Familygatherings can be great opportunities to shareheartwarmingstories and reminisce about what it was like when your youngest family members were still in diapers. Keeping these tales alive is a wonderful way to bond withrelativesand maintain a strong connection, even if you live thousands of miles apart.But it seems like every family has a few stories that they never want to hear repeated and have decided to sweep under the rug. Reddit users have recently been bringingfamily secretsthat never get discussed into the light, so we’ve gathered the juiciest ones below. Grab some popcorn, pandas, and enjoy reading through this list. And be sure to upvote thestoriesthat you can’t believe have been buried!This post may includeaffiliate links.
Familygatherings can be great opportunities to shareheartwarmingstories and reminisce about what it was like when your youngest family members were still in diapers. Keeping these tales alive is a wonderful way to bond withrelativesand maintain a strong connection, even if you live thousands of miles apart.
But it seems like every family has a few stories that they never want to hear repeated and have decided to sweep under the rug. Reddit users have recently been bringingfamily secretsthat never get discussed into the light, so we’ve gathered the juiciest ones below. Grab some popcorn, pandas, and enjoy reading through this list. And be sure to upvote thestoriesthat you can’t believe have been buried!
This post may includeaffiliate links.
When I was a teen in the ‘60s no one in my family was allowed to talk about Aunt Rita because she preferred the company of other women. I thought that she was a strong vibrant happy woman who never had a bad thing to say about anyone and didn’t care what anyone had to say about her. She was friggin awesome.
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When I was 5 my dad one day took me with him to visit a guy about buying a wagon. While they were talking I went into the backyard to play with the guys grandson. My Dad forgot I was with him and just left. He came back 25 minutes later and that was the very last time my Mom let my Dad take me anywhere until I was old enough to call home. The biggest plot twist is I’m now married to the grandson. But yeah my Dad hates if anyone brings up I got left so we don’t.
When I was 12 (in 1999) my parents told me they were taking me to Disneyland, and dropped me off at a boarding school and just left me there for 2 years. I had no warning and no idea what was happening or why, and no idea when I would see them again. All these years later and I still cry when I think about it.
We all pretend we don’t know my uncle is gay. No one has a problem with it at all aside from my uncle himself, who has a lot of shame about his sexuality due to some childhood trauma. So we all pretend we think he’s just such a hermit that love isn’t for him and all he needs is his cabin and his fishing pole.He knows we know, we know he knows we know - but for now this is how he feels most comfortable.
That today is the day my mom died. No one has mentioned it. Rip Bobbi Jo Caraway. I’ll always remember, even if they don’t.
My aunt talked my cousin out of an abortion (not her kid, just her niece) and it fd my cousin’s life up. She lost the kid, ended up on all the ds and spent a while in jail. She’s got her st back on track at this point but she was headed somewhere until that fg meddling holy roller got involved.My family doesn’t talk about it, but I sure do. Every time I see that Aunt. She can f*g rot in hell and I will never let her forget what she did to my cousin- we were thick as thieves. It’s been thirty years and my rage still burns white hot.
My biological maternal grandfather smothered my newborn uncle in retaliation for my grandmother sticking up for herself during his abusive tirades. He’d been abusive in every sense of the word towards my grandmother and their children, and for the most part my grandmother just took it out of fear. One day she got a bold streak and argued back at him. He stopped arguing and my grandmother thought maybe he just decided to leave it alone. Later that day he smothered their newborn son in his cradle, and told her if she ever talked back to him again, she’d be next. He lead the authorities to believe it was crib death, and so it was ruled to be such.Thankfully my grandmother escaped him some time later. I didn’t hear this story until I was an adult. I never met my maternal grandfather and I’m quite content with that. If I cared enough to know where he was buried, I’d go p**s on it.
My family didn’t talk about anything beyond the weather, prices at the grocery store, and light gossiping about other family members. I was 12 when my dad died. No one said his name again, and there were no stories about him. As an adult, I reflect on how pathological the avoidance was.
My dad’s old hairstyle in the 80s. We have an agreement to never bring up the perm again.
My wife once made some kind of chicken with a chocolate glaze…. we don’t ever speak of that evil lest it rise again!
Oh, in my family, it’s definitely the mysterious ‘potluck fight of 2016.’ Like, no one will tell me exactly what happened, but apparently, it involved my aunt’s potato salad, my grandma’s deviled eggs, and my uncle making a ‘harmless joke’ that escalated into full-on chaos. 😬All I know is that someone stormed out, my mom ended up crying, and to this day, the phrase ‘potato salad’ is basically a trigger word at family gatherings. We’ve all collectively agreed to just pretend it didn’t happen, but the tension every time someone brings a dish to share? Palpable. 🥴Family secrets are so weird, right?
