People Share The Most Deep-Cutting Thing Their Parent Said To Them As A Child That Still Haunts Them

In a moment of extreme anger or stress, parents may not realize the long-term effects of the hurtful words they toss at their children. However, these people know that there are some comments you can never take back.

Poisonous Parents

1) “You were an accident.”–

2) “My mother told me often that I was fat and an ingrate.”–

3) “My mom said I was they type of girl who slept with a lot of men and my head was stuck up my own lady parts. Her go-to insults were that I was a liar, pig, not even worth what was on the bottom of her shoe and she loved me because she had to but didn’t like me.”–

4) “I’m a terrible daughter and she doesn’t know why God gave me to her. I’m not a good person I’m not as smart as everyone else in the family, I would be prettier if I did this and that. I still think about that stuff all the time even as a 26-year-old now. I try not to let it get to me but it does.”–

5) “When I was around 14, I noticed that my mom never told me she loved me. I started playing this game where I’d call her from wherever I was, like at a friend’s after school, and at the end of the conversation, I’d say I loved her to try to ‘trick’ her into saying it back. She’d have none of it and hang up. When I eventually asked her why she never told me she loved me, she said, ‘I just can’t.’ I stopped trying and it was a real moment of clarity in our relationship for me. As an adult, I finally cut her out of my life and that’s been that.”

Cruel Words Marked In Their Minds Forever

6) “My parents divorced when I was 2. My dad used to sit me down from age 7+ to show me how much ‘I cost him in child support’ each month. Took me decades to not feel like an insecure burden.”–

7) “My mother looked me in the eye and told me I was the reason that their marriage was broken and they were getting divorced.”–

8) “‘You better get used to lying on your back. It’s how you’ll make money. People just tolerate you. You’re not that smart, you’re not pretty, you really have nothing going for you. Nobody likes you, and that’s why nobody tells you you’re pretty or compliments you. You’re really just a waste of space.'”–

9) “That I killed my grandmother. Which is literally impossible since she died from a brain tumor. My mom attacked me and screamed at me over and over again, ‘You killed her, you killed her!’ No one liked my mom because she was abusive and my grandmother raised me because she was an awful mother. It still messed me up since she tried to hurt me and make herself feel better by saying I killed the person I loved most in the world.”–

10) “When I was 13-14 years old, my dad said my mother was the ugliest person he knew and that I’m basically a younger dark blond haired version of her. He said he didn’t believe I could be loved and that every man who showed interest would either be out for getting laid or money and would eventually cheat. I’m 23 now and in a relationship with a really good guy and the entire conversation I had with my dad that morning still messes with me. My partner has been amazingly understanding about them even when thoughts of them trigger a depressive episode.”

How Could Anyone Say That?

11) “I attempted suicide once when I was 17, which was obviously unsuccessful. On the way to the hospital, my mom told me that next time I try to kill myself I should do it properly.”–

12) “I don’t believe you have depression.”–

13) “When I announced I was going back to school in my early 20’s, my mom laughed out loud and told me I’d never succeed. My dad then sat me down and told me get these fancy ideas of going back to school out of my head. He said I had my chance at secondary school and since I failed, I should just be content working in a supermarket for the rest of my life.”–

14) “Just remember, you’re not special.”–

15) “When I was 12 years old, my mom said, ‘You should have died, not your sister,’ when I brought her tea in the wrong cup. She was recovering from addiction at the time, but God that one stung.”

Verbal Abuse That Left Lifelong Scars

16) “My mom told me she hoped I got HIV when she thought I was out all night because there was some green foliage in the toilet. I tried to tell her it was just hay from my bunny’s food and she refused to believe me.”–

17) “When I was 10, I was messing around with my dad’s bicycle, which was generally not in the best condition as it was old and had 2 flat tires. I was trying to ride it, even though it was too big. My dad found me, scolded me and told me, ‘This bicycle is worth more than your life.’ I’ll never forget that.”–

18) “When I was 13, my mother told me I was a mouthy little girl and if I didn’t learn to hold my tongue my future husband would beat me to death.”–

19) “‘I love you because I have to, but I don’t like you at all,’ ‘I am only legally forced to take care of you till you are 18,’ ‘I can’t wait till you are 18 and I can throw you out and forget you.'”–

20) “‘I should’ve drowned you at birth,’ ‘I never had depression until you caused it,’ ‘You’re my biggest regret,’ ‘If you’re going to try killing yourself again, do it right this time.'”

Definitely Not Mother Dearest

21) “My mother told me I’m worthless because I’m a product of her being assaulted. My mother used to bully me daily. It got so bad to the point that I wanted to take my own really badly.

