In a perfect world, your family would be the safe place you go with all of your secrets and heartache.

In reality, sometimes our family are the people we trust the least with the things that seem the most shameful to us in the moment.

These people are keeping some doozies, and in some cases, I think they probably will be forever!

Definitely never tell.

I used to live in a house where the woods was our backyard.

About 15 years ago, my stepdad and I were hitting golf balls in the back with his clubs.

I still had a few golf balls left and he told me to put his clubs away when I finished and he went back inside.

Well, when he was out of site, I decided to use his $900 driver which, at the time, was too big for me to use. I took a swing and the head of the driver immediately hit the ground and the neck snapped near the head and was hanging on by a few splinters.

My heart sank and I quickly put the clubs away in the trunk of the SUV like he asked me to and prayed that I wouldn’t be murdered in my sleep.

Well, a few days later my step dad goes back to grab his golf bag. Luckily for me, the hydraulics on the back hatch of our SUV was starting to go out for a few weeks now and it swung down and pulled a Marie Antoinette on that driver. My stepdad was pissed. I still haven’t told him that I was mainly responsive for the destruction of his driver club.

A horrible human being.

I was assaulted by my high school teacher who we all thought was straight.

I’d never tell my family about my SA but he’s now in prison for 10 years on account of child porn and animal crush videos.

Fortune smiled upon him.

When I was a like 12, I played too much FallOut and got super into lockpicking.

We were going to move from our house and mom was planning on selling. I got home from school early and didn’t have a key, so I decided to take a bobby pin and pick the lock on the inner garage door.

Well the pin broke inside the lock and I couldn’t get it out.

I just sat in the garage nervously sweating and waiting till my Mom came home.

Well, she got home… She greeted me warmly and I was so nervous to tell her and have her smile disappear. I was preparing to tell her and get yelled at when suddenly a guy in a truck appears in our driveway right behind her.

Apparently the doorknob and deadbolt were old and chipped, so she had hired a guy to replace them with new ones. He didn’t look inside, he just unscrewed them from the door and put in new ones. Then, as quickly as he arrived, he left.

I’m an adult haven’t told my mom I accidentally jammed the garage door lock 😭

They might be proud!

I posed nude in a tasteful art project when i was 20.

It was supposed to be a small private exhibition but then it blew up and at one point my naked image was on our major cities website to advertise a popular art festival and a printed large version was displayed at a popular market during the festival. It was also printed in a book series.

I was so worried my parents would see but so far it’s been 12 years and they still don’t know. I am actually really proud of the work we did and sometimes consider showing them the book but they may murder me.

Awful to hear.

My drug addiction to opioids between my 15 and 18. I went to hospital for a chronic disease and they gave me that, i fell into and could ask for medical prescription anytime so i took these for 3 years and stopped with a big craving effect for weeks

A completely different life.

I was in a Long distance relationship with someone from another country for 2 years. I would travel nearly every month to visit them or they would come to me. They had no idea when they messaged me, I was sometimes out of the country, either in their country or on a trip somewhere else. I was living a completely different life that barely anyone knew about.

Edit:

It’s been interesting to read some other peoples similar experiences. A lot of people are also experiencing this due to culture, religion or families not supporting.

My reason was a little different. I had come out of a relationship with a very abusive and dangerous person. He had completely embedded themselves in my family’s life and when I finally left them, I lost my family with it.

I moved to the next town over and kept contact with my parents but all information about daily life was hidden. I built a life slowly, and part of that was a solo trip abroad, where I met someone.

I was far too terrified to tell them the truth about what had happened with my ex. I didn’t think they’d believe me and I didn’t want them to know. My parents eventually cut ties with him but my brother stayed friends with him after. I went NC with my brother for 4 years in total.

I was so scared my ex would find out and come looking for me due to jealousy that the relationship was kept a secret from most people I knew, including my parents in case they let something slip to my brother.

I have left the country now for good, and I’m sure there’s people who I have some degree of connection to, that have no idea I ever left. I’ve always been someone that has kept their cards close to their chest, and life circumstances have contributed to that greatly.

Why was it like that?

This is hard, but just how frustrated I am with them. They wouldn’t have any clue just how angry I am at them for the things they did to me as a child and how much I blame them for my insecurities and lack of confidence as an adult.

And that we might seem ok every time I visit with them, but how I just want to yell at them and ask them why, why they had to be so hard on me and couldn’t just accept me for what I was when I was a teenager.

Oh the guilt!

I lost one of my mom’s pearl earrings that she wore on her wedding day.

Down the drain when I was like 8 years old. Haven’t told her to this day….pretty sure sure thinks she misplaced it 🙁

A fresh start.

I moved with my wife (then girlfriend) from the Northeast to the south so she could go the med school. We were leaving family and friends behind, although many of our friends were scattering to opposite coasts and elsewhere.

Her parents were overbearing, and still treated her like a 15 year old. My parents were pushy and judgmental, with some issues with alcohol to boot. My two younger brothers were in their early 20s and still living at home, having dropped out of college or working out of my parents’ basement. My parents’ house was like a frat house. Drinking almost every night, weed, and no one in the house worked more than 3 days a week at one point.

We saw the move as a “refresh button”. Putting some distance between us and our families such that my wife could feel like an adult and so that I was removed from the lifestyle and influence of my family.

Two weeks into our move into our new apartment, we were living on clouds, just so happy to have our own space and be with each other.

