Yasmin Mogahed’s Lived Experiences of Healing in Her Own Words

I’m going to share something that is not easy for me to talk about. It is deeply personal and something I struggled with for so many years. Spiritual bypassing. I heard this term a long time ago and I wasn’t sure if I even believed in it. You see, I was suffering deeply for many years and I was desperately searching for a way out.

Breaking Free from Emotional Wounds: Finding Light in Darkness

Yasmin Mogahed’s journey of self-discovery, shared through her books, Healing the Emptiness, Reclaim Your Heart, I Lost My Way: Finding Happiness After Despair, and Love and Happiness (ISBN: 9780998537306, 2017)—and her upcoming 2025 UK tour (Stockholm, June 13; Oslo 14th; Copenhagen, 15th; Vienna, 20th; Paris, 21st), is a profound narrative of her intense pain, growth, and spiritual healing. She hopes to make $5,000.00 for each one hour talk, a total of $25,000.00 not including her book sales.

Her first-person reflections, gathered from social media, writings, and YouTube transcripts as of today, May 19, 2025, offer an authentic glimpse into her lived experiences, including her divorce. Below, Mogahed speaks for herself, sharing her struggles and the divine path that led her to healing, ensuring her voice stands alone without interpretation.

Healing Through Talking: A Journey Beyond Despair

Mogahed’s struggles began in childhood, shaping her relational patterns: “I needed a best friend… Any fall-out with a friend shattered me. I couldn’t let go of anything… If things didn’t work out the way I wanted… I was devastated… Once let down, I never fully recovered. I could never forget, and the break never mended. Like a glass vase that you place on the edge of a table, once broken, the pieces never quite fit again. However the problem wasn’t with the vase, or even that the vases kept breaking. The problem was that I kept putting them on the edge of tables. Through my attachments, I was dependent on my relationships to fulfill my needs. I allowed those relationships to define my happiness or my sadness, my fulfillment or my emptiness, my security, and even my self-worth. And so, like the vase placed where it will inevitably fall, through those dependencies I set myself up for disappointment. I set myself up to be broken. And that’s exactly what I found: one disappointment, one break after another. Yet the people who broke me were not to blame any more than gravity can be blamed for breaking the vase. We can’t blame the laws of physics when a twig snaps because we leaned on it for support. The twig was never created to carry us. Our weight was only meant to be carried by God. We are told in the Qur’an: ‘…whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things.’ (Qur’an, 2:256) There is a crucial lesson in this verse: that there is only one hand-hold that never breaks. There is only one place where we can lay our dependencies. There is only one relationship that should define our self-worth and only one source from which to seek our ultimate happiness, fulfillment, and security. That place is God” (from her writings and Reclaim Your Heart). This reflection reveals how her childhood attachments set a pattern of dependency, leading to repeated heartbreak until she shifted her reliance to Allah.

When the Soul Shatters: Restoring Faith, Love, and Self-Worth

Her longing for connection persisted into adulthood: “I spent a lot of my life chasing after people and things. I’ve always felt a bit ‘needy’—always craving friendships and connections. It was tough for me to deal with disappointments” (“The Search for Love”). She adds, “I think we seek out people who we hope will fix what our childhood broke,” connecting her neediness to early wounds. Her idealism compounded her pain: “I was expecting this life to be what it is not, and was never meant to be: perfect. And being the idealistic that I am, I was struggling with every cell in my body to make it so. It had to be perfect. And I would not stop until it was. I gave my blood, sweat, and tears to this endeavor: making the dunya into jannah” (Reclaim Your Heart). This pursuit of perfection led to heartbreak, as she realized: “After years of falling into the same pattern of disappointments and heartbreak, I finally began to realize something profound. I had always thought that love of dunya meant being attached to material things. And I was not attached to material things. I was attached to people. I was attached to moments. I was attached to emotions. So I thought that the love of dunya just did not apply to me. What I didn’t realize was that people, moments, emotions are all a part of dunya. What I didn’t realize is that all the pain I had experienced in life was due to one thing, and one thing only: love of dunya” (Reclaim Your Heart). This reframed her pain as a call to seek the eternal.

Unraveling Despair: Understanding Pain and Healing from Within

Mogahed reflects on her tendency to spiritually bypass her pain: “I used to think that if I just prayed harder or focused on Allah, the pain would go away. I thought I could skip over the hurt by being more ‘spiritual.’ But I learned the hard way that spiritual bypassing doesn’t heal us—it delays the healing. I had to face the wounds, feel the pain, and do the inner work, not just cover it with faith. I realized that true healing through Allah means bringing Him into the mess, not pretending the mess isn’t there” (Facebook, 2023). This confession highlights her growth in understanding that faith must accompany emotional work.