I realized that if I had gone through with it, my mom would be even worse to all my siblings about it. Keeping this in mind, I stopped thinking about any of that nonsense. I learned to stop caring about what she or anyone else said about me, but sometimes things just seep through. This is the only thing that will ever truly get to me, ever truly hurt me on a deep level. My decision to not let her words get to me is that it resulted in a chain of events that basically made me a ‘not-real’ person. I’m not genuine. Most things I say I don’t mean. I do carry the habits of the past me. In a way, I killed myself off a long time ago.”

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Manipulative Parents Who Tried To Craft Her Into Their Perfect Muse

22) “My parents told me that I’m unattractive and that affects my worth. I was told I was a skinny, knobby-knee’d little girl with big front teeth that earned me the life-long nickname ‘Bunny.’ I still answer to it. My parents were obsessed with looks, especially when it came to women. It didn’t matter to my parents when a woman was smart or successful; what was important to them was if was she was pretty, desirable and men wanted her.

I was the eldest of three girls. Our parents measured our worth by how many boys at school found us attractive or whether strangers/friends commented on how pretty we were. Our dad literally wanted us to grow up and be models. If my sisters or I had a cookie or a bowl of ice cream, he’d yank it away from us and say, ‘Can’t be a model someday if you get fat!’

When I got into middle school, I was not allowed to leave the house without my hair and makeup done perfectly. If I came down to the table for breakfast before school without my hair and makeup done, I’d get verbally taken apart, or even slapped across the face by my mom or dad. They were physically abusive on top of everything else. If I had an acne breakout, my dad would call me disgusting and mom would slap me or pull my hair, accusing me of not washing my face enough. If I wore a color that they thought didn’t look good on me, I’d be ordered to march right back upstairs and wear what they thought looked good on me, I’d be hit if I didn’t. I once wore my hair in a way they didn’t find appealing on me (just a ponytail with no bangs showing) and they chased me upstairs screaming that no daughter of theirs was going to be seen ‘looking like an idiot’ and then dad held me down on the bathroom floor while mom ripped my ponytail holder out and slapped me several times. They then stood there and screamed instructions on how they wanted my hair styled that day, as I complied and curled my hair with a curling iron and cried.

There were several times I can recall my mom staring at me in the kitchen or something and when I’d catch her and ask her what she’s staring at, she’d just shake her head and say, ‘You’re just…no model. But there’s just nothing I can do about that, I guess.’ Fast forward a few years, and I must say I grew into my looks. I hit high school and blossomed. Suddenly, all those kids that bullied me years before either wanted to date me or be my friend. The guys wanted to date me, most of the girls hated me for it but wanted me to hang out with them so they could get some of the attention I was getting by being around me. I graduated high school and I became what my dad wanted: a model/actress. I also went to college, made the dean’s list, and was very successful in that, but guess which one mattered to him? I literally became what he wanted, and I got paid to have people take pictures of me. He was finally proud of me because all of my parent’s friends would rave to them about how beautiful I was. Funny how he stopped physically and mentally abusing me when I became good-looking and got a modeling contract.

Even with how everything’s changed, I still hate the way I look. I wake up in the morning and when I look in the mirror while brushing my teeth, I can only focus on what I don’t like about my face and body; I can only focus on the flaws my parents used to point out. If someone does say something disparaging about my looks, it’s like being slapped all over again. I’m fragile. I still feel insipid, unattractive and strange-looking. It’s an odd concept. I understand that I have certain features that society finds appealing and that I’m acceptable enough to model but I still feel ugly somehow. I can’t leave the house without makeup; I’m still too insecure about my natural face. The times I’ve tried to force myself to leave the house without makeup, all I could remember is being slapped for that and I could hear my parent’s screaming at me in my head, ‘You are not pretty enough to go out without makeup! You should be ashamed! This is why you don’t have any friends!’ I still feel worthless. I have a college degree, friends who love me, a fiancé who treats me like a princess, hobbies, talents, and opportunities ahead of me. I’m working on a graphic novel and I’ve already got a publisher interested. I’m really happy and proud of myself, but I still feel that all of my true worth is related to how I look. What happens when I get old and I’m not pretty anymore? What will happen to me when I age? I know it’s wrong but I will feel unlovable when I finally age enough to lose my conventionally attractive looks. My sisters are the same way. They won’t leave the house without makeup, and one of them has already had a lot of plastic surgery done, and she’s only just turned 30. My parents did that to us and I really, really hate them for that.”