Then she got a call. It was the admissions director from the med school 15 minutes away from our home town offering her a spot that had become vacant. They gave her 24 hours to decide.

We sat that night and debated all of the pros and cons of moving back home. We talked about getting a place together in our home town, but quickly realized that it would have been much better financially to just move back in with our parents like it was pre-college.

She turned down the offer. We don’t regret it for a second. We never told a soul that we could have almost moved back home, there would have been far too much animosity.

Well that’s terrible.

I was SAed from 11-16 by my “cousin” and I reported at 17. No one believed me. Half even blame me.

Even my father has a familiar relationship with the guy.

Good.

My cousin molested me when I was 6. He went on to groom a girl from ages 12-15. Apparently there were others.

He went to prison.

Totally unfair.

When I was 14 my mom confessed to me that my older sister is not my father’s biological kid. She said she was in an abusive relationship with my older sister’s bio dad. She finally resolved to leave him when she found out she was pregnant. She then met my dad a few months after giving birth and says that they fell in love.

We used to get a lot of comments in school about us not looking alike, comments that only increased after my younger sister was born and happened to have a strong resemblance to me. My father never treated us any differently.

I loved my father a little more after finding out because I never once doubted how much he loved us all equally. I do resent my mother for having told me though.

I wish she wouldn’t have made me a secret keeper from my entire immediate family (my dad doesn’t know I know). I was 14 young and confused. Now so much time has passed that I feel like it’s too late. I feel like part of me is betraying my sister for not telling her but I also feel like it’d be a betrayal if I did.

A childhood lost.

I once had a s*x ed lesson that flipped my whole world upside down. It was a boys only class and the male teacher was talking to us about s*xual health. He explained the importance of checking for lumps as this can be a sign of cancer. I can’t recall exactly what the teacher said but I basically left that class with the view of, if you have a lump then you have cancer.
You can probably guess where this is going by now. I got home and proceeded to check my balls for lumps, and sure enough I felt a hard tender mass on my left testicle. I must’ve been about 13 at the time and didn’t know what to do. Of course the teacher explained during the lesson that you should tell a parent or doctor if you do find anything of concern but I felt far too embarrassed to tell anyone. I didn’t feel comfortable enough to tell my Mum and my Dad wasn’t in the picture.
So from 13 I was convinced that I only had so many years to live. I think I told myself that I would be lucky to make it to 20, not that I was equipped with any kind of knowledge about cancer at the time, other than people regularly die because of it. This belief set me on a path of self destruction through my teenage years which led to me breaking up with my childhood sweetheart, losing many friends and moving out of my family home at 14.
Fast forward to 17 years old when I finally gained the courage to tell a doctor and have them check. Turns out the lump is just a benign cyst and will have close to zero impact on my physical health. I wish I felt like I could have been open with my Mum to tell her at the time. My early life would have turned out very different if I had.

TLDR: At 13 years old, s*x ed made me think a testicle lump is cancer. Believed I was going to die young and proceeded to emotionally self destruct over the following years. Got it checked 4 years later to discover it was only a benign cyst and I have nothing to worry about.

Not a dream.

I’ve never told anyone this irl except my husband but when I was 5 yrs old, my dad was an alcoholic & most of his friends were drunks as well so we were all hanging out at my dad’s friends house , when one of his friends sat me in his lap & put a blanket over us, then in front of everyone, acting perfectly normally he proceeded to molest me putting his hands into my underwear & messing with me s*xually.

I just sat there in shock, I really had no idea what was happening. I told myself for years it was a dream, but it wasn’t. I never told my dad, he would be devastated & for that reason I never told anyone else either.

It never happened again. The “friend” of my dad’s has since died & it came out after his d**th that he was accused of molesting his grandkids. My own daughter is 5, she’s NEVER allowed to sit on anyone’s lap.

A weird transition.

I had no home or place to stay when I was 19-21 years old. I slept in phone booths, sometimes at a friends house.

Everything turned out alright once I got a girlfriend, moved into her/her moms house, started a career in programming.

Not many people actually know this.

It doesn’t happen every day.

That I was addicted to fentanyl for almost a year and then beat that addiction all on my own!

I just passed 1 year off of it and I haven’t considered going back once!

It takes time.

I had a miscarriage on my 17th birthday. I had found out I was pregnant 3 days after my HS boyfriend and I had broken up when my sister caught him f**king my best friend. I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, except him. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do yet, or how to tell them.

Turned out to not matter, because 2 weeks later, again, on my birthday, I woke up in incredible pain and my bed was just covered in blood. I was home alone, so I just called my ex to take me to the hospital and never said a word to anyone in my family. He and the girl he cheated on me with showed up, and she cleaned up the bed while he drove me to the hospital. I had already passed the fetus – she found it.

It messed me up for a long time, and I tried to kill myself not long after that. My family does know about that, but they assumed it was a combination of my anxiety meds and my breakup. Those were factors, but the miscarriage was a big factor, too.

ETA: Thank you everyone for the kind words. This was nearly 15 years ago now, and I’d say I’be healed now. I still think about it from time to time, think about how I’d have a teenager by now, and how different my life would be (I came out as gay about 5 years later, started dating a woman and moved across the country with her, later marrying her. We have no children). I’m grateful that I could heal and see a better life for myself after that.

Just remember, secrets don’t make friends…

Or close families.