Unawakened Family
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The Movement Told Me My Family Was Toxic. Islam Gave Them Back.
By [Hind Silkan] | Personal Essay
There is a sentence I said out loud, with full conviction, that I am not proud of.
"My parents lower my vibration."
I said it. I believed it. I had been taught to believe it by a wellness culture that handed me the most sophisticated-sounding justification for emotional abandonment I had ever encountered ,and dressed it in the language of healing.
I didn't cut my family off completely. But I pulled back. I created what the community called "energetic distance." I started seeing every difficult conversation with my mother as evidence that she was unawakened. I started feeling quietly superior to the people who raised me, because I was doing the work and they weren't.
I thought I was healing.
I was performing it.
And then I found Islam, and something cracked open that I did not expect. Not shame, not regret, not a list of rules. Something much more disorienting than any of that.
I found out that the people I had been energetically distancing myself from were, in the eyes of Allah, among my most sacred responsibilities on this earth.
I had to sit with that for a very long time.
What the Movement Actually Taught Us About Family
Let me name it clearly, because I think we deserve honesty about what happened to us.
The New Age wellness world, the astrology, the energy work, the shadow work, the awakening community, built an entire theology of family around one concept: toxicity.
And the theology went like this:
Your healing journey is the most important thing. Anyone who does not support that journey, who questions it, who doesn't understand it, who triggers you, who comes from a different level of consciousness, is a threat to your growth. Real healing sometimes means cutting people off. Especially family. Especially parents. Because family is where your original wounds live, and if they can't match your vibration, you are allowed, encouraged, to leave them behind.
The spiritual community had an entire vocabulary for it: people were called "asleep," "unenlightened," or "low vibration." Outsiders, including your own family, were pitied or demonised.
And for those of us who are neurodivergent, who already felt like outsiders in our own families, who had always experienced relationships as complicated and overwhelming, this framework was intoxicating. Finally, a reason. Finally, permission. Finally, someone telling us that the distance we'd always felt wasn't our problem to solve. It was theirs.
It was a form of toxic positivity that blamed and shamed anyone who raised criticism or didn't fit the mould, a convenient way to silence complexity with the language of energy.
What I didn't see, what none of us were supposed to see, was that we were being slowly separated from the people who had known us longest, loved us first, and would be there when the retreat was over and the crystals were packed away and real life resumed.
We called it healing. It was isolation with better aesthetics.
What Islam Actually Says About Your Family
I want to give you the Islamic position on family ties plainly, because it is not ambiguous, and when I first encountered it, it stopped me completely.
The Arabic term is silat ar-rahim, literally, "the bond of the womb." The word rahim means womb, and it shares a linguistic root with rahmah, mercy, and with one of Allah's most beloved names: Ar-Rahman, the Most Merciful.
The Prophet reported that Allah said: "I am Ar-Rahman. I have named the womb after My name. Whoever maintains it, I will maintain a connection with him. Whoever severs it, I will cut off from him."
Read that again slowly.
The word for family ties shares a root with the word for mercy, which shares a root with one of Allah's own names. This is not incidental. This is theological architecture. Family is not a lifestyle choice in Islam. It is not a relationship you curate based on who matches your frequency.
The Quran places honouring parents directly after worshipping Allah: "Your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him, and that you be good to parents." (Surah Al-Isra, 17:23). This verse does not merely suggest kindness, it commands ihsan, excellence, the highest standard of goodness.
Not if they deserve it. Not if they've done the work. Not if they understand your journey.
Excellence. Toward the people who raised you.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: "The one who severs family ties will not enter Paradise."
I had been out here, in my linen trousers and with my rose quartz, talking about raising my vibration, while unknowingly walking away from one of the most serious obligations in the faith I was about to enter.
The Part That Broke Me Open
Here is what I was not prepared for.
When I started learning about Islam, before I even took my shahada, I kept encountering this concept of silat ar-rahim and feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Because the wellness framework I'd lived inside had made "maintaining difficult family relationships" sound like trauma bonding. Like codependency. Like a failure to love yourself.
And then I found this:
The Prophet ﷺ said: "The person who perfectly maintains the ties of kinship is not the one who does it because he gets recompensed by his relatives, but the one who truly maintains the bonds of kinship is the one who persists in doing so even though the latter has severed the ties of kinship with him."
The highest form of maintaining family ties is doing it when they haven't done the same for you.
Not walking away because they don't match your vibration. Staying, thoughtfully, with boundaries where needed, but staying, even when it costs you something.
