Women Living Alone Abroad: Safety, Loneliness and Strength

Being a woman living alone abroad can bring safety worries, loneliness and family pressure. We explore the psychological load and ways to feel stronger.

Keeping your key ready in your hand as you walk home from work, checking the lock once more after you have locked the door, remembering to text your mum "I'm home"... For many women, these are ordinary habits. But when you live in another country, in another language and thousands of kilometres from your family, these small rituals carry more meaning. Being a woman living alone abroad offers freedom, independence and the chance to discover yourself, but it can also mean coping with safety worries, loneliness and the expectations of your family back in Turkey. In this article, we look at the feelings that women living alone abroad often experience, the cultural background to those feelings, and concrete steps that support both safety and mental health.

Being a Woman Living Alone Abroad: The Different Faces of the Experience

The stories of women living alone abroad are very different from one another. Some are students who went for a master's or a doctorate. Some are engineers, doctors or software developers who moved for a career opportunity. Some have found themselves alone after a divorce or the loss of a spouse. Others are second-generation, with family living in the same country but in a different city.

Despite these differences, some experiences are common:

• A sense of independence: Making your own decisions, building your own routine and standing on your own two feet.
• An invisible load: Taking on everything alone, from bills and bureaucracy to home repairs and health appointments.
• Safety awareness: Constantly assessing the place you live, the road you walk in the evening, your landlord and your neighbours.
• Evening and weekend loneliness: The silence you feel on coming home after days that were full during work or school hours.
• Questioned choices: The questions from family and acquaintances in Turkey: "When are you going to get married?" and "What are you doing there all by yourself?"

This experience also varies according to the country, the city, your age, your language skills and your financial circumstances. Living in a big, crowded city and being the only Turkish woman in a small town bring different challenges. Someone who speaks the language fluently copes more easily with bureaucracy, while someone who is still learning it can feel alone and vulnerable even in the simplest tasks.

These experiences do not all happen at once, and none of them alone means a psychological problem. But they can build up into a tiring burden.

Feelings Commonly Experienced by Women Living Alone Abroad

Living alone is not hard for every woman; many choose this way of life deliberately and are happy with it. Still, some signs can indicate that the load is getting heavy:

• Avoiding going home, or feeling uneasy at home
• Marked anxiety, a racing heart or a state of being on guard in the evenings or when you wake at night
• Your social relationships being limited to work, and your weekends being spent entirely alone
• The thought "Who will look after me?" turning into an intense fear when you are ill
• Feelings of guilt, anger or inadequacy after phone calls with your family
• Disrupted sleep, or putting off going to bed by staying in front of a screen for long periods
• Neglecting self-care: irregular eating, inactivity
• Losing interest in things you used to enjoy

These symptoms do not on their own mean a diagnosis. But if they last for weeks and affect your daily functioning, it is important to take the situation seriously. For the general picture of the experience of loneliness abroad, you can look at the article on loneliness abroad.

Safety Anxiety: Between Realistic Precautions and Being Constantly on Guard

Safety is one of the subjects most often raised by women living alone abroad. It is important to separate two things here: realistic precautions, and a constant state of alertness that wears a person out.

Realistic precautions are healthy and give you a sense of control: living in a safe area, checking your door locks, knowing safe transport options late at night, keeping emergency numbers saved on your phone, and sharing your location with a few trusted people.

Constant alertness is different. The person perceives every sound as danger, cannot relax even at home, has trouble falling asleep and begins to avoid going out. This can be fed by a frightening event in the past, by intense news consumption, or by worries that the family expresses all the time.

From a cognitive-behavioural perspective, anxiety often overestimates the likelihood of danger while underestimating your ability to cope. The thoughts "Something is definitely going to happen to me" and "If something happens, I won't be able to do anything" are two basic thinking patterns that make anxiety grow. The aim is not to give up precautions, but to stop precautions from coming under the control of anxiety.

An important note: if someone is currently threatening your safety, following you, harassing you or harming you, this is not an anxiety matter but a real danger. In this case, call the emergency number of the country you live in and contact local support organisations.

Cultural Context: Family Worry, "What Will People Say?" and Being a Woman

For many women from Turkey, living alone is not only a practical situation but an experience that carries cultural meaning.

The family's worry. The thought "my daughter is there all by herself" can be a major source of concern for the family in Turkey. Frequent calls, the expectation of an immediate reply to every message and warnings such as "Don't go out in the evening" come from love, but they put an additional burden on the woman. Alongside her own anxiety, she begins to carry her family's anxiety too.

"What will people say?" (Elâlem ne der?) In some families and circles, a woman who lives alone without being married can still be seen as a situation that needs explaining. This view can make a woman feel she has to defend her choices and can lead to feelings of shame.

Pressure to look strong. The narrative of "I went, I made it" makes it hard to tell the family when she is struggling. Out of fear that "if I tell them, they'll say 'come back home'", a woman may keep her difficulties to herself.

Questions about marriage and children. Questions repeated in holiday calls, family visits or weddings can lead a woman to question her own life plan.

Living alone does not mean being alone. But a woman living alone needs relationships in which she is understood without having to explain her own story.

For the wider dimensions of being a woman abroad, you can read the article on women abroad.

The Effect on Relationships and Family

Living alone abroad affects a woman's relationships in several ways.

