40 Things People Experienced As Kids And Only Later Realized Were Deeply Unsettling

Having my hair chopped off because I wasn’t taking care of it to my mother’s standards.

I was 6, and had very long, very curly hair. Of course I struggled to take care of it!

My mom yelling at me when I was hurt or sick instead of being nurturing. She has bad anxiety and doesn't handle stressful situations well. This has lead me to crave a ton of sympathy/attention when I'm sick as an adult.

Anytime I brought up something my mom did that I didn’t like or was uncomfortable with I was told that never happened. In fact she still does it. It’s really messed with my memory because now I have a hard time remembering what actually happened and what I was told happened and what I was told didn’t happen. They are all sorta mixed up in there.

Being told to suck it up, boys don’t complain when they get hurt or sick.

I wouldn't say I'm traumatized from it, but I realized I'm a people pleaser because my father never showed me that he was proud of me when I was younger. His attitude towards my achievements would lead me to believe they were expectations more than things to be proud of.

It was an internal conflict I struggled with throughout my teen years and into my early 20's, but I'm glad to say I've been working on it since recognizing the root cause of my people pleasing.

So apparently obsessively praying to not go to hell is a disorder.

Being told we (mom dad and I)can't leave my uncle's house when we were about to leave from a family dinner until I gave my uncle a kiss on the cheek.

Having emotionally volitile parents does a ton of damage. When kids can't predict the moods of their parents it leads to heightened threat scanning behaviour and people pleasing. These tendencies cause tons of self esteem and burnout issues later in adulthood.

Parents, from a therapist, I beg you to be more emotionally consistent with your kids. And stop being children yourselves about this stuff. Ive had grown a*s adults in my room jealous of and angry at their own children because the kids take attention away from them with their partner. It's a mess. And have some boundaries. Your kids are not your therapist.

Being told that a boy trying to kiss/touch me in school & making me very uncomfortable/scared was just because he had a crush on me.

My mom would go into these insane cleaning frenzies where you got yelled at if you didn't suddenly start cleaning along with her. As soon as you heard the vacuum, you knew she was gonna be in a terrible mood. Day ruined for sure. 


Whenever my partner vacuums, I get really upset no matter how many times she tells me she's not mad.

I don’t know if traumatized is the right word, but the way nobody expected anything good out of me. Growing up I was always told “you’re not ready” or “how are YOU going to be able to handle that” especially when it came to big dreams or life milestones (telling everyone I’d never be ready to drive or I’d never be able to keep a job yet they’re the only ones who kept me from those things) it really did a hit on my self esteem and it’s still nearly impossible to do things that feel too “big”.

“Stop crying. Your brothers are just being boys.”.

Falling asleep under my bed instead of in it because it was safer down there, and I wasn't allowed to wake my parents up if I was scared.

Really mild, but my pulse still shoots up whenever I hear my mother walk or breathe heavily, since that's what she did before what we kids called a "cleaning rampage", in which she angrily and bitterly cleaned my two little sisters' messes while blaming me and my big sister for it. I used to dig through the trash to retrieve the things of mine she threw away because she hated "junk" and "I wouldn't even notice". I thought I was a bad,  messy kid. Nope, turns out she had impossible standards for cleanliness with four little kids running around and she's so much happier now that she's accepted she cannot maintain that.

Waking up to find my guinea pig gone one morning after I wasn’t able to understand some of her behavior and started complaining. My father likely put her out in the woods and let her become food for a predator. I didn’t say anything because I knew it wouldn’t have mattered to my dad.

Later I always felt such guilt and thought that if I just kept my mouth shut she wouldn’t have had that done to her.

My mom taking me to a juvenile detention center at age 12 or so and having the warden threaten to lock me up because I wouldn't do my homework. It wasn't until I told a friend that story and saw her reaction that I realized lol.

Being worried about food and money.

Being raised where any first attempts at doing anything should not have any imperfections or problems (while not having a source to learn from).

Always expected to be on-call to fix anything and everything (again without a source to learn from) that's thrown at me. Oh, and at the same time being refused help every time I asked for it.


The whole "children should be seen but not heard" and "we are raising adults, not kids".


End result: only 2 of the 8 kids have ever interact with parents anymore. Lol.

When my father was angered by my brother and my behavior he would take his leather belt and whip us across the back of our legs. I also got my ears and hair pulled by him a lot as a child. he was a real d**k. Now he sits at home by himself because no one wants to socialize with him.

Being yelled at in my face drill sergeant style, with added poking on forehead as well.