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This article details allegations of child abuse, stillborn babies, emotional abuse, and rape.
Every family has their secrets. Some are kept from those outside the family, while others are kept from the closest members. The reasons for keeping these secrets range from avoiding embarrassment to sparing those involved unnecessary hurt. Some families' secrets go beyond the mundane and have huge implications. Often, when those secrets are found out, people's lives and what they thought they knew about their families change forever.
Redditor elmarador62, took to the social platform to find out more about these shocking family secrets. They asked, "What is a disturbing family secret you weren’t supposed to find out, but now wish you could forget?" Here are the 15 most shocking answers.
1. "My dad spent a long time believing I wasn’t his. My mom cheated a lot before my parents divorced, and I’m a solid foot taller than anyone else in either my mom's or dad’s family, and look nothing like him. He never said anything until we were both drunk one night recently and he brought it up; we’ve never spoken of it since, and I’m happy to leave it and never try to find out."
2. "One case that kind of goes the other way is my story, as I am hiding the secret from the rest of my family. It is something I haven't told my family, as it might hurt them and requires a lot of context. My dad had hit my mom a few times and was generally terribly drunk. There was one incident that went too far and finally led to divorce and a court case for domestic violence. I had to testify against my dad along with my half-siblings in court. I was 11 years old and also the only one who had been living at home for at least three years at that point due to there being a 10-plus-year age gap between me and my half-siblings. After the trial and a not guilty verdict, a woman from the jury was in the bathroom at the same time as my mom and me."
"My mom is deaf, so she didn't hear it at all, but the woman said she was sorry at the sink, just that 'our stories didn't line up at all, especially the little one.' I had to be the little one she was referring to. It's been 20 years, and I haven't told anyone in my family this happened, and I will probably take it to my grave. I feel like the reason for the not guilty verdict was me."
3. "My grandma cheated on my grandpa; the birth of my mom caused them to divorce (but they later got back together). Only my aunts (my mom's sisters) and my mom know about the affair. I only found out because one day I found my mom ugly crying past midnight, drunk, and she told me she was a mistake and that she wished she hadn't been born because she ruined her family. I have no biological link to my grandpa, but he's an amazing man who never treated my mom differently from her sisters or held it against her. It's wild that no one in our family knows about it. My aunts are like twins; they look almost identical, even if they are three years apart. They both are tall, have blue eyes, are thin, have pale skin, a bigger nose, the same smile, and the same teeth. Then there's my mom; she's small, extra curvy, with thin lips, thin hair, hazel eyes, tanned skin."
4. "After his death, I found out that my Japanese grandfather fought for 'the bad guys' in World War II. He was a very quiet and kind man who enjoyed nature and served as a diplomat for Japan from 1950 until 1995. He was a major advocate for peace and was as anti-war as one could get. He always took the time to stare at flowers whenever he walked. When asked why, he simply said, 'Because beauty in life is so fleeting that we tend to miss it.' When he passed away in 2008, his very old diary was found in a worn-out box of notebooks. What else was found was a very old photo of him with a few guys from his army squad. This shocked everyone. He never told anyone that he fought in WWII. He only told his wife (my grandmother) about it once and never spoke of it again. My grandmother had to explain what was in the notebook and why the photo existed. My grandfather did not want to be a part of WWII."
"All he wanted was to go to college and make a name for himself. However, because of the Bushidō code, he was forced to fight for Japan because of 'manhood and pride.' He only served from 1944 to 1945. He was stationed mostly in Shanghai at the tail end of the war. He did not participate in the fighting or anything; all he did was guard supplies. There were two stories in his diary about his time in the war. First, he wrote that during the evacuation of Shanghai, my grandfather lost a coin toss with his friends from his company for the first boat out. He sat on the docks as he saw the boat get destroyed by Allied bombers. All of his friends and over half of his company died. He lived because of a coin toss.
Second, he wrote about his last mission ever. He was told to find survivors (if there were any) after the bombing of Hiroshima. He wrote, 'All we found was ash.' He was forever haunted by that. He later wrote that because of Hiroshima, he started taking time to sit in nature to just admire it."
5. "I’m now 57 and have lived for years dealing with a problematic mother. I was told by my aunt (my mother's sister) that after my mother had me at 20, while my father was in the army stationed in Asia. My mother's family found her prostituting. Additionally, I found out that her family had to place her in a mental hospital against her will at some point in her teenage years.
6. "Someone reached out to my cousin a couple of years ago, saying they matched as relatives. My cousin asked her mom, and sure enough, she knew the family. They were neighbors growing up, and my dad (my aunt’s brother) and the other family’s youngest daughter were around the same age. They spent a lot of time together since the kids were similar ages. Turns out, my grandpa had an affair with the neighbor, and she got pregnant. This was in the late '50s/early '60s. The daughter was raised by the neighbor-dad, and my grandpa or the woman never admitted anything."
