“Brought Up In A Cult”: 35 Things People Went Through As Kids And Didn’t Realize Were Unusual

I was having really bad depression and s****dal ideation at the age of eleven. my parents took me to see a child psychologist and they sat in the first session. I guess they didn’t like what I had to say cause my dad yelled at me on the way home and threatened to flip over the car since I wanted to die so bad. he kept saying things like “you ungrateful child” and “you made us seem like bad parents” and “why don’t I flip over the car since you’re bored and making things up” and the whole time my mom was looking back at me and laughing, as she thought of it as a joke. 24 now, and due to the economy being so bad, still staying at home. but once I move out, I’ll never speak to them again, as the problems just got worse after that. why would they say that to their eleven yeaeleven-year-oldr old?

It took me almost 25 years to realise that alcoholic parents aren't normal and other people have it different.

Bullied in elementary school for being Jewish. Pennies thrown at me and epithets as well. Now, I don't take the slightest "attack" of any sort. I am intolerant of any sort of disparagement of anyone and will react forcefully when I encounter it.

Not to me, but there was a family of kids that were being severely a**sed by their mother and nobody did anything. As children we obviously saw adults do nothing and thought it wasn't serious. One of them ended up drinking caustic soda when he was 12 in an attempt to kill himself. Looking back I see that nobody protected those kids. Every adult failed them.

I was in summer camp and had made friends with the weird girl there. We were probably both around 7 or 8, both awkward kids who weren't good at making friends but we got along with each other. She had a very perverted sense of humor and was constantly talking about everyone's genitals. Didn't think much of it at the time.

Once she was sitting in a chair at a table and I snuck up behind her as a joke and grabbed the back of her chair and shook it to startle her. She was laughing and yelled at me to stop it. So I stopped it. She asked why I stopped. I told her she'd just asked me to stop so I did. She said that her dad told her that if a girl says stop it means do it harder. She wanted me to shake it harder. So I did.

Now that's a memory that got lost in my brain for years collecting dust, but thinking back on summer camp one day and remembering that made me think wait... what the F**K? I mean I hope my assumptions are wrong, but it really seems obvious what was happening to her at home. How did an adult there never notice all the signs?

In Elementary school, I won 1st place in a Halloween costume contest. Finally, all those kids who teased me for looking like a girl would see that I was awesome! My parents helped me make my Cat in the Hat costume for like a week. Just recently saw pictures - wicked cute.

School principal called me up on stage and announced, as the first place winner, I got to choose any of the prizes from the girls' table. I had won best costume for the girls as a 7 year-old boy who was already teased for being girly. From this day forward, teasing turned to beatings.

The moment of looking out at all of the whole school, as well as the parents (mine, too), and more and thinking "see, I'm a winner!" as they all laughed at my confusion has caused damage I'm still undoing 40 years later.

EDIT: thank you everyone... I expected you to make fun of me (even now). Thank you for your kindness.

Bullying, it made me socially awkward that's a disadvantage now

My mom barely fed us when my dad was out of town. She only let me shower once every two weeks. She would tear my clothes off and lock me outside. She would randomly pull over, drag me out of the car by my hair and leave me to walk home, even if it was miles away and no safe way to get there. She would pull my hair until I fell on the ground and then kick me in my back until I wet my pants, when I was a teenager. I never had enough clothes and getting underwear and a bra was always difficult. I thought I was a bad kid and deserved everything she did, until I grew up and my dad got early onset Alzheimer's. I saw her do all the same awful things to him and I couldn't stop it. I reported her to adult protective services several times and asked her neighbors to report anything they saw as well. She cried and told APS her kids refused to help and she was overwhelmed, so they got free respite care several days a week. She would make the caregiver scrub the floor on her hands and knees instead of helping my dad. Finally dad fell down and hit his head, in the exact spot in the house where she always used to knock me down, and had to go to a certain hospital because it was the only level one trauma center in the area. I went in the middle of the night and told the ICU nurses about the a**se and neglect. I told the social worker at the hospital how my mom liked to withhold necessities because she liked seeing people "offer up their suffering to the lord." The hospital refused to discharge him back to his house, and he spent the rest of his life in various facilities. My mom had a pattern of getting kicked out of the facility and then moving him to a different one, where she would bully the staff and interfere with my dad's meds and feeding tube until they figured her out and kicked her out. After my dad died, she tried to find another old person to care for, even offering to be a free caregiver. She wants to move my sibling into her house, because my sibling is severely disabled after several strokes. She insists she can get sibling walking again, if sibling can't get any food unless they walk to the kitchen.

I lived in the countryside in a farming town. Alongside the road my family lived on was a small concrete ditch. It was visible for about half the road and then went underground the rest of the road until it flowed out into a large canal at the end.

I was a really thin and small kid. When I was about 9 or so my sister and I and some of her friends were playing in the small ditch to cool off. My sister thought it would be interesting to see if I could fit into the pipe that led underground. So my 12 year old sister and her friends held me by my arms and lowered me into the pipe until my hips were in. I could feel the rushing water pulling me in. I yelled at them to bring me back out. They did and then we left.

I didn’t tell anyone about it for years and when I finally did they looked horrified. So yeah if my sister had lost her grip, I would have gone underground and likely gotten stuck and drowned.

Raised by single mom. She emotionally dumped all her problems on me starting as far back as I can remember (5? 6? Years old). Def screwed me up as an adult.

Starting to eat LSD at 13 at the encouragement from my father because “it was cool and made everything look like cartoons.” In retrospect, its mind boggling and so absurd to convince a child to do that insane of a drug. I’m grateful for my experiences and I think I have some unique perspectives thanks to the copious amounts of hallucinogens I ate 13-16, but I would absolutely never in a million years encourage my 2 children to do that. It hurts my heart.

I lost my sister to brain cancer at 7 years old. Parents shut down after and never were able to go back to healthy people.

Lot more to the story than that, but this situation being the majority of my childhood. I didn’t realize how f*****g awful it all was until I was an adult and out of the house.

Kinda like a frog in boiling water, I had no idea how rough my situation was.

Mom took me along when she was buying drugs. Took me 30 years to realize waiting at a gas station at 6 am on a Saturday wasn’t a thing, and neither was driving WAY into the ghetto and having her friend drive around the block with us. Turns out not everyone sleeps on their laundry and goes right to bed when they get home EVERY DAY either.

Living in an environment with addicts. Having your head on a swivel and things going from zero to 100 in .5 seconds is not normal. As a teenager I turned to alcohol to cope and that was the only tool in my toolbox for most of my adulthood - did not realize the severity of how bad I had got until I was in my 30's.

How much my mother used to F me up, physically and verbally. She can't physically anymore today, but boy oh boy does she still have that sword of a tongue... And will never, ever, ever admit to it. Ever. Crazy.