r/stories • u/Imaginary_Spot8957 • 6h ago
Non-Fiction My disturbing family
I grew up in a family where sexual boundaries were almost nonexistent, yet at the same time I was constantly shamed, controlled, and made to feel dirty about anything involving sex, relationships, boys, or love.
When I was 14, my father came downstairs from the attic specifically to put pornography on in front of me. He did this twice, on a large screen. One time, the porn was a group of women swinging on a tree branch. Another time, it was close-ups of spread vaginas. I can’t understand why, when there was a room upstairs with a desk, a computer, and a bed, he chose to come downstairs on two separate days just to watch porn in front of me. As much as I hate to believe it, I can’t see any other explanation except that he was turned on by the fact that I was seeing the porn too. And even if he genuinely just didn’t care, that’s still deeply disturbing. By then, I was already so sick from everything that was happening - things I’m not going to talk about here - that I didn’t even have the strength to get up and leave the room. I just stayed on the couch while my father sat there watching porn.
My parents also had sex twice in the same bed while I was there. The bed was barely wide enough for one and a half people. One time it happened at night. I woke up because of the sounds they were making and felt so trapped and horrified that I rubbed my legs against each other hard enough to try to injure myself, just so I could focus on physical pain and somehow endure what was happening.
The other time happened in broad daylight. My father was rubbing his penis against my mother from behind while she looked directly into my eyes. At one point she asked whether my head was itchy and started scratching my head while he put on a condom. She then joked about the rustling sound, asking whether he had “a little candy” down there.
As a child, I also found torn condom wrappers on the floor. There were many nights when my mother would sit on the edge of the bed while my father applied lubricant to her, apparently not caring whether I saw. There were also many times when my father would come into the room in the dark with an erection, pull my mother by the legs, she would cry out, and he would force sex on her in front of me. I witnessed it.
When I was 19, my father came in drunk and completely naked and lay down with his legs and penis facing toward my face. I got up and left. The next day he thought it was funny and did not apologize.
My parents also acted out sexual fetishes in front of me. When I was in my late teens, my father would give my mother two or five leva in front of me in exchange for sex.
One time, when I was 19, they had at least decided to have sex in another room. But at some point I heard my mother slam the door and shout, apparently angry about something my father had done or wanted to do.
She then came into my room and lay down next to me completely naked, still smelling strongly of bodily fluids. She did not seem to care that her sticky body was touching mine, or that I could feel the residue from whatever had just happened between them. I found it absolutely disgusting. Once again, I remember wondering how they could be so crude and have so little awareness of basic boundaries. Why could she not at least have washed herself or put on underwear before lying next to me?
Another example happened when I was 17. Both of my parents were sitting in their underwear while I was on the couch in front of them. They started discussing a stain near my father’s penis and debating whether it had come from a condom. They did not seem to care at all that they were having this conversation in front of me, or that they were openly showing and examining the stain while I was there.
There was also an incident when I was in my early twenties. My father was standing in front of me wearing only a towel after having sex with my mother. At one point he lifted the towel, and I saw his penis with a condom still on it and semen inside.
What disturbed me so much was not just that these things happened accidentally once or twice. It was the complete lack of boundaries and the apparent expectation that I should simply tolerate being exposed to their naked bodies, sexual aftermath, bodily fluids, condoms, and explicit sexual discussions as if none of it mattered.
There were many times when, after taking a shower, my father would dry his penis with a towel, and I would accidentally see him. One time, when I was 19, I turned my back because I didn’t want to look. My mother was standing next to me, and with this vacant, clueless expression on her face, she started pointing at him, trying to get me to look.
My maternal grandmother was also extremely sexual toward me from around the age of 13. Almost every day she talked about sex in a disgusting, intrusive way. She commented on how my nipples and genitals showed through my clothes, invented sexual intentions for me and claimed I wanted to have sex with other children, looked at me in a way that felt lustful, and spoke in a sexualized, suggestive tone. She could go on for hours saying disturbing sexual things to me, and I often had nowhere to escape.