"Unfortunately, the neighbor's dad was horribly abusive and sexually abused all of his children, including the one related to my family. Decades later, due to an at-home DNA test, my cousin, aunt, her newfound half-sister, and her half-sister’s daughter met up and talked about everything. The woman was so relieved that the man who abused her wasn’t her real dad, and she has since developed a good friendship with my family."
7. "My wonderful, kind stepfather, who raised my brother and me, passed away very suddenly in 2023 from a brain hemorrhage. My mom relocated to another city, and I helped declutter our family home. I took all the old laptops to help mom out, one less thing for her to do and deal with. I researched and learned how to open them, extract the hard drives, and access the files on them. Turns out, my stepdad had been cheating on my mom for five years in their relationship, before we all lived together. There were hundreds of photos and chat logs between him and other women and couples, including photos of him in lingerie with other men. It hurts so much to relive; I've just put the hard drive in a bag and hidden it from myself. The worst part is that I thought their love story was magical. He was such a wonderful man and a great father figure; it hurts knowing that parts of him were lies."
8. "My grandmother was 13 when she had my Mom. Also, I'd known since I was nine that my mother had a stillborn child years before I was born. When I was 11, I was looking through the 'family' bible at my grandmother's house and found the name of my mother's stillborn child. It was my first name and a different middle name."
9. "A few years ago, my grandma found a young woman's dress underneath the seat of my 90-year-old Grandpa's car (don't get me started on the fact that he's still driving). My family spent a week trying to figure out who it belonged to before my aunt claimed it was hers. The rest of us all know it wasn't hers, and she just claimed it was so we would all stop talking about it."
10. "My mother was recently diagnosed with late-stage cancer. During one chemotherapy session, while on the bed, she teared up and told me that I was the product of rape, and that she was forced to marry the rapist (my dad). I am from a poor Asian country, and this is not unheard of in our community. I was still destroyed for a good month before I learned to accept that I had no control over this and to make some peace with it."
11. "I have a lot of secrets from a dysfunctional, abusive family, so I'm pretty desensitized to them, but a recent one still has me feeling sick. My older brother was three years old, and my family was living in an apartment complex. My mom started driving somewhere with my brother when he threw a fit about not wanting to go. She pulled over and told him to get out and go home then. That same brother now has a 3-year-old of his own, and I feel sick to my stomach thinking about a kid that small being dropped off and expected to find his way home."
12. "Before I was born, I had a cousin who had solar urticaria. My grandmother was a very devout Christian woman who decided to cleanse herself of the devil by locking my cousin outside."
13. "My grandmother had been a raging alcoholic since before my mother was born. Turns out my grandparents' only son died in a tractor accident while my grandpa was driving (they had a farm), and their marriage never really recovered. I stayed with them for one or two weeks during school breaks, and I never noticed a thing. She passed away when I was 14, so I only found out years later how hard my mom fought to keep her alcoholism from us, and how she'd drive us straight back home if my grandma was drunk when we came to visit (we lived like an hour and a half away). I only remember my grandmother as a kind-hearted woman, a mother of five girls, and a great-grandma, but it turns out she had her demons too."
"It also turns out she's the only one to blame for her issues, and ultimately, her death. She died rather quickly of cancer, simply because it had metastasized a lot by the time they caught it. She never went to the doctor to have a checkup. I want to be sad that she passed before I ever had an adult conversation with her, but I can't help but be just a bit mad at her, if that makes sense? She was an addict, and a few of the stories my mom told me about her childhood were enough to realize now how bad it was."
14. "My grandfather was raping his daughters, impregnated one, and when she ran away, he had the police arrest her and institutionalize her. This was back in the day, and that's what they did with ‘wayward’ girls back then. He raised the baby with my grandmother. I only put two and two together recently that it really happened. I was the family scapegoat, so I was constantly told how bad I was because I'm autistic. She would try to scare me with tales of being thrown in a cell, only a singlet to wear, only bread and water for sustenance, and all you were allowed to do was scrub the concrete floor with a toothbrush. I found the document last year, and the realization made me so sad. She was a very hard woman, but she was always kind to me and even once had me stay with her for the school holidays. I realize now that she was trying to protect and guide me in her own way in response to what they did to her. I hope she has found peace now."
15. And finally, "I recently learned that when my dad's stepfather was first starting to get sick (before dying a few years later), he cheated on my grandmother with his caretaker. My dad, in his late twenties at the time, supported his stepdad and even lived with him and the caretaker for a few years. Later, my dad even flew by himself to meet the caretaker's family in her home country. My dad never mentioned any of this when he was alive. I knew he loved his stepdad a lot. I know my grandma was never really mentally stable, but I never imagined anything like this, especially since his stepfather used to hit my dad. I'd be happy not to know any of this."
Some of those were absolutely shocking and heartbreaking. Did you have a dark family secret that was revealed to you? Let me know in the comments or in the anonymous form below:
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here if you're in the US, or call FRANK at 0300 1236600 if you are in the UK.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
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