The Best Of Confession Bear (Family Secrets) (With Backstories)

My mother was the subject of a child porn ring held by her biological uncle on her estranged father’s side. Her stepfather was a huge Nazi sympathizer, stumbled upon photos of my uncle in Hitler youth garb. The abusers are no longer alive but there’s a reason the moment she and my father had my older brother she packed up and moved 3,000 miles away without a word.

I read a blog post about a cult in America, known for exploiting young and vulnerable women, where my uncle’s wife is described as the leader’s ‘favorite girl.’ Nobody in my family knows she was a part of this cult but I did some research into it. Turns out she named her firstborn son after the leader, weird

For the longest time, I thought I was named after my father. Found out a few years ago that I’m actually named after a stillborn baby that my father had in a previous marriage that was named after him. My mother named me after that baby, against my father’s wishes

My father is sexually and romantically attracted to me, and would leave my mom to be with me….He was an alcoholic and I was in my sophomore year of college and…basically he had always been a nudist, and as I grew older I realized I was probably sexually abused, just not at an extremely invasive level. So he was just drunk and naked and began masturbating and asked me to bring him tissues, and I threw the box in his face and went to my room. Then he just kind of told me that in an alternate world he would be with me, and he’s attracted to me, but he understands it’s wrong and we’ve never really spoken about it since.

As of this past November, my cousin was prostituting herself to men she was meeting on various websites to fund her benzo addiction. I don’t know if it’s still going on or not but it’s pretty fucked up

My dad wanted to abort me, but his college professor convinced him to let my mom had me. I think he still regrets it.

When I was 13 my father came out as gay and how is happily married to a male and works in Las Vegas as a drag queen

My mother murdered my brother a while back, and while no one else knows this, I was able to talk to the mortician and discovered that my brother had his neck slit by my mother and that he had bruises up and down his arms and face. Turned out to be defensive bruises from trying to block her stabbing him. I’m the only one in my family to know and I don’t think anyone in the family could handle figuring that out, especially since it’s been over two years now.

My ex’s father was passed around like candy between his parents and their friends. Dude’s like 60 to this day can’t have a normal bowel movement

My father use to physically and mentally abuse me and my sisters until we all left for college. My mother knew about this and would say she’d all cut us out of any inheritance if I told a living soul about it. I’m glad they’re dead.

My aunt is a lesbian. Its a shame because she represses herself so much because of religion.

Found out not too long ago that my uncle shot a guy (drug dealer) and did a lot of marijuana. He has some pictures of smoking weed with famous politicians and celebrities that I have yet to find.

Great-grandfather was born the bastard son of a Jewish professor during a time in Germany you really didn’t want to be Jewish. His mother raised him without ever telling him who his father was until her deathbed.

My great-grandfather killed two people and the only person who knew was his wife and myself. I found out after he died when I found his journal in the house. I was the only one really close to him because the family knew he killed his wife. That’s the first thing. No one could prove it, and it was a mercy killing as she had cancer and assisted suicide wasn’t a thing. He was my grandfather though and I loved him. I was told not to spend time with him but did. When he died I was in his wood shed. He spent a lot of time out there whittling and no one thought to check for valuables out there. The family gutted the house and his son put it up for sale. Out in the wood shed was his journal in a tool box. I read it from cover to cover. He was bullied for years by someone from another family and he eventually drowned him in a creek and left him there. They found his body weeks later after it was washed up elsewhere. They said it was a swimming accident. The journal said he told his wife, who then used this information to get him to kill her because she didn’t want to live any longer but couldn’t get into heaven if she killed herself. The whole thing was so fucked up. I still love my grandfather but goddamn.

I was helping my grandmother clean her attic and come across a box with old legal papers, I’m a nosy little shit so I take a break and read through them. Found a document adopting her 4 kids out to a family, her reasoning was she had a fatal brain tumor. Thought this was weird so I kept digging. Found another document where she took the family to court to get her kids back, had to confess the brain tumor was a lie and she did it because the man she was with didn’t want kids. The reason she took the family to court to get her kids back: the adoptive father was habitually molesting them, including my uncle. She apparently found out because my grandmother and her new man were living close enough that my mom ran away from her adoptive parents to my grandmothers house and told her everything. It’s hard pretending you don’t know…

My father has a daughter from his lover, heard him speaking about her with his friend while mom wasn’t at home (however I think that she may know). I actually want to meet her, I always wanted to have a bro/sis.

