People Share The Most Emotionally Damaging Thing A Loved One Ever Said To Them

These people share the one thing loved ones have told them that they have never gotten over.

His Response Was So Terrible

“I was abused between the ages of four and six years old by a teenaged ‘family friend’ and was told at the time if I spoke a word to my parents that he would kill them both.

Needless to say, I didn’t speak a word for years to anyone about it. But when I finally built up the courage at age 17 to tell my father about it, he just said ‘boys will be boys.’

I told my mom about six months later, and she broke down crying and was then ticked when I told her what my dad (her ex-husband at that point) had said to me when I told him. She agreed that was NOT a normal reaction. Thankfully a good sanity check. I’m still bothered and hurt that my dad responded in that way though. I haven’t brought it up since, and that was 16 years ago (I am 33 now).”

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Who Would Say This?

“I have an eating disorder, and I just got out of residential treatment a few months ago. Over the last seven months, I’ve gained 17 pounds. I was feeling pretty good about myself. And then my boyfriend told me that I was no longer attractive to him and that I should want to lose weight because I should want to be attractive to him.

I want to do that but I can’t. Every time I try I do it all wrong and use my eating disorder and I get sick. I want so badly for him to find me attractive and I want to lose weight but I just can’t right now. Mentally, I just am not capable. It’s like he’s asking me to fly and I just can’t do it. It breaks my heart.”

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They Never Apologized

“I went to Vietnam in 2008 to get away from an abusive relationship and to clear my mind. My parents wanted me to stay with my cousin’s family, and I had always seen her as a sister. Things were good in the beginning, then her fiancé from the U.S. came to visit.

The two of them have been together for seven years, and he is not a nice person. Her family kept telling me that I should convince her not to marry him and go to the U.S. because she would be miserable. They told me how they didn’t like how he made her cry all the time. So I was wary of him when we met.

She wanted the three of us to go on a little vacation together and begged me to go, so I went. I tried to not be the third wheel and let them have fun.

It was fine the first day. The second day we went to the beach and the guy had one of those cameras that can take pictures underwater. My cousin is kind of a princess and doesn’t like physical activities, so she didn’t want to swim for long. I like beaches, so he and I swam around while she was relaxing (or so I thought) on the sand. After we went back to the hotel she was furious.

The next day I texted her asking if they want to go out for breakfast (we usually do that together). She said I can go on my own, and I knew something was up. An hour or so later she met up with me at the restaurant and started going off about how her fiancé was such a horrible person. She said he was a jerk because apparently, he took pictures of me underwater without my knowledge. She said he has always been unfaithful, and went on and on about what a terrible person he is.

She then asked me what she should do. At that point, I thought about all the negative things her family and she said about him. I wanted her to be happy, so I said that if he is that kind of person she isn’t going to be happy, and she should reconsider marrying him. I left that day so that the two of them could work it out among themselves.

They came back several days later, and all the sudden I noticed that everyone was just cold to me. I knew that something was going on, but I thought it might have just been the stress getting to them. One day I came back to the house after getting some coffee and her mom started going off on me as soon as she saw me.

She told me to get out of the house. She would never want to live with a horrible lying woman like me. I was trying to ruin her family life. I was ungrateful and an ugly person inside and out. She was screaming at me about how she could never live near me. My cousin then jumped in and told me that her family had enough problems, and I was adding on to their problems, and they don’t need to take care of me. They told me I needed to get all my stuff and get out of their house by the next day. They told me I needed to call my mom right then and there to tell her that she needs to buy me a plane ticket home because they wouldn’t take care of me anymore.

The entire family descended on me, ripping me to shreds, telling me what a horrible, disgusting human being I am. All because my cousin made up with her fiancé and they needed to crucify me for giving her good advice.

I felt terrible. I thought I had done everything to be kind, and show my appreciation for these people that I loved as my family. They didn’t even let me fight back. They even let the fiancé go off on me about how I was a backstabber for trying to break them off.