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Words That Hurt More Than Sticks And Stones

23) “She said, ‘You are not my daughter. I’ve got a son, that’s it. My daughter left me years ago. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done with her.’ At the time, I was 12. I still know that my older brother is her favorite. She never loved me as much as him and she never will.”–

24) “My father nicknamed me Tumor and said I was like a cancerous growth you’d love to be rid of but will continue to grow. He shortened it to ‘Toome’ after awhile when enough people told him how hurtful that was.”–

25) “After I didn’t hang up my clothes properly, my mother told me, ‘I should have had an abortion but I didn’t have the money.’ She also told me, ‘We could afford you and your sisters that why we gave you to your grandparents, but you wanted to come back so that’s why we were always poor.’ She was emotionally and physically abusive for years. She stopped hitting me when we had to move in with my grandmother. Now that I’m 24, she wants to be friends with me but I won’t allow it. My dad also told me, ‘We might have screwed you up but that’s why we had your sisters.'”–

26) “I had bad skin as a teenager and my dad told me I needed a paper-bag for my head.”–

27) “The only reason you exist is for our own economic and financial gain. Your life is ours to do whatever we want to it.”

They’ll Never Be Able To Forget

28) “I was just 15 and my mother used to say my body look like if I had just given birth. I used to argue with her about how mean she was being and she’d say she did it for my own good so I could feel motivated to lose weight. Needless to say, I’m almost 28 and have a huge self-esteem problem.”–

29) “You’ll never amount to anything, and never have a real job. You’ll just be another high school dropout, living on the streets, and begging for change to buy illegal substances with.”–

30) “When I was 17, I was in a horribly abusive relationship that left me with an overwhelming amount of suicidal thoughts. When I was in a really dark place, I tried hanging myself on my doorknob and was jolted awake by my dog licking me and biting my hand. My mom came home and found me as I was coming back into consciousness. She got incredibly mad at me and told me that next time I wanted to kill myself, I needed to stop being melodramatic and ‘just do it quickly.’ After that, I opened up to her one more time several months later about still feeling suicidal and she told me to stop complaining and just kill myself. We’ve worked through it but it messed me up for a long time.”–

31) “My old stepfather would tutor me in math and when I struggled to answer some questions he would call me retarded and stupid. He would tell me that I never listened and that I wouldn’t have a life because I couldn’t remember an equation. This was in the fifth grade and I used to get A’s, now I still struggle to maintain C’s because I hear his voice every time I don’t understand and need to ask a teacher. His mockery and taunts only got worse when I got diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.”–

32) “When I was 16, my dad flat out told me that he never wanted a second child. I’m the younger child. He’s also never said he loved me or been emotionally supportive at all. In fact, one could say that he was emotionally negligent, if not outright abusive. After he said that to me any care I may have had for him disappeared. I don’t love him, I’m in very low contact with him and I am working on going full no contact. His actions have made me not fully trust anyone, and it’s a lot easier for me to walk away from people than it was before.”

She Said This To Her Own Daughter With Poor Mental Health

33) “I struggled up and down with depression through all of high school. I was in despair and thinking of killing myself. I decided it was time to go get help and went to my doctor. He recommended that I read a few cognitive therapy books since I was really iffy about going on anti-depressants. Deep down, I had a feeling that it was cognitive and something I needed to work through. My mom didn’t know I was depressed. I never was close enough with her to share since whenever I did she’d just say, ‘Oh’ and not take any interest in being there for me. In the past week she was raving on about how depressed people don’t get the help they need. I come home and I’m crying, she asks what’s wrong I tell her that I’ve been struggling for awhile. She doesn’t say a word. Not a word about it to me for a week. Then she asks and offers to buy the book for me. I was surprised she was actually being nice.

Two days later, I’m washing up in the bathroom, which is right beside my parents bedroom. I could hear my mom talking angrily to my dad about how she had to buy this book for me and I never paid her back, saying I was rude and a burden. I confronted her about it but she denied it.

Later on, I had a boyfriend cheat on me and was crying in my room when she came in to inspect why I wasn’t vacuuming. I told her I was cheated on, she replied, ‘Oh, well you haven’t vacuumed yet you do that right now.’ She never asked about it later.

One day, she told me, ‘You’re never going to get anywhere in school, and you’re never going to get anywhere in life so you might as well go and get pregnant.’ When I caught her cheating on my dad, she accused me of violating her privacy for snooping through her stuff.

At my rehearsal dinner, my friend was talking to me about how it must be hard for me to do be the wife of a man in the navy with him being gone for so long and me doing all my immigration stuff all by my myself. My mom butts in saying that she had it so much harder than me when she got married since her parents bailed out on helping pay like they said and divorced a few months after.