Not really dark but kinda sad. I overheard my parents talking and apparently none of my dad’s side of the family males have lived over 60 years old. He is currently 52.

My cousin D has some issues. She is addicted to Oxy, and currently has two children who could be taken away any day now. She steals constantly. My aunts live near her, and they had to take her key away because she kept pawning stuff from their house (presumably to buy drugs). She even sold one of their cars once. D was always taken care of by my great grandparents, and, after they both passed, she was left everything (This was before the drugs). She pretty much sold all of their belongings and kept the house. My grandfather, as far as I know, was unable to retrieve any of his mother’s belongings. D also molested someone in our family by asking them to ‘Do what her boyfriend does.’ D will be in jail soon.

When going through my great (great?) grandfather’s things after his death, they found his huge, daunting, red KKK hood in the back of his closet, turns out he was the Grand Dragon of my home town.

My granddad was an auditor for the Church of Scientology, and decided to quit after one of his friends was brutally assaulted. He was hunted down and threatened repeatedly, and they threatened to kill off his family, and a bunch of other fucked up shit. My uncle killed two of the men chasing him and hunting him down. Buried them in cemeteries in another person’s grave. He told me one day when I found some threat letters from the Cult

I grew up in a house that valued technology quite a bit. My dad always liked getting the newest/fastest computer and gadgets etc. As a result, I started using the Internet at a pretty early age, roughly 5-6 in 1994 or so. Despite my father’s taste for technology, we lived more-or-less in squalor due to my parents getting divorced. Fast forward a few years, and my Dad and Stepmom have moved out of the crappy two-bedroom apartment with 3 kids, and somehow afforded a much larger house. I loved the Internet, and was a sexually curious individual from a pretty early age so I remember searching for stuff (on AltaVista/Lycos of course) like ‘boobs’ and ‘vagina.’ I can’t recall exactly what I’d searched for, but I ultimately came across a photo of a white woman with very familiar hair having sex with a black man. I kept scrolling down and ultimately to my horror realized that the woman was actually my stepmom. She had become a local porn star and high-end prostitute where I lived at the time. They were destitute despite my father being a lawyer and had to do something, so she turned to sex work and he helped to facilitate it. She would regularly go on ‘business trips’ and I knew before any of my other siblings did about what this really meant. Ultimately, this came to a head by way of a custody trial between my mother and father. My mother is very religious and knew about the whole thing, and my father naturally lost—despite the fact that I wanted to live with him because my mother was a tad unstable at the time. My stepbrother doesn’t know, but pretty much the rest of my family knows but NEVER talks about it.

My mother is a notorious whore. I could go into details about that but to be on point about this particular case. It was simple, she had sex with him but he was married and had his own kid. In order to be taken care of my mother told the man I thought was my biological father that she was pregnant. He married her. So my biological father is a falsely convicted felon and I have a sister. We talk frequently and have been trying to find a way to overturn his ruling ever since….We did do a blood test and have confirmed without a shadow of doubt that he is my father and she is my half sibling. I have confronted my mother about it but she denies it even with presenting her with the test results. The man who raised me, who is apparently my uncle and not my father, doesn’t know as that would absolutely devastate him. We decided to keep this a family secret between me, my sister, my real father and my lying whore of a mother.

My gran had to move to England from Pakistan ’cause she kept receiving death threats from the Taliban. ‘Cause apparently being an actress is a sin, and you need to be murdered for it. I’m pretty sure nobody’s supposed to know this besides my parents and her.

