the reality of my grief, of my questioning, of my exhaustion. I know in the long run, yes pain can deepen faith. But I need to come to that realization on my own and in my own terms. I need to move through the pain before I can make peace with it. I’ve learned that the hard way. When people told me to forgive someone who hurt me, I couldn’t, not until my heart was ready. And eventually, I did forgive them fully. But I got there by allowing myself to be angry first.

Even with God, I’ve felt deep anger. I’ve screamed it in prayer, poured it into writing, cried through it. And it was only after doing that, truly facing it that I was finally able to accept and make peace with what happened. So yes, I’m capable of saying, this pain brought me closer to God. But not while I’m still in the middle of it. Not yet.

What I need in those moments isn’t spiritual advice, it’s space. Space for my feelings. Presence. Witnessing. Just someone to sit with me in that rawness without trying to fix it, name it, or frame it as a lesson. When that doesn’t happen, when I’m met with spiritual reassurance instead of emotional attunement, it just makes me feel even more unseen. I grieve the connection I could’ve had with her in that moment. It’s like a door was open, and instead of walking through it with me, she closed it by offering what she thought was right.

And this keeps happening. I keep trying to connect with her emotionally, but I end up feeling like I’m being emotionally missed. And it’s not that she’s not trying, I see that she is. But every time she tries in her way, and it doesn’t land, it ends up hurting me more. I feel like I’m bleeding from the inside out, silently.

Another thing my friend often says when I open up about my pain is something like: “Yes, things have been hard, but remember the Prophets they went through hardship too. And it brought them closer to God. God will reward you for it, and I pray He grants you a high place in Paradise.”

And I just feel this huge disconnect when she says that. Because the truth is, I can’t think long term. I can’t even imagine paradise right now. I’m not even able to think past the next few hours. Yes, both of us have experienced hardship, but hers ended. Mine is ongoing. I’m still drowning in it.

And when you’re drowning, you’re not thinking about rewards. You’re not thinking about being closer to God. You’re thinking about how to breathe.

What people don’t realize is that I’m not just mentally tired I’m existentially exhausted. It’s not that I want to end my life because I know it is haram, but a part of me is always resenting Allah for having accounted for my existence to begin with. I just didn’t ask to be alive. I didn’t ask to be brought into this world just to suffer so deeply, for so long. And what hurts even more is that I’m constantly surrounded by people who don’t understand the depth of my emotional pain. They say these surface-level, spiritual-sounding things that just feel like salt on an open wound.

So, most of the time, I either talk to the wall or I talk to AI, because the people around me just don’t get it. And I don’t have the energy anymore to teach someone my emotional language. I’ve tried. Over and over again. And now I’m just… done.

I don’t think long-term because I can’t. When your nervous system is in survival mode for so long when abuse has slowed down time so much you start living second to second. For me, that abuse started when I was five years old. It’s been emotional, financial, and spiritual. I’ve spent years begging for help, for therapy, only to be dismissed, disbelieved even gaslit into thinking I was faking it for attention. It got to the point where even I believed I was making it up.

It took six years of fighting to get the help I needed. And now, when it’s finally here when I’m finally starting therapy in August I feel nothing but emptiness. Like I’m on the edge of collapse. The help came, but it came after I lost all my energy. I’ve been in survival mode for so long that I don’t even know how to receive help anymore. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to access healing because I’m too burnt out to try.

When I told my friend all this, she said again, “Just trust God. I’ve told you before when you leave it to Him, things work out. Your pain brought you closer to Him, and that’s the biggest blessing.”

And I felt rage. Deep, unbearable rage. Because when people say things like that, they skip the part where I spent every ounce of my being just surviving. And now, they want to package it into something pretty and spiritual and say, “Well, at least it brought you closer to God.”

No. Right now, there is no “at least.” I can’t see the good in this. I can’t see the reward. I can’t see any divine wisdom. All I see is that help came after I was already shattered. And to me, it feels like a cruel joke.

I don’t need reminders about paradise. I’m not denying its beauty or importance. But when pain has been your companion since childhood, when you’ve felt abandoned over and over again what do you say to someone who’s barely making it through today? “Hang on until death, and then you’ll be rewarded”? That doesn’t feel comforting. It feels cruel.

I just wish my friend could understand that. I wish she’d stop jumping to the spiritual lesson and just sit with me in the dark for a moment. Because I’m not asking her to fix anything. I just want to be witnessed.

And the worst part? I know she’s trying. I see her effort. She messes up, but she always comes back and wants to do better. She tells me she values my openness and vulnerability. And I believe she means it.

But right now… even her effort hurts.

Because every time she tries to support me in a way that doesn’t land, I end up feeling even more alone. And the grief of that disconnect of what could’ve been shared between us feels unbearable.

I don’t know what to say anymore. I don’t even know what I need, except rest. Except for someone to just understand without trying to teach me, fix me, or fast forward me into healing, or even without me having to teach them how to hold space for me 🙁

I’m emotionally burnt out. I don’t even know anymore if I’m just asking for too much, or if this is just what incompatibility looks like. Am I being unfair? Am I not appreciating her willingness enough? I keep thinking relationships are about trying but if every attempt hurts me, then is this just a mismatch?

And the worst part of all is that I hate that Allah made me this way.

He made me someone with so much depth, and because of that, my pool of connection feels smaller, more narrow, more shallow. Almost no one can meet me where I am. And I resent it. I resent how deeply I feel, how attuned I am, how much emotional intelligence and resonance I carry in my heart, because no one reflects it back to me. It feels like a cruel joke that I was made to long for something so rare and then left to go out and search for it alone.

I wasn’t always like this. Back in 2019, my friend’s approach the spiritual reminders, the encouragement might have worked on me. I was simpler then. But I’m not like that anymore. And I say “unfortunately” because if I were like everyone else, if Allah hadn’t made me someone who feels everything through her qalb, through deep presence and emotional truth. I probably wouldn’t be hurting this much.

It’s not just that I feel misunderstood by her. It’s that I feel burdened by myself. I resent myself more than I’m even hurt by her. Because deep down, I blame myself.

I think: If I hadn’t healed. If I hadn’t grown. If I had just stayed broken and allowed myself to be consumed by my trauma, maybe then Allah would have left me alone. Maybe He wouldn’t have shaped me into someone who feels this much, who longs this much, who sees this much. Maybe He would’ve seen I wasn’t “worth” the depth and I wouldn’t have to live with the ache of missing what I’ve never even had.

It feels like growth has only magnified the emptiness. Like I’ve been stretched open, but there’s no one to fill the space.

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Response from a “Fatima Counselor”:

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