I left the next day. Keep in mind, I was recovering from a relationship that made me feel like I was a human not deserving of love. These people told me to my face I wasn’t deserving of anything. I went into a deep depression after that, believing that I could never have anything wonderful. I felt betrayed, but I thought maybe I am a horrible human as they said I was. It took me a long time to get over it.

They pretended nothing bad happened, and I overreacted. They never apologized. If anything, they tried to make me feel more guilty for not wanting to have anything to do with them after that. I realized they were just messed up people, and it had nothing to do with me.

Apparently, a week or so after I left, my cousin found out she was pregnant, and her loving fiancé beat her and threw her out of the hotel that they were staying at because he didn’t want a kid. She had an abortion, her mom went off the deep end, and her family was in shambles. They still got married a few months later.

I realized my life is never going to be that messed up, and I’ll be happy.”

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“That One By Far Hurts The Most”

“My stepfather was emotionally and verbally abusive to me growing up. When I was a senior in high school, he and my mom were getting divorced. It should be noted that I’ve bent over backward to help my mom for years. When she had to get a hysterectomy and her crap husband was ‘busy,’ I waited on her hand and foot for days. Same thing when she had wrist surgery. And same when she was pregnant with my little brother.

He moves out, and I offer to get up three hours earlier than I needed to for school to watch my little brother in the mornings and get him ready for school so that she wouldn’t have to change her work schedule. I was also working full time, and regularly wouldn’t get home until 10 or 11 p.m., only to get up at 5 a.m. She kept picking fights with me, and I kept trying to diffuse them, figuring she was stressed from the divorce. Eventually, it got so bad that I moved out a few months before graduating high school and didn’t talk to her for a few months until I almost died in a car accident.

By far, the cruelest thing anyone has said to me was straight from my mother’s lips post-divorce. It had started out innocently enough when I made some joking comment about guys and said she should start dating again. She then turned to me and told me I was ‘pathetic’ for not having a boyfriend at my age, and I would never get one because I wasn’t worth the high standards I set.

That hurt my ego. Especially since we’d been laughing and joking one minute earlier. So I responded with, ‘Thanks, mom. I’ll be sure to lower my standards. What excellent motherly advice.’

And then she said, ‘You’re just like [my former stepfather]. I wish you’d left instead of him.’ As a person who has had some cruel things said to them over the years, that one by far hurts the most.”

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She Ruined Him

“I am a normal guy. I’m not too smart or funny. I’m just decent looking, average, and nice. I try to be honest, I grumble at bad drivers and help people/animals whenever I can.

After being married for eight years, I thought I had a good, decent life with the love of my life. I then found that the overtime my wife was working was actually her going out with her students and partying after work and on some weekend days. Yes, that was unethical of her and a whole other story. Back to me.

I was furious when I confronted her with the situation. Her response was so unexpected that it disarmed me, and has since left me so humbled, damaged, and sad that I can’t think of myself as anything but a loser, which I am trying to overcome.

Her response: ‘I’ve known you for a long time. I probably know you the best out of anyone in the world. I know every one of your secrets and have seen you at your lowest. The reason I go out with other people is that I don’t want to be married to you anymore. I think I’ve never wanted to be married to you. I had doubts before, during, and after the wedding. You’re nice and everything, but you’re not that great looking and I earn more than you now. I also think you would make a really bad father, too. You are just not the kind of guy I want to raise a family with; you are nice and everything but not impressive in any way. I wanted a real man. I settled on you and now we’re both paying for it. It feels good to get this off of my chest.’

I pretty much was speechless and just stood there, then walked away. She moved out that night. Other things were said later, but that preamble pretty much resonates in my head when I go to sleep still.

I can’t look at myself in the eye in a mirror anymore. It has been three years since she said that. I haven’t seen my own face in over a month, in fact. I shave by feel because I don’t want to look at myself.