One of my cousins willingly castrated himself in an effort to hide his transgender urges from his radical Baptist parents. When we were growing up he was the star of the football team, a state wrestling champ, and super popular. He was so good at sports that my aunt and uncle pulled him from private Baptist school and put him in public school. He then went into the army. When he came back home he revealed to me that he had always stolen my thongs and bras when we were young, which I had always blamed on my little brother’s perv best friend. He said he had a gay lover in the army and he was confused about his sexuality. He became extremely depressed and an alcoholic, I couldn’t help him because he wouldn’t let me. Suddenly he was engaged to a girl he went to high school with. I talked to both of them to find out how their relationship was going to work, and make sure she knew the seriousness of what she was getting into. She knew, and supported him. She helped him go shopping for women’s clothing and allowed him to have lovers while maintaining a friendship and a front for his family. They got married, had a little girl and everything seemed fine. He decided to get castrated because he wanted to stop his urges because even with his wife’s and friend’s support, he felt terrible about hiding it from his family. He wanted to be normal. It was a drastic decision, but I supported him in his plight to be happy. Now there’s an even bigger secret. His wife has had a boyfriend, who has gotten her pregnant. My cousin enjoys the humiliation and being emasculated but I don’t think he counted on this happening. A few people in my family know now, and have all kept it from his parents. We have no idea how they’re going to raise this new baby and how open they are with their three year old. I am very afraid that one day their daughter is going to tell his parents about her mom’s boyfriend and think it’s a completely normal thing. Also, if anyone is feeling grated that I used ‘he’ instead of ‘she’, it is because he doesn’t always identify as female. His sexuality is still pretty undefined, or fluid.

My late uncle tortured and mutilated the adult cousin who repeatedly raped his nine-year-old sister. He purposely kept from killing him, cauterizing his wounds so he wouldn’t bleed out and so the scarring wouldn’t be repairable. He made very sure he’d never be able to rape another child….My uncle passed away a few years later. The cousin underwent a ton of surgeries, but none of them could really fix the scarring or mutilation. Last I heard he was still in hiding overseas. I see his mom from time to time. 40 years later she still blames the victim for her son’s injuries. The victim, btw, grew up to be an advocate for DV and abuse victims.

My uncle snitched to on a Youngstown kingpin. My whole family is or has been involved in some sort or criminal enterprise for around 3 generations. Growing up we learned fast to never speak of family matters to strangers and defiantly never to police. Pack in the mid 90s my uncle was driving drugs all over the East Coast and got hit in Virginia with 15 keys of coke. The DEA had tracked him from pick up in Florida to Ohio once and had video of both the pick up and delivery. They offered him 8 years if he gave them the man that wanted and he did it rather than the life sentence he would have had in federal max.

My grandmother was going to abort my uncle. When she left that day to get the abortion, my other uncle was hit by a bus. She took that as a sign from God not to have the abortion. To this day my uncle doesn’t know that he was supposed to have been aborted.

My older cousin is very wealthy, lives in the nice part of town, has a beautiful wife, healthy kids, and a luxurious life style. Apparently, the first kid his wife and he had had Down syndrome and they gave her up for adoption because of it, instead of the lifestyle. No one talks about it and I don’t know if the kids he has now know about it.

My half-brother raped me and would play ‘wrestle’ with me and take my clothes off. Would walk around naked and sneak in to the bathroom when I was there to ‘talk’ while naked. (I was 8-10 and he was 13-15). My other half-sibling either knew or didn’t care and would leave to go sleep with her boyfriend and leave us to ‘play.

Two months ago today my father, 52, killed himself. The day before he ended his life I had seen him and even though he wasn’t in the best spot in life we were working on making things better for the future for him, my 4 younger siblings, and myself (19). When I got the news of his death I immediately went and visited his home where my stepmother, and two younger half siblings lived with him. While there I found out that my stepmother had “accidentally” wiped his cell phone after his death while trying to get in to it. While leaving I took his computer to look through to see if I could find anything that would give a lead as to why he ended his life. He had his phone syncing with Google Voice, so I could see all his text messages and whereabouts as they were all backed up with Google. During my investigation I found exactly what caused him to kill himself. It was a text from my stepmother that wasn’t meant to be sent to him. She doesn’t know that I know why she wiped his phone or that she was the one that caused him to kill himself. I have yet to go after her legally, but I am in preparation of doing so….The message read “He has not been served yet…I don’t know what to do. He’s in the office with J*** (my youngest brother of 13) fixing his office chair.” That was the last message he received. The being “served” part was in reference to a divorce and restraining order she filed on him. He knew she filed but had been told that it was going to be pushed back and potentially thrown out. He did nothing wrong to have her initiate a divorce or a restraining order from his two kids. I believe it ultimately devastated him after going through a very nasty divorce with my mother because of what my stepmother did many years ago and caused him to act in the way he did. He lost all hope and I believe it was because she ruined his first marriage, tried to take his kids away, and broke his heart.