Relationship with family. Distance sometimes moves the relationship with family onto healthier ground; sometimes it deepens conflicts. A woman can be caught between protecting her own boundaries and not hurting her family. The family's question "When are you coming back?" can create a hidden tension in every conversation.

Friendships. Building deep friendships in a new country takes time. With old friends in Turkey, as your lives diverge, you may have fewer topics in common. A woman can feel she is between two worlds of friendship, not fully belonging to either.

Romantic relationships. Cultural differences, worries about trust and the family's expectations can complicate forming a relationship. "Someone from my own culture, or someone from the country I live in?" is one of the questions often asked.

Suppose an engineer in her thirties has been living alone in Northern Europe for five years. She is successful at work, has set up her own home, and from the outside everything is fine. But her weekends pass without speaking to anyone, and every phone call with her mother ends with "It's time you got married." After the calls she feels both lonely and inadequate, and tells no one. This fictional example shows the difference between the strength that is visible from the outside and the burden carried inside.

What You Can Do on Your Own

As a woman living alone abroad, the steps that support both your safety and your mental health often begin with small, achievable changes. You do not need to apply all of the suggestions below at once; you can start with the one or two that feel closest to you.

1. Make your safety plan, then let it go. Save the emergency numbers, the nearest health facility and the contact details of a few trusted people. Decide on practical measures such as location sharing. Once the plan is ready, try not to let your mind keep replaying the same scenarios.

2. Weave your support network deliberately. Keep regular contact with a few people from different circles, such as neighbours, colleagues, a language course or a sports group. Having at least one or two people nearby whom you could call in an emergency increases your sense of security.

3. Build an evening and weekend routine. Make small plans for the hours when loneliness is felt most: a video call with a friend on a set evening of the week, a class or a walking group at the weekend.

4. Clarify your boundaries with your family. While preserving your love for them, decide which topics you are open to discussing. You can use clear and kind sentences such as "I love you and I understand your concern, but talking about this in every call tires me out."

5. Prepare for the scenario of falling ill. Deciding in advance on your home medicine cabinet, your family doctor and a person who could help you reduces the worry of "What will I do if I get sick?"

6. See your own achievements. Building a life on your own is a great effort. Noticing the small and big things you manage every day supports your self-confidence.

7. Look after your body. Regular sleep, nutrition and movement are basic supports in coping with anxiety and loneliness.

When Should You Seek Professional Support?

Struggling does not mean you are weak. The experience of a woman living alone abroad can feel heavy from time to time even for the most resilient people. It is important to consider professional support in the following situations:

• If anxiety and being on guard have lasted for weeks and restrict your daily life
• If you have started avoiding leaving home, social settings or certain places
• If feelings of loneliness, low mood and hopelessness have continued for a long time
• If a frightening event from your past often comes to mind and disrupts your sleep
• If relationships with family constantly create guilt and anger
• If thoughts of harming yourself come to mind

In a crisis, or when your safety is in danger or there is a risk of self-harm, call the emergency number of the country you are in immediately: 112 in EU countries, 911 in the USA and Canada, 999 or 112 in the UK, 000 in Australia. Online therapy is not an emergency response service; in situations of serious risk, local emergency services and local psychiatric services are necessary. Mental health services in the country you live in and support organisations for women are also important resources; support in your native language is an option to use alongside them, not instead of them.

How Does Online Therapy in Your Native Language Work?

It is possible to describe a family's worry, the pressure of "what will people say?", the need to look strong or the sadness that follows holiday calls in another language; but sometimes explaining these concepts takes more energy than expressing the feeling itself. Working in your native language can make it easier to be understood without having to explain the cultural context at length. You can find more detail on this on the Turks abroad page.

In a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)-based approach, the following areas can be addressed:

• Anxiety management: Assessing the perception of danger realistically, and reducing the state of constant alertness while keeping sensible precautions.
• Avoidance behaviours: Returning step by step to activities given up because of anxiety.
• Thinking patterns: Re-evaluating thoughts such as "If I'm alone, something will happen to me" and "I'm disappointing my family."
• Boundary-setting and communication: Communication skills that protect both affection and your own space in the relationship with family.
• Social connection: Planning realistic, small steps that will reduce loneliness.

For online sessions, a quiet and private room, headphones and a secure internet connection are enough. A fixed session time is set with the time difference in mind. Payment can be made online; for insurance reimbursement, you need to check the insurance conditions in the country you live in. You can find information on how the sessions work on the online therapy page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal to be afraid of living alone abroad?

Yes, it is quite natural to feel a certain unease when you begin living alone in a new country. This unease often eases once you have made a safety plan and got to know your surroundings. If the fear does not fade over time but starts to restrict your life, seeking support can be helpful.

My family is constantly worried and it is wearing me out. What can I do?

Your family's worry usually comes from love, but carrying that worry is not your job. Updating them regularly at set intervals, sharing your safety measures with them and gently telling them which subjects you do not want raised in every call can help you strike a balance.

Does living alone mean feeling lonely?

No. Many women are happy living alone and choose it deliberately. The feeling of loneliness has less to do with the home you live in than with the presence of meaningful relationships. What matters is having a support network that understands you and that you can reach when you need to.

Does therapy in my native language replace the services in the country I live in?

Online therapy in your native language is an option to use alongside, not instead of, the mental health services in the country you live in. In emergencies, in situations that require medication, or when face-to-face follow-up is needed, local services come first.

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• #therapy in your native language

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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