Both of my parents always told me I was a burden and it’s why I’ve always felt like it was not ok to ask for help. They always told e how stupid I was and never took the time to show me how to do anything thing. They just ridiculed me when I did something wrong. On top of that, there was a lot of physical abuse. I’d get hit if I didn’t eat all of my lunch at school even though it was way too much for me to eat almost every time.

I blamed myself always. I thought I really was a worthless person from all of their negative comments growing up. I constantly hoped for them to actually do something genuinely nice and not have them complain about it afterward, but I have to cut them off emotionally if I want to grow.”

“She Told Me I Used My Disorder As A Crutch”

34) “While I’m dyslexic, I was told by my parents that I don’t have a learning disorder and that I’m just lazy. My disorder effects my spelling, anything to do with numbers, and my ability to see angles. I am practically face blind. I also have ADD but because I was wild and crazy like my mother’s friends kid who had ADHD, I apparently don’t have that either.

My mom thought I used my disorder as a crutch so she just screamed at me that I was stupid and lazy instead. She has since denied ever knowing that I was in special-ed classes. According to her, she knew I had to go to the resource room because I didn’t do my projects right and I was supposed to have extra homework. She would take any good marks I had and use them as proof that I was lazy. ‘You got a B in social studies. Where is your B in math? You just need to apply yourself to everything.’ Or, ‘85%? I thought you said you were good at this. Where is the other 15%?’

Then when I was diagnosed as bi-polar she decided that I wasn’t bi-polar, I just ‘really feel my feelings’ and it isn’t a disorder ‘because I’ve always been like that.'”

Dealing With Personal Demons

35) “When I was 13 or 14, my dad once said when I was around that it was only because of my mother he kept me around because if he had his way he would’ve left me at a side of a road years ago.”–

36) “My dad told me that he wished I had died from cancer. I had leukemia as a very young child and this was years later during a fight.”–

37) “The only people with depression are those that have too much time on their hands and feel sorry for themselves.”–

38) “‘I hope you have a slow child someday because then you’ll know what it’s like.’ My mom has always been particularly terrible to my younger, mentally challenged sibling. I got mad and told her off about it one day. Fast-forward a bunch of years, my son ends up with a diagnosis of ASD. Not mentally challenged, but those words haunted me. That kid is the apple of my eye and I would never dream of saying the things to him that my mother (still says) to my younger sibling. I strive every day to be everything she is not.”

Toxic Mother

39) “My mom would tell me, ‘I’d rather have a gay son for a son than you,’ ‘I wish I’d never prayed for you,’ and ‘You ruined my life.'”

She would buy me things just to make me watch her return or break them as ‘punishment’ for something I did ‘wrong’ (which she would invent if she had to) which is why I have difficulty accepting gifts to this day. She would physically abuse me then shriek and threaten to have me arrested if I resisted.

Similarly, she would routinely tell me horror stories about orphanages then call social services and hand me the phone if I ever stood up myself. Anytime I cried or was hurt I was just looking for attention. I still hear that in the back of my mind anytime I think about asking for help: ‘You’re just exaggerating,’ ‘Stop being a drama queen’ or ‘Stop pretending.’ The only kindness I ever got were in public around others, and she would always make sure I knew she didn’t mean it when we got home. I still have difficulty accepting compliments or praise. By far the worst legacy she left me is the fact that I sought out narcissistic personalities like hers after she died, in order to try to earn the approval she and they won’t/can’t give me so I never truly escaped her.”

Their Youth And Extreme Tempers Made Them Ill-Fitted To Be Parents

40) “My parents had me very young and both hadn’t come from particularly supportive families, so they’re not the best at emotional support. It doesn’t help that they both have tempers that are slow to build but impossible to stop. They told me when I was younger that I am ‘literally evil incarnate/possessed by the devil’ and ‘I am a heartless sociopath that is incapable of affection or love because I don’t open up to them enough.’ After I talked to them about a traumatic incident that involved my physical safety and how I was dealing with depression in the aftermath, they told me, ‘I wish we had raised you to be more resilient.’ They told me, ‘I wish we had done x differently so you wouldn’t be like this’, ranging from wishing I was more religious, more social, more family-oriented, etc.

In addition, my mom has said very recently that I am too fat and combative for anyone to love me, so my only option is an arranged marriage and that my window of being ‘desirable’ is rapidly closing so I need to get moving. I’m in my early 20s. What really kills me about this one is how nicely she tried to present that comment. It’s something she genuinely believes about me and it’s crushing. I don’t think any of these things are excusable and they really bother me. But I’m realizing how easy it is to really hurt someone in just a few words, enough that it sticks with them for as long as it’s stuck with me. I’d really like to think that if/when I’m a parent I wouldn’t have the ability to say something this awful to my kids, but I know that no one’s a perfect parent and I absolutely will not be.”