It’s hard to choose just one thing because my family is the definition of a clusterfuck. I think the worst thing worth mentioning is that I was molested and eventually repeatedly raped for a period of 7 years as a child by my father. It was quite violent at times, and occasionally, a loaded gun was involved. I’m now 24. In short, this has ruined my life. I’ve suffered an incredible amount of mental health problems as a result that are not yet totally resolved and have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars and hours to treat. I’ve been on probably 20 different psychotropic drugs, none of which have made much of a difference. I’ve tried to kill myself more times than I can count on both hands. I’ve been institutionalized nine times—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I am objectively quite bright. Everyone expected me to go places with my life, but I have absolutely nothing to show for my intelligence. I couldn’t finish my college degree both because I have been in and out of hospitals and treatment centers since I was a teenager, and because my college fund consists of money my father controls; dealing with him in any form renders me unable to function for days or sometimes weeks. I’ve had many jobs, but I can’t hold one down because my mental health has made me too unreliable for anyone to want to keep around. It was only fairly recently that I became remotely capable of having healthy or functional close relationships. I met my SO two years ago, and as of December, we are happily engaged. This is the first person who has ever made me feel safe, and the first person who I felt has ever accepted me as I am. He might be the first really good thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. My fiancé and my therapist know what went down, but no one else does. I think the rest of my family thinks I’m just plain crazy. My father has never been punished for what he did in any way. He is moderately famous in a field I will not divulge for fear that he sees this. He lives in a mansion with a trophy wife, and I live in a studio in the ghetto. My parents are divorced, and my mother and I are close; however, my father is an extremely vindictive, vengeful person, and I don’t even want to know what would happen if he knew I had outed him. He is getting old, though; he’ll be 65 next month, and as far as I know, he’s in fairly poor health. I have resolved to tell my mother what happened once he finally kicks the bucket.

My grandfather and father knife fought each other frequently. Dad has huge scars on his abdomen. Grandfather had serious issues, very abusive. He held a straight razor up to my grandmother’s throat and my uncle grabbed a nearby rifle and held it up to him. The last words out of his mouth were telling my uncle he didn’t have the guts to shoot him

My uncle got addicted to prescription meds, bled out his business of cash before he emptied out my cousins’ inheritance/college funds. He then asked my parents for a loan to help with his business (no one was aware of what he was doing, apparently not even my aunt) and then spent that on drugs. His younger kids don’t know but his oldest does as he was the only one my aunt could rely on/confide in. My family wasn’t the only one he stole from either and he’s basically been exiled from his immediate family until he fixes what he’s done, which isn’t likely.

My dad is on the sex offender registry for rape. From the research I have done he was never convicted and most likely falsely accused; yet he is still listed as an offender. Also, he is several years older than he says he is?!?

I’m named after my mother’s ex-lover. 20 years and one divorce later my dad still doesn’t know.

My aunt sent lewd (I am not sure if fully nude or not) pictures of her underage daughter, my cousin, to an underage boy she met on the Internet. No charges were ever filed, because my uncle was going through chemo and wasn’t doing too well, and my family that found out didn’t want to put him through the stress of that investigation during the last years of his life. Sick fucking bitch got away with it.

My great-grandfather was a Yugoslavian immigrant in the 1930s. He became a detective in Gary, Indiana. Stories I hear from family members is that he was an incredibly cruel and corrupt cop/detective with a very racist streak in him. He was known for taking African Americans that caused petty crimes, stripping them naked with their arms tied behind their backs and a broom handle through his arms and dumped them at the Indiana/Illinois border in the middle of the night. I’ve heard some other rather disturbing stories where he ‘killed people’ in the line of duty although under very shady circumstances. If there is some interest i can try to get more stories.