That is not codependency. That is not trauma bonding. That is one of the most quietly radical acts of spiritual maturity I have ever encountered.
And I had been taught to call it weakness.
What I Had to Unlearn
When you spend years inside the wellness-awakening framework, family becomes a wound to be processed rather than a relationship to be tended. Every interaction with your parents becomes data, evidence of their unconsciousness, their emotional immaturity, their unhealed patterns.
You stop seeing them as people. You start seeing them as case studies in generational trauma.
And the cruelty of this, the part I had to sit with for a long time after becoming Muslim is that it is dressed entirely in the language of love. "I'm doing this for my healing." "I can't be around that energy right now." "I love them from a distance."
But love that requires the other person to earn it through growth is not love. It's a performance review.
Islam handed me something radically different: the idea that your family relationships are an act of worship. That showing up for your difficult mother, your complicated father, your messy siblings, with patience, with kindness, even imperfectly, is not something you do instead of your spiritual practice.
It is your spiritual practice.
The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: "Anyone who is pleased that his sustenance is expanded and his age extended should do kindness to his near relatives."
Your rizq, your provision, your blessings, the expansion of your life, is tied to how you treat the people you share blood with.
The wellness world told me my family was the obstacle to my growth.
Islam told me they were part of the path.
What Stopped Being a Performance
Here is the honest truth about the shift.
Before Islam, when I made an effort with my family, there was always a layer of self-consciousness to it. I was tracking my triggers. I was noting their behaviour. I was secretly proud of how evolved I was being in the face of their unawareness. Even the love was a little bit about me.
After Islam, something changed that I still don't fully have language for.
I stopped performing healing around them. I started just being with them.
Not because I suddenly became a saint. Not because all the difficult dynamics disappeared. But because the framework changed completely. They are no longer characters in my healing journey. They are my family, my rahim, my womb-connection, and Allah Himself named that bond after His own mercy.
How do you hold someone at a "vibrational distance" once you know that?
You don't. You just... show up. Imperfectly. Regularly. Because that's what the religion asks of you. And in the showing up, something happened that no retreat, no circle, no card pull ever gave me.
I started actually knowing them.
A Note on Real Harm, Because This Needs to Be Said
I want to be careful here, because I know that "the movement told me to cut off my family" lands differently for different people.
Some people in that community were using it as an excuse for avoidance. That was me.
Some people were using it because they were in genuinely harmful situations, abuse, addiction, real danger, and the framework gave them permission to protect themselves when nothing else had.
Islamic scholars make this distinction clearly: you are not required to remain in regular contact with someone who causes you documented harm. Silat ar-rahim does not mean enabling abuse.
If a person is compelled to sever ties with a family member due to a genuine reason, the warnings about cutting family ties are not applicable.
Islam is not telling you to return to danger. It is telling you not to confuse discomfort with danger. Not to mistake your parents being human with them being toxic. Not to call every difficult relationship a wound that requires distance to heal.
There is wisdom in the distinction. It took me a long time to sit in it honestly and ask myself which category I was actually in.
The answer humbled me.
To the Girl Who Distanced Herself and Doesn't Know How to Go Back
This is the part I needed someone to write for me.
You don't have to explain everything. You don't have to confess the full arc of the wellness-to-Islam journey in one conversation. You don't have to arrive back in your family's life with a manifesto.
You just have to show up.
Call. Visit. Ask how they are and actually listen to the answer. Sit in the ordinary, unremarkable, imperfect reality of being someone's child, and let that be enough for now.
Islam commands us to be kind to relatives even if they are unpleasant or harsh toward us, not because we are doormats, but because the bond itself is an act of worship that does not depend on reciprocity.
The wellness world made family conditional. Islam makes it covenantal.
And the covenant runs through you, not through whether they deserve it on any given day.
What I Know Now
I know that my parents are not my mirrors, my triggers, my case studies, or my low-vibration obstacles.
They are my family. The first people who loved me. The ones who are tied to me through something that Allah Himself described as part of His mercy.
I stopped performing healing around them the day I stopped needing them to be anything other than what they are.
That is not something the wellness world gave me.
That is what Islam gave me, quietly, in the middle of learning about silat ar-rahim at 11pm, sitting with the specific weight of realising I had been calling something healing that was actually just a well-dressed form of running away.
I came back. Imperfectly. Slowly.
But I came back.
And that, more than any ritual, any reading, any retreat, is the most genuinely spiritual thing I have ever done.
I write about faith, neurodivergence, family, and the beautiful, complicated work of becoming more honest with yourself. If something in this landed, you know where to find me.