I know intellectually that I shouldn’t define myself by someone else’s opinions, but it just doesn’t seem to go away.”

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She Was Dumbfounded

“My dad got remarried after his divorce from my mom. I was having a lot of problems with my stepmother. They had small children of their own and didn’t feel like dealing with a grouchy teenage daughter from a prior marriage. When I was about 13 or so, I fought with my dad about something stupid like not wanting to go to church, and he blurted out, ‘I’m so tired of trying to fit you into my family!’

I was shell-shocked. I excused myself from his family and stopped seeing him. I haven’t spoken to him in years. I’m friends with his kids on Facebook, and they seem like a nice little family on the outside. Apparently, it worked out for him.”

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He Feels Completely Unwanted

“This wasn’t said directly to me, but it still hurt.

My dad was a cheater and a deadbeat. He stole my mom’s engagement ring and gave it to this high school girl he was fooling around with while my mom was pregnant with me. He even brought the girl to the hospital with him to see me after I was born (he wasn’t there for the birth).

He never paid child support, and by the time I turned nine years old, he had spent less than 24 hours with me. This didn’t stop him from suing my mom for visitation rights he claimed he wasn’t getting (the state had set up supervised visitations; he just never showed. I would sit there each day, excited like an idiot, wondering where he was, and my mom would make excuses for him).

I would go over there and try to spend time with him, but he’d just ignore me. Eventually, he started making excuses for why I couldn’t come over. He had a thing for work. He was taking a mini-vacation. Things drifted apart. I was getting my oil changed and was reading through the local paper. In the local section, there was a picture of my dad with his arm around some young boy. Turns out the boy was his new wife’s son from another man. He was being honored for winning some scholarship for an honors summer program. And there’s my dad, quoted talking about him: ‘I couldn’t be more proud of my boy.’

Your boy? What?! Nearly every major issue in my life can be attributed to that man. I self-sabotage any relationship in my life after about two years because I’m convinced they’re going to leave me like he did. I’m forcing myself to accept that I cannot have kids because I don’t want to end up like him. I had a nervous breakdown when I realized I didn’t know his birthday. I break down sobbing from time to time wondering why he didn’t want me.”

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His Brother Is Awful To Him

“‘I wish you’d died when you had cancer.’ — my brother.

Then, when telling my parents (who I was living with while I was sick with cancer) that my brother had stolen my painkillers that used to manage chemo pain and my severe anxiety disorders to sell for quick money because he is too lazy to get a job, my mother replied, ‘Well tough, you should have had it locked up somewhere. And if you call the cops, get the heck out of our house.'”

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Their Parents’ Comments Caused Health Problems

“My parents are Chinese, and I guess in Chinese culture, it’s perfectly fine to tell your daughters that they are fat. I used to be stick thin, but once I hit puberty I started gaining weight. They would say, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that?’ if I was eating something and it hurt.

This has always hurt me and it triggered an eating disorder. It started with a diet, but once I started losing weight, my family would praise me, so I got more desperate to lose more, faster. The same thing happened to my younger sister and she also suffers from an eating disorder.”

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“I Hated Myself For Them”

“I don’t know if it’s the most hurtful, but when, at my therapist’s suggestion, I told my father I had been repeatedly abused by this old man when I was younger, he laughed and said, ‘Stop lying. You would have been smart enough to tell me. I didn’t raise some promiscuous girl.’ My mom said something along these lines, too.

Another time, sometime after I went through a rough period in my life, battling with anorexia, depression and a suicide attempt, my then-boyfriend said during a fight, ‘Your whole life culminated in a big cry for attention, and you somehow messed that up, too.’

I think what made those things hurtful, apart from the fact that they were from people I was supposed to trust, was that they struck a chord with a part of me that believed they were true, and I hated myself for them. I don’t talk much with my parents anymore.”

