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When the Person Who Understands You Is Also Hurting. By Amber.

Hi everyone, my name is Amber Seedat and I’m an estranged university student navigating higher education, whilst also living with chronic illnesses. Through my writing, I share honest reflections on community, resilience, and what it means to build belonging and support systems when the traditional safety net of family isn’t there. This blog explores who to trust when you’ve lost your safety net and loving someone with a similar experience. If you’d like you connect, you can find me @invisible_not_imagined on Instagram.

For many students, university comes with an invisible safety net: family to call when things go wrong, somewhere to go during the holidays and someone who can step in when life becomes overwhelming. But for estranged students, that safety net often isn’t there. When you’ve had to step away from family or been forced to leave unsafe situations, the question becomes very real: who do you trust when the people who were supposed to protect you can’t?


Estrangement isn’t just distance. It’s the quiet reality of knowing that the people who raised you are no longer the people you can rely on. Sometimes that choice is made for survival. For many of us, estrangement follows experiences like domestic abuse, instability, or environments that made it impossible to grow safely. Leaving is often the bravest and hardest decision a person can make, but it also means stepping into the world without the support system that many other students take for granted.


What makes my situation both painful and strangely comforting is that the
person I love the most in this scary world – my boyfriend – is going through the exact same thing.


Like me, he had to flee from a domestic abuse situation. Like me, estrangement followed. And like me, he’s now navigating adulthood, education, and healing without the traditional family structure that many people rely on.


On one hand, there is a deep comfort in being understood without having to
explain everything. When someone else has lived through similar experiences,
there’s an unspoken language between you. We understand each other’s triggers, the quiet grief that comes with estrangement, and the strange mix of freedom and loss that follows leaving an unsafe home.


But there’s another side to it too.


When the person who understands you the most is also hurting, things become complicated.


We’re both healing at the same time. We’re both carrying the weight of past
trauma while trying to build a future together. And as students, that healing happens alongside deadlines, lectures, financial stress, and the pressure to
appear like everything is normal.


Living together helps in many ways. It gives us stability and a sense of
belonging that we didn’t always have growing up. Our home is now a place
where we can feel safe in a way we didn’t before. That alone is something
powerful.


But it also means we sometimes see each other at our lowest.


There are days when both of us are exhausted from the emotional work of
surviving the past while trying to build a future. On top of that, I’m also
balancing chronic illnesses, which adds another layer of unpredictability to
daily life. Some days my body simply doesn’t cooperate with my plans, and that can make the pressures of being a student feel even heavier.

For estranged students, life rarely follows the neat timeline people expect. We’re not just studying. We’re rebuilding.


What I’ve learned is that community doesn’t always look like the family you
were born into. Sometimes it’s the people who stand beside you after everything falls apart. Sometimes it’s the person who sits with you in silence when neither of you has the energy to pretend you’re okay.


Trust, in situations like ours, becomes something you build slowly. It’s not
about finding someone who has everything together. It’s about finding people
who are willing to grow, heal, and keep going – even when they’re struggling
too.


My boyfriend and I don’t have all the answers. We’re both still learning how to
navigate estrangement, university life, and adulthood without the traditional
safety nets many people rely on.


But we do have something powerful: we understand each other.


And sometimes, when you’ve lost the safety net you were supposed to have,
belonging starts with building one together.

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Specific to this Blog

There are several advocacy and support lines out there for care experienced and estranged students.

Wider Support