People Share Their Family Secrets That Aren’t For The Faint-Hearted And Here Are 45 Of Them

I'm 99% certain that my brother (born 3 years before divorce of my mum and dad) is actually my half brother, and his dad is my step dad - my mum was cheating on my dad with the dude who was to be my new dad.

To cover this s**t up, my mum made up a bunch of terrible lies about my dad (he killed my (imaginary, it turns out) twin brother in utero, tried to kill me, he kidnapped us, my dad always hated my brother, etc etc) that made me cut contact and plan his death for 35 long, angry, and wasted years. Until I discovered all the lies. Unpacking this s**t with my step bro (we're tight) and we came to the same conclusion about my brothers real father.

The tragic part was, all these lies really f****d with me and my brother's heads. My bro committed suicide at 18 with no note. For years I tried to figure out why he would top himself, and now I'm all but certain it was due to the jedi level mindfuck from my mums attempt to hide her infidelity. My anger was channeled into rage, his went to sadness.

Miss you bro. You should be here. You'd have loved my kids, my little girl is just like you.

That my cousin’s Papillon didn’t run away… I was with my Uncle drinking on the porch and watched that poor pup get snatched off the ground by a massive hawk. A blink and it was gone. There was nothing we could do. We looked at each other after a solid few minutes of silence and he leans over: “That f*****g dog ran away.” I nodded and that was the last we discussed it.

Up until today, the secret was that I am gay. I came out to my extended family this weekend after telling my parents that I was done hiding (I'd kept it secret several years at my mom's request.) Ironically, the response from my aunts/uncles was way better than my parents', they all said they still loved me and my mom said I was ruining her life 🙃.

I absolutely adored my mother. She was a single mother who got a master's in education while taking care of the three of us all the way up to working being a head of a department in the DOE. I never seen her drink, shout, act immature, act out in any unbecoming way etc. My whole life the one thing people commented on was how "classy" my mother is.

Then two years ago when she passed away and I was cleaning out her house, I ended up accidently taking one of her boxes of papers from the attic thinking it was mine. It was full of court documents talking about an affair my mother had with a married colleague where she got allegedly got so upset he ended it that she started to stalk and harass him and he filed criminal charges on her as well as brought it to HR at her former job. The things he says my mother did in those documents, I can't imagine in a hundred years. Yet I also couldn't imagine her having an affair with this guy at all but she admits it in the paperwork. I know why she left her state job and we moved to DC- basically there was some kind of deal made where she would leave and it would go away. And the criminal case was also pretty much dropped with the expectation and deal she would never contact him or bother him again.

Like wtf. It's made me really realize that you don't know ANYONE really.


EDIT: I really didn't expect to get all these nice and respectful replies. I realized that a lot of you are right and I'm judging my mom a bit to harshly when she did everything else right and had been a great mother. Everyone makes a lapse in judgment sometimes especially when it comes to love and it seems she owned up to it and took responsibility. Thanks. I feel a lot better about it.

My aunt divorced my uncle in the 50s, with six children. She had no job nor any means to support her & her kids and had to split the family up, sending half the kids to her sister’s house while she & the other three stayed in another sister’s home. She and her six children were treated like dirt. No one could understand why she left her husband. She died in the 1980s taking the truth to her grave. I became close to one of her daughters who also died, recently. But on her deathbed, drugged up from all the medication, she told me the truth. She told me her father, the uncle whom my aunt divorced “touched her all over when she was 12.” 😳😢.

Hell, I am positively mortified hearing about all these stories in here. Mine is a bit light one. I am from a very conservative country, and arranged marriages were the norm here, until a generation ago. Mine uncle's marriage was the first love marriage in our family, and it happened after a lot of persuasions with the Elders. Long before that, my uncle once took me to see his gf in the McDonalds. I was hardly 5, and I remembered the woman as a tall amiable one, who gave me her burgers to eat. As we were going away, I told uncle that I am gonna tell mother how fine this lady was. (We lived in a joint family.) Uncle was terrified. He said there is no haste, and made me promise to never tell again. They married next year.

21 years from then, and they are still married with a boy and a girl.

Tl:Dr; I met my future aunt, before the rest of the family even knew she existed.

The part they know I know now, because I vocally expressed my knowledge, is that my dad cheated on my mom while she was pregnant with my younger brother. There are a couple parts they don’t know I know, and one they don’t even know themselves.