This was before 9/11. My ex-husband was an NYPD detective but he abused his authority, so the PD took his detective shield away and put him back on patrol in uniform in Brooklyn. After he got demoted, he hated going to work but he had no choice. He was also playing hockey in a men’s league. One day he fell on the ice playing hockey and he suffered a herniated disk in his back. He dragged himself to work the next day and hid his injury. He was in his patrol car and was called to a house for a domestic disturbance. This was in the winter and there was a lot of ice in the driveway. He got out of the car and pretended to slip on the ice. He told his partner that he cannot move and they ended up taking him to the hospital in an ambulance. He claimed that he was injured on the job and was retired with full disability in his 30s. After about a year his back got better and he was showing very little signs of his injury. We moved to another state because he was paranoid that if the NYPD finds out that he is not as disabled as he claimed to be, he will lose his pension. He gets 75% of his pay and full medical and dental benefits for life tax free courtesy of the taxpayers of NY City. After we moved across the country he told all our new neighbors that he was retired from the NYPD because he got hurt saving people from the World Trade Center during 911. He was never at Ground Zero, he was already retired when 9/11 happened

My dad fought in the Soviet Afghan war and has a large number of journals he wrote in while there. Reading some of them in secret growing up made me find out some things about my dad. One he wasn’t a truck mechanic like he always told us, he was a sharpshooter and apparently was a damn good one. Two he killed three Afghans while they where asleep. So here it goes his squad was on patrol apparently and he stepped off into the bushes to take a leak and happened upon three Afghan mujahideen that were asleep. Not wanting to wake them he apparently stabbed two with his bayonet and realizing this took too much effort smashed the third ones head in with his entrenching tool. He then rejoined his patrol and didn’t mention what he had come across or done to anyone else.

My uncle died owning several pieces of land and plenty of money in the bank. The relatives took all of it and divided it up among themselves, and lied to his poor widow and children that uncle left them nothing

That my cousin had sexually abused me when I was a kid. I’m talking like…8-14, and it only stopped because she had hanged herself. If she were still alive, well… I still have flashbacks of what she would do, and I feel so…fucked up for being, well…sorta turned on, I think because it was at such an impressionable age, and was the only sexual activity I’ve ever had. I don’t know how to describe it. I’ve only told my brother and my girlfriend about it. It has been the root of most of my issues, from depression to suicidal tendencies (I put myself in harm’s way hoping for the worst which would be the best) to not being able to perform sexually, and many many other things. I frequent /r/suicidewatch mostly because, well…duh. There are times where I want to just end it all, and I’ve been…dangerously close to it. About 5 lbs of trigger pressure away from it. I’ve tried counseling, but I could never bring myself to tell someone I barely know about it. Or my family, mostly because they wouldn’t believe me.

Stepdad raped two girls when he was in high school. Edit for explanation, probably should elaborate: so my stepdad is a douchebag. As in, he’s pretty overzealous with the belt or his fists and it’s even worse when he’s drunk. One time though, he was really hammered and I was changing the day after a party and he walked in and saw a hickey on my neck. He was already pissed at me because he always is (like dinner not good enough, grades slacking, not playing well in sports, etc) but for some reason hickey = evil and he went apeshit. He pushed me on the floor and took off his belt and I thought “here we go again” but then he tugged at his pants I was was like “what the fuck” and got up and pushed him away. He was like “Ive done this twice, ill do it again” and I was like “what?” and he slurred “gotten with a high-schooler that didn’t want my dick.” then he passed out on the floor. I was completely dumbfounded and just dragged him to his room and went back into my room and locked the door and was just thinking what the fuck… I mean his usual shit sucks a lot but it’s nothing I can’t handle but that’s a whole other level of shit. Now I have this info on him, not sure what to do with it. I looked him up and he’s never been arrested, so there’s two poor girls who were assaulted by the monstrosity that is my stepfather and never got justice. I know it’s been way too many years for anything it happen but it’s still really, really shitty.