My brother SAing me from age 6-12.Finding videos of him recording girls at school….like under their skirts and stuff like that without them knowing.Me trying to reason with my mom that he needed help after a side attempt….but she didn’t listen.He…left a side note saying cremate me and sped and crashed his truck.After he died went through his computer and it was filled with even more videos he took of girls at school.But my mom REFUSES to the core to say it was a s***ide. Talk about the note, talk about the behavior that led up to it. Refuses to discuss or bring up any of the findings…..refuses to acknowledge my sexual trauma in any capacity….the family doesn’t talk about any of it. Thats a big fat sack of nope.
My aunt. She abandoned my grandmother on her death bed leaving my dad to sort out everything. After he did the only thing she cared about was the money, didn’t even try to show up for the funeral. Fk you Kelly, you hateful, conniving, racist ct. She won’t even talk to her own daughter (my cousin), because she had kids with and married a black man. They’re happily married BTW.
The fact that my father is likely responsible for the disappearance of his 1st wife.
Autism. We’re all autistic. I’m just the one who got my kids diagnosed.I absolutely cannot have that conversation with my mother. She used to have meltdowns over how I wasn’t masking very well. Not the words she’d use, of course.
My Mother sleeping with my BIL while he was still married to my sister. Big time family drama.
One Christmas, we had to pretend my cousin wasn’t 7 months pregnant because her dad “didn’t know.” She was thin as a rail with a big beach ball belly. Denial was strong in that part of the family.
My mom had a brother who was a couple of years older than her. From what I’ve put together, he was autistic and was sent away for electric shock therapy some time in the 50s/60s, which eventually k*lled him.We have no idea when he died, or where he is buried. My mother apparently found out when her parents casually mentioned it over dinner when she asked how he was doing. My grandfather (with whom I grew up with) refused to speak about him. Would change the subject or leave the room if he was asked anything about him.The only evidence we have of his existence is a picture of him and my mother when they were children, and some forms from the hospital he was in describing an episode where he was hitting and scratching the nurses. Just really sad all around.
The fact that I have two half sisters…….my dad cheated on my mom. My mom knows about one of the girls, not the other. Ancestry DNA for the win……no one says a word because we don’t want mom to have to relive that trauma.
My dad beat the living s**t out of me and my brother very frequently. Almost every time he got drunk, he would either slap us till we fell down, haymaker swings at us until we ko’ed, jump kick/round house kicks us till we ko’ed. It was scary every night. Then we both grew bigger than him, I confronted him once when he was about to do it again. It stopped then and there, and we never talked about it since. I’m 40 now, and this happened throughout my childhood well into my late teens.
My Great Aunt.She and my grandma (her sister) hate each other so much that I didn’t even know she existed until I was 30 and I was accidentally shown a picture with her in it. I still don’t know why they stopped talking and grandma is obviously not willing to talk about it at all.The funny thing is, I know my great aunt’s children. They’re really close to my grandma and come to every holiday dinner. I always knew they were related to me, I just never knew how.
My blood type doesn’t make sense. My mother is a B+, father is an O-. I donated blood in college and found out I’m A+. I brought it up in a casual “This is interesting, I must be a medical anomaly!” way and was immediately and brusquely shut down. I DNA matched to my paternal cousin on Ancestry, but no one else in the family would do a DNA test. There’s more questions than answers. Considering I no longer talk to my bio parents or a majority of my family due to other things we don’t talk about (like addiction, mental health and abuse), I doubt I’ll ever get an answer.
Both my parents cheated on each other. All my aunts and uncles got divorced but my parents stayed together and drank and fought and supposedly that was better.
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My real dad overdosed, later my step dad adopted me and they had my little sister. My sister has no idea we don’t share a dad and I was never able to discuss the grief of finding my dead dad.
A good portion of my father’s family live(d) on the same street. My great-aunt never came into my grandparent’s house and I didn’t think anything of it until I was older and noticed she’d just stay outside or we’d go to her house to say hello. Turns out, my great-grandfather shot himself in the house and she was the one who found him. No one talks about it but my mother finally told me in my early 30s.
My uncle died because he overdosed on viagra. The funeral was awkward because no one wanted to say why he passed.