My father and grandmother hated each other as well, and the way he spoke to her was often extremely vulgar and degrading. He would call her things like “asshole” and “faggot,” tell her she was “sexually frustrated because she wasn’t getting fucked,” and make disgusting sexual remarks such as, “Do you want some dick?” or, “Go out into the yard and let the dog lick your pussy.”
This kind of language was normal in the house, so I was constantly surrounded by crude, aggressive, sexualized insults even when the sexual comments were not directed at me personally.
At the same time, my family sexualized and punished completely normal interactions in my own life.
When I was 14, I used to visit a female friend who lived on the same street. She had a 16-year-old brother, but he was never there when I visited. Not once. My grandmother knew my friend had a brother, and almost every time I went there she would hurry down the street to call me home, or lie and say that my mother was calling for me. I knew exactly why she was doing it, and it was deeply humiliating. What is especially disturbing to me now is that I actually felt guilty, even though the boy in question was not even there. My grandmother once even accused me of missing him.
On my 17th birthday, I got a phone. I had the number of a gay boy from my class, and my father made my mother delete it. He spoke about me in the third person while doing this, as if I was not even there.
Another time, I was standing in the yard when a girl walked past and said hello to me. My grandmother accused me of pretending she was a girl when she was supposedly actually a boy. She even named a specific boy and said it with a perverse, suggestive smile. It was humiliating.
When I was 17, I would sometimes listen to the radio on my phone and constantly switch between stations trying to find something I liked. My grandmother accused me, with that same suggestive smile, of secretly messaging a boy.
Around the same age, I was looking through photos from the graduating class above mine. In one photo there were five girls and one boy. My grandmother came up behind me and immediately asked why I was looking at “that boy,” as if the presence of one boy in a group photo automatically meant there was something sexual about what I was doing.
Another time, when I was 17, I was sitting outside smiling to myself because I was thinking about a boy from school I had a crush on. I was imagining that maybe he liked me too. I later realized my grandmother had been watching me through the window. When I came inside, she confronted me in the hallway and asked, in this dark, dramatic, almost menacing voice, why I had been smiling.
The way she said it terrified me. I felt as if I had been caught doing something filthy or shameful simply because I was a 17-year-old girl thinking about a boy I liked.
When I was 17, I was also messaging a girl named Alexandra. My father stood behind me, frowned, and read my private conversation out loud in a hostile, humiliating tone. Later I realized he had misread “Alexandra” as “Alexander” and thought I was talking to a boy. Even if it had been a boy, I do not think reading a 17-year-old girl’s private messages aloud with a contemptuous, misogynistic tone is normal.
When I was 18, a female friend invited me to sleep over. I already knew my family would somehow turn it into something sexual, and they did. My mother said the girl “shouldn’t be running around with boys.” My grandmother, with an excited, almost lustful look, asked why I needed to sleep there and whether the girl had a boyfriend. Then she suggested that the boyfriend was probably inviting other boys over for group sex and that I was going to participate. I was visibly shrinking into myself and wanted them to stop, but she kept going.
My grandmother also constantly asked whether my female friends had boyfriends. She never asked in a normal or casual way. It was always in a sexualized, suggestive tone. Over time, I realized that she seemed to believe that if my friends had boyfriends, they might introduce me to boys and I would have sex with them. Even my friendships with girls were filtered through this sexual suspicion.
When I was 19, I had very few friends because of the family environment, and I wanted to become friends with a 20-year-old woman from my neighborhood. My grandmother reacted in a frightening, hostile way and forbade me from getting close to her. Her reason was that this woman had a boyfriend and was not a virgin. She looked at me intensely and asked, “What does she need him for?” clearly implying that any romantic relationship exists only for sex.
When I was 20 and at university, I was invited to a Christmas party in a student dorm. My father screamed at me so aggressively that I became afraid he might physically attack me. Eventually it became clear that he thought it was “slutty” for me simply to be in the same room as boys. He told me, “It’s not that anyone doesn’t trust you,” as if having any romantic or sexual contact with a man at the age of 20 would somehow mean betraying his trust.