I’m almost 100% confident that my father is not my biological father. They hung the birth certificates of my two younger brothers, not mine. I asked about it, parents said that they let somebody borrow it & they “never got it back.” I was digging through old things & found a letter written to me for my first birthday. I can’t remember word for word what it said, but it was effectively ‘I’m proud to be your father and will always love you’. But it was signed “Nick”. I do not know a single adult Nick in my whole life. My uncle on my dad’s side looks a hell of a lot like me. That’s probably paranoia though. His name is not Nick. The aforementioned uncle killed a guy. Got into a fight with someone in college, beat the shit out of him and the guy died. My grandfather is a lawyer and somehow got him out of it; uncle is now a minister. I was molested by my dad when I was younger, and both of us act like it never happened. Now, he touches me whenever he “says goodnight” to me.

I have a stepbrother who is the bad sheep in our family. It’s a sad story as a whole, it starts with him as a baby, his real mother a prostitute who would feed him pain medication in his bottled so he would sleep while she made her living downstairs. My mum and his dad got together when I was about 2, he would often steal things, then it built up to breaking into places after hours, destroying property and setting fires. He is 4 years older than me, when I turned 7 he started molesting me and I just didn’t know how to deal with it, it went on until I was 13. He started getting violent and taking speed when he was 13 so he scared me a lot and I never told a soul until he moved out. My grandparents know but they never talk about it. He killed a neighbor’s cat and buried it in our front yard and then eventually he was living on the streets and he was raped so he took so many drugs that he was hospitalized and then diagnosed with schizophrenia after he said the devil spoke to him and told him to hurt people. The one instance that makes me sick is my grandmother saying she remembers him being at her place and he made her tea and then she got really tired and all she remembers is him laying on top of her, she’s never spoken of that again, I doubt she ever will and I’m the only one who knows. He now is on heavy medication and is practically like a child under constant supervision in hospital

Practically every female on my Mum’s side of the family was sexually abused including my Mum and Sister. My Mum was abused by her Dad, my sister was abused by Mum’s side cousin (oldest male), My Mum’s side cousin (second oldest male) raped the youngest male cousin, who abused his niece. The messed up part was when I was around 13-14 just before the majority of this started to collapse in on itself I used to go and stay at their house because they lived in the city near 2 of my favorite skate parks so I would stay for weeks on end just going and skating every day. Then one day my Mum invited the some of them down, shit got real depressing real fast and everything came out. That shit was seriously fucked up

This is actually a story about several family members, and I have decided that I would never divulge this to anyone—not even my SO, I don’t care if we got married. Something about this toxic legacy makes me feel like I myself am tainted by this bullshit so I like to hide this family secret in some really deep dusty old memory bin. My mom was raped when she was 14 and gave birth to a son. The father of the kid was alleged to be some random guy in her hometown and he was disgraced after the kid’s birth. My mom gave the kid up for adoption, and he was taken care of by close relatives—my grandpa would become his legal guardian. This is in the deep South and abortion was wrong—no exceptions. Of course, that’s not the only stereotypical Southern trope you’ll find rings true in this story but we’ll get there. The kid grows up, and he’s kind of fucked up. He’s a huge troublemaker and just can’t stay on the straight and narrow. My mom never really wanted anything to do with him, and we all knew he was aware of this. More thank likely it contributed to his behavior issues. I was a little kid when I met him, and he was much older by about 10 years. He didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him. My mom died and that was the last I heard of him. We all moved on and I lived with my dad following her death. I always wondered why my mom hated the kid so much. One day, I was getting wasted with a cousin of mine and she started talking about an uncle I’d never met who lived in fucking Seattle, WA. He moved really far away to be away from his family and I simply never knew him. Well, my cousin was really drunk and she looked me in the eye and said ‘It’s time you knew something.’ She pulled out two photos, one of the uncle I didn’t know and one of my older half-brother, the kid my mom hated. They looked exactly the fucking same. Yep, turns out the guy who raped my mom at 14 and got her pregnant wasn’t the poor sap riding around town. It was my fucking uncle, my mom’s older brother. If you’re wondering how my mom died, well she killed herself. After learning that, its not hard to imagine why.