1. My dad actively took me to see his mistress (my now stepmom) while he was still with my mom. I was really young, but I remember being around her while my parents were still married. It didn’t click for me until I got older, and the rest of the family was really mad to find out when I told them.
2. The thing I know that my dad and the rest of my family doesn’t know themselves is that my paternal grandpa continued to give my mom $1000/month on top of what my dad paid in child support, because he was pissed at my dad for cheating. My mom actually told me a story about my dad trying to bail on a dinner where the divorce was going to be discussed, and my grandpa straight up said, “You’re taking your f*****g b***h a*s to that dinner.” My dad started favoring the kids he had with my stepmom, and my grandpa wasn’t having it. Until the day he died, he would secretly give my brother and I “extra” for Christmas, birthdays, etc., because he knew the other two kids were getting treated better. My mom told me many times that my grandpa was the only member of my dad’s side she truly still loved after the divorce because of everything he did.
3. My grandparents paid for the house my dad and mom lived in, but my dad wanted to leave it when he got remarried. He didn’t want the memories from it. Note that this house was three years old and really expensive. My dad threw a fit, because he wanted to build a new one family farm land. This pissed the rest of my family off, because it was active farmland. This fit split the family in half, and it’s still not fixed. My aunts and uncles still don’t like my stepmom because of her role.

1. The " richest " of them, Swiss banker, constantly borrows money from 2 of the retired middle income family members to stay afloat. He doesn't know the rest of the family know, and is insufferably arrogant about his non existent wealth.

2. The fitness instructor of the family is an anorexic who also drinks a bottle of wine every night, and is constantly preaching health / fitness to the rest of the family.

3. Sister of fitness woman is an aerospace engineer, who graduated with honors. Her personality is so overbearing and toxic that she can't keep a job, so she's a SAHM who looks down on working moms in the family.

4. The judgemental ultra religious aunt had to go to another state to have a baby in secret. Thanks ancestry test.

My older sister is actually my mom.

My sister used to pimp her friends to my older brother and father to avoid having sex with them.

My grandpa had an entire secret family.

Even named his mistress’s kids the same exact names as my mom and her brothers. No one knew until his funeral, they all think I was too young to remember (8ish 9ish) but I do

Edit: funny part is, I remember the secret kids and my mom + her siblings all getting drunk together later that night too.

Back when i was 14, my father got blackout drunk and told me that he and my mother nearly had me aborted. She was 15 when i was conceived, and both of them were growing up in poverty. At the appointment for the procedure, they decided against it and kept me, knowing that they were both throwing away better chances at a good life in adulthood.

He doesn't remember telling me, i am certain of it. I dealt with the emotional rollercoaster on my own instead of confronting them.

After a few years of dealing with my emotions over it all, i was happy they had the choice. I am pro-choice. They set themselves back probably 15 years compared to where they could be if they went through with it the way i see things. I am thankful for life and thankful they put so much love and care into my upbringing. They raised me to make smarter decisions, and they set me up for success in having a "better life" than the lives they had. Not everyone has as much love and selflessness as my parents had, day after day, raising me. There are billions of different lives and situations out there, and sometimes, abortion is the right decision. Me being here probably wasn't the right one, they struggled a lot. Alcoholism, divorce, depression, poverty, and who knows what else, had followed that decision.

All of this being said. Me knowing this is not getting back to them, ever. They can tell me about it consciously if they want, but i don't think they will.

That my uncle (deceased) was a registered sex offender. I was never introduced to him and my dad (His brother) would never speak about him. I was told he passed away, and the excuse of "You never met him!) was the reason I couldn't go to his funeral yet my parents have dragged me to peoples funeral that I never knee's funeral. They weren't even related to me. Got suspicious and searched my uncles name up on one of those sex offender lists and his name came up + his face. Turns out he was caught touching a 3 year old child at a park a few weeks before I was born. Scary. My parents were probably just protecting me.

That my grandfather cheated on my grandma with her best friend! Karma did him dirty, the “best friend” took his money when they divorced.
That my father cheated on my mother when she was pregnant with me! (My father is the son of the cheating grandpa btw)
Such a f****d up family.

My mom and dad used to go the bar together to pick up guys.

I discovered that my mom had a secret husband (she divorced him) that no one knew about. I do the family history research for my family, and I discovered it by accident. I asked her about it discreetly, and she begged me not to tell anyone--said not even my dad or brother knew. She died in 2003, and I still haven't, or won't, tell a soul.

My brother got arrested and went to court for multiple d**g charges. They went out of their way to hide it from me so that they could continue to act like I was the disappointment. They pretended they were going out to breakfast without me and rubbed it in my face to cover up his court dates.

That mom was never accepted in the family because she wasn't quite "white" enough.

I have a half-sister. No one in my family has ever spoken about her, and after putting the pieces together I understand why. Being young, unwed and pregnant in the South in the early sixties could be f*****g tragic.

My grandfather lied about where he was stationed in WW2. He confided some in me in his last years, but a few slip-ups on his part and some papers I found made me start questioning.

He says he was stationed in Las Vegas at a supply warehouse the entire war, but has papers from the OSS, knows how to hot-wire a single engine plane, and when I made some remark about a field manual saying to fire your gun into an enemy if your bayonet is stuck in them, he mumbled "Yeah, done that a few times."

My mom and aunts all like to dodge the question, they may not even know it all themselves, but my older cousin and I both agree he probably stacked bodies across Europe.