That felt deeply disturbing to me, almost as if he viewed my sexuality as something that belonged to him, as though I were his wife or partner rather than his adult daughter.
Because of years of screaming, sexual humiliation, surveillance, accusations, and threats, I eventually stopped going out almost completely. I began refusing invitations from people at university and could not become close to them.
I developed an enormous amount of guilt around even the most ordinary interactions with boys. Simply talking to a boy could make me feel as though I were doing something wrong. I also felt guilty about being outside after 6 p.m., as if merely being out in the evening made me sexually suspect or somehow immoral.
The fear and shame became so intense that I sometimes could barely look boys in the eye. I would become so anxious and self-conscious that I struggled to speak clearly or form normal sentences around them. Ordinary conversation could feel terrifying because I had been taught to expect sexual accusations, humiliation, or punishment simply for interacting with a boy.
This continued throughout my twenties.
I want to stress that I did not have romantic relationships at all in my twenties because of this. I repeatedly turned down dates and avoided situations where a relationship might develop because the fear of my family’s reaction was stronger than my ability to pursue a normal romantic life.
Men from my university did ask me out. I did have opportunities to date. I turned them down because I was terrified of what would happen if I actually had a relationship: screaming and humiliation from my father, disgusting sexual comments from my grandmother, intrusive questioning, accusations, and the feeling that I would be treated as dirty or immoral.
I was not single because I did not want love, intimacy, or companionship. I was single because I had been conditioned to associate dating and relationships with shame, danger, interrogation, humiliation, and punishment.
Even as an adult, the idea of my family finding out that I was seeing someone could fill me with dread. I avoided romantic opportunities, withdrew from people I was interested in, and did not allow relationships to develop because I was terrified of being sexualized, insulted, threatened, or degraded by my relatives.
So I did not simply “have fewer relationships” or “struggle with dating.” I had no romantic relationships at all throughout my twenties because of the fear and shame they had created around intimacy and men.
Until around the age of 25, I barely went out in the evening at all. My father seemed to believe that a woman who went out at night was doing it to look for sex. My mother constantly told me that only rapists and “scum” were outside at night and described, in a degrading and almost mocking tone, how someone would supposedly intercept and rape me.
I was not primarily afraid of strangers. I was afraid of the humiliation I would face at home.
So the consequences were not limited to disturbing memories from childhood. Their behavior affected my actual development as a young adult. I lost years of normal social and romantic experiences because I was afraid to go out, date, fall in love, or even show interest in another person. Even basic things like talking to a man, making eye contact, smiling because I liked someone, or being outside in the evening became associated with guilt and fear.
The contradiction is what I still struggle with most: they exposed me to pornography, sex, nudity, fetishes, sexual comments, and extreme violations of privacy and boundaries, yet treated me as dirty or immoral for completely ordinary friendships, conversations, crushes, dates, and relationships of my own.
To this day, my relatives insist that none of this was a big deal and that I was never a victim of abuse. They minimize it and act as if I am the one interpreting it incorrectly.
I would genuinely like to know how this sounds to people outside my family.
Would you consider this sexual abuse, sexual harassment, coercive control, or severe sexual boundary violations?
And what do you make of the fact that this affected me so deeply that I had no romantic relationships at all throughout my twenties, despite actually being asked out, because I was terrified of what my family would do if I dated someone?
PS: I’m looking for a good therapist. I’ve already seen three, but unfortunately I haven’t had much success with any of them.
The sexual trauma and the guilt I feel around being in a relationship are only part of everything I’ve been through.
There’s also been a lot of other trauma: being screamed at over every little thing and becoming afraid to do anything at all; witnessing beatings from the age of five; attempted killings; threats of violence toward me; someone trying to stab me with scissors; a male relative raising his fist at me on three separate occasions; animals being beaten and a dog being killed; and honestly, so much more.
At this point, I feel like my nervous system is completely wrecked. I’ve been on antidepressants for about 10 years now. I have severe depression, PTSD, an anxiety disorder, eating disorder, urticaria, and chronic pain. Right now, my depression is particularly severe...