From Heartbreak and Lack of Faith to Hope: Reclaiming Happiness After Struggle

Her healing journey deepened through spiritual surrender, as she shares in a 2015 X post: “I am one of them… I suppose healing has become a lifestyle for me… I know that [crying to Allah] is the only reason I still walk around… Cry, especially at tahajjud” (Post ID: 603852342069342209). This practice of late-night prayer became her lifeline, aligning with her philosophy: “We must realise that nothing happens without a purpose… Emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change.” Her Love and Happiness description adds, “I have faced loneliness and defeat myself… [I hope to offer] hope and strength to… others navigating life’s storms.”

Turning Pain Into Power: The Art of Emotional Healing

A YouTube transcript (0:02-5:22) details her healing process: “I still had a lot of toxic thinking patterns… I used to focus a lot on what I don’t want… I just did not have very healthy ways of dealing with… interpersonal things… I had an abandonment wound… It was a really long and very horrific journey… I didn’t have the support… I had to learn the hard way… I feel like I had to learn… groping in the dark… I had that anxious attachment… to people… I found the secure attachment in Allah… I wrote these books because I hope that I can help other people to do it with less… tears… I have to know with full certainty that Allah’s got me… That’s how I got through… That’s how I wrote [Reclaim Your Heart]… I was able to develop healthier human relationships… I wrote [Healing the Emptiness]… about learning the healthy psychological tools.”

Breaking Free from Emotional Wounds: Finding Light in Darkness

Another YouTube transcript (0:02-7:29) shares her insights on generational trauma: “I can tell you that right now that within our community there’s an unbelievable amount of… emotional neglect, emotional abandonment… parents who were so conditional in their love… I want to remind you that you are setting the example for your children… I met a girl who told me… ‘My mother told me that you should be able to drink poison and keep a smile on your face’… I’ll say this, whenever I meet a woman who is passively sitting in her own fire… She most of the time watched her mother do the same thing… I think that the most important thing is… healing your own shame, learning to have boundaries and believing that you deserve better… I wrote these books because I hope that I can help other people to do it with less… tears… I hope that I’m growing because if I’m stunted then that’s… a sign of spiritual, emotional, psychological death… I want to remind you that… [children] are going to learn whatever you do… You do not need someone else to sign off on your boundaries.”

Mogahed took the advice of her mother, began healing her own shame, and believed she deserved better. She addresses her divorce, countering narratives that she sought fame over family: “A lot of commentary is flying around about my recent divorce. The words that my former husband strung together in his statement will never allow perfect strangers to understand the depth of a situation… My former husband and I did not take this decision overnight—but after years of effort, prayer, and counsel. We did not decide to go forward with this decision simply because we grew apart, or had different natures… The reason we took this decision, after years of effort and prayer, was due to irresolvable incompatibility. There was no animosity, no ill feeling—only mutual respect, alhamdulilah… Our deen is a deen of balance and ihsan (beautiful conduct), in whatever we do… Islam doesn’t just teach us how to walk when the weather is nice, but how to continue walking—with strength and grace—even when it’s storming… No matter what happens, no matter the storm, if you hold onto the rope of Allah, you will never, ever drown” (social media, 2024). This reflection emphasizes her commitment to faith and grace amidst personal challenges.

The Silent Battles Within: Navigating Self-Hatred and Lack of Faith

In her April 2025 Facebook post, she expresses humility, acknowledging that she doesn’t hold a PhD in psychology or spirituality:
“I’m not a scholar—just a seeker like you. I’m not perfect; I’m a work in progress, trying to navigate this journey back to Allah. I share my reflections as someone who’s been broken and is slowly piecing herself back together, with Allah’s help. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that turning to Allah has been my lifeline. It’s what keeps me going, even when I stumble.”

One can sum her up based on her books: She spent much of her life beating herself up for not being perfect. But she eventually realized she wasn’t created to be flawless—if God wanted perfection, He would have made her an angel. Instead, He made her human, with the ability to grow, to learn, and to rise after falling. This understanding became the heart of her book, I Lost My Way: Finding Happiness After Despair—that true healing began when she embraced her shame and imperfections as essential parts of her journey.

Given her own words and experiences, where do you place Yasmin Mogahed on a general health spectrum?