These are all so dark. In my family we don’t talk about when my great uncle tried to start an astronomy shop at the mall and it didn’t work out. Also the word in scrabble we wouldn’t let him play 10 years ago (he still won’t play with us).
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The fact that my great aunt and great uncle’s “adopted” daughter bore more than a passing resemblance to my great-uncle and an ex-girlfriend of his.
My moms drinking.
Hoarding. Especially my mother’s. Since it is not as bad as her sister’s or sister-in-law’s it’s not hoarding. I’m sorry but if you have rooms that are packed full of stuff and the rooms and items in them are unusable it’s hoarding.
Anything positive.It’s all a competition. They are the most judgemental bunch of a******s you’ve ever met.
When my grandmother was on life support it came out that she and my grandfather had divorced for a period of time and were set to marry other people, but dumped them at the altar and married each other again.And this happened when my dad and uncle were like late teens/early twenties so they knew about it and were still like “eh” when this big secret came out. I’m nosy, I need the gossip!
The fact that my dad beat the s**t out of me as a kid and terrorized me. I in turn did the same to my little brother. Mums the word every time I bring it up.
That my biological grandmother committed s***ide when my mom was only 16.I knew my step-grandmother was my step-grandmother my whole life and I knew my mom’s mother had died long before I was born. It wasn’t until I was 10 or 11 that my mom finally told me how her mother died. That’s the only time we’ve really talked about her death. I know that she was a pretty good mom all things considered and my mom thought she would have been a good grandmother to me if she hadn’t had severe depression when she was in her 40s. We never really bring her up at family gatherings. We don’t really talk about my mom and my aunt’s childhoods. It’s really sad because my step-grandmother was abusive as hell towards me and she is the reason why my mom didn’t get to see her dad much after I was born.
My parents enabling my d**g addict con artist brother to the point they were completely broke because they didn’t have the heart to see him go to prison again (where he rightfully deserved to be.).
That my mom is actually my stepmom. I’ve learned of it when I was very young from a cousin. Back then I used to think your birth mom is more ‘important.’ Now it’s completely the opposite. My parents didn’t tell me until like a decade after I already knew.
D**g addiction has been an issue for my mom’s side of the family for the past four generations. I’m the only adult that’s not an addict.
Did some research on my grandparents and learned my Grandfather, his siblings and parents were all illegal immigrants to the U.S Not only that but they likely were connected to illegal horse gambling rings out of Lexington Kentucky. They came kinda legally to Canada on work visas from England but then border jumped to the States.This alone wouldn’t bother me but my family are all racist right wing nut jobs that talk constant trash about immigrants.Oh and also my Grandma was half-native…and racist af.
My eldest paternal uncle is likely the result of forced incest between my grandma and her father.
I have a relative that served time for SAing a child. His step daughter. Nobody believes he did it but we don’t talk about it. We also don’t talk about how his ex wife beat me and my sister. Probably her kids too but I know for a fact us. We don’t talk about the history of mental health issues in the family. We don’t talk about the split that happened way back before even my mom was born that caused part of the family to change the way they spelled their last name. Basically we don’t talk about bad things involving family members.However, I will say my mom is starting to change that and has told me some things about what my father was like when they were together and even right after they separated. I’ve been asking practically my whole life but she’s finally answering.
Flemish landscape painters.No one in my family really cares about them.
Mum tried to self delete and I had to drive her to hospital then brother hung him self and I had to get him down.Then my childhood dog died.
What I think is an unhealthy practice in my family is having no topics off limits. None. We lack verbal boundaries or the ability to stfu.
My dad going to prison. It’s a taboo subject.
The m*rder. A body was stuffed into the crawlspace and everything.
My mom’s side of the family that she completely cut off and stopped talking to shortly after she met my dad, and long before I was born (I’m the firstborn), and has never mentioned, at all.
My dad being in the closet his entire life apparently.
My mum said once “you don’t talk about money, you have it.”Made me laughEdit: what she meant was if you have money, you don’t really need to talk or argue about it, so if you don’t have money, f*cking get some then so we have less to talk about.
Everything that would even HINT to us being anything other than a picture-perfect, Brady Bunch family with no problems whatsoever. 🤮.
My mother’s family always talk about a sibling that was stillborn. They sometimes talk as if the sibling existed, and act like they knew the sibling. I consider it a family secret. Something I’ll probably never know the true story. They will say poor poor “siblings name”. To me the sibling must have existed before death.
My mother never talked about my father, who died when I was five. My sister and I would try once in a while, but she would always change the subject. 50+ years later, it still makes me sad.
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