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“What They Say Is Not Who I Am”

“My mother: ‘I should have aborted you.’ I was 10 years old.

My father: ‘You have disappointed me many times, in many ways.’ I was 29 years old.

My mother and father are decent people who happen to make horrible parents. It’s taken almost my entire life and an ocean of tears, but I have finally learned that their problems are not my problems. What they say is not a reflection of who I am; it’s a reflection of their own self-loathing and bitterness. I don’t say those kinds of things to people, and I will never say them to my children.”

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He Was Always Self-Conscious

“I’m going to start my story by saying that I’ve never felt that I was attractive physically. I’m nearly seven feet tall and was freakishly skinny growing up. Naturally, I was teased about this all through school. It doesn’t help matters that I’m also a nerd. I also have a weird mark on my right shoulder blade; this big brown splotch that I’m a little self-conscious about and always have been.

Well, fast forward a bit and I’m getting divorced from this woman I love more than life itself and she tells me, ‘I’m not attracted to you. I wasn’t ever attracted to you, and your birthmark grosses me out.’ I died inside at that moment. I’ve always known that I was weird looking and that cemented it for me. The hardest part, though, is knowing that she was telling the truth, you know?

The second person I ever told this story to was a female co-worker, and her exact response was ‘well, you’re not THAT gross.’ Cheer up fail. So I guess I have two, about the same thing, from two different people.”

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“I’m Still Not Over It”

“When I told my now ex-boyfriend that I had depression and needed to go on anti-depressants, he said ‘so this means I can tell all my friends you’re legitimately crazy.’

He also told me I had no friends and that I was fat. And when he dumped me, he listed every single aspect of me that he hated and couldn’t stand, basically saying he couldn’t bear to be in a relationship with me, but he still loved me and cared for me and still wanted to be friends.

I can’t believe someone who claimed to love me made a point of continually hurting me so bad.”

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They Freaked Out Over One Action

“I spent my teen years working my butt off in school. I graduated with a 4.7 GPA, passing scores on all my AP tests, and acceptance and 100 percent scholarships for three different colleges. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I’d never touched illegal substances, and I just wanted to be a good kid. I volunteered my summers at a camp for the mentally handicapped, I volunteered in a soup kitchen during the year, and I even worked at my father’s office in the evenings after school.

When I graduated, two of my friends and I went to New York City for a week on our own. We each got a piercing in celebration of being 18 and graduating from high school — mine was a lip piercing, which I had wanted for three years. My parents wouldn’t be happy, I knew that much because they were against body modification. But a piercing isn’t permanent, and I figured I was an easy kid to raise, so I figured they’d get over it.

They did not. Getting that (legal, well-thought-out) piercing was like undoing everything I’d done for the last 18 years — it didn’t matter that I was a good, hardworking student who’d never been in trouble before in her life. You would’ve thought I’d killed someone. My mother cried and refused to speak to me for three days, and my father told me I ‘hadn’t turned out like he planned,’ and he was ‘just so disappointed in how I’d grown up.'”

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They Haven’t Spoken In Years

“My dad spent my entire life saying damaging things to me; it’s hard to pick which one. I think the worst thing he ever said to me was when I was 18 after my mother committed suicide, and he wanted to tell everyone she had a heart attack instead. I didn’t understand at the time, and that’s not my complaint about him, but what he said afterward about our future together:

‘The sooner you learn this the better. Everyone is stupid, and everyone is out to get you. I am the only one who cares about you and I don’t even like you. You do as I say, you shut up, and you don’t have anyone to impress anymore but me, and that’s never going to happen.’

He was a damaged man, hateful and spiteful without a friend in the world. Didn’t need them. He blamed my mother’s drinking and depression on my poor grades and just generally being a disappointing loser that he just had to tolerate because he was legally required to do so. ‘In every facet of imagination, you have failed, and will never amount to anything.’

He threw me out after my mother died, I graduated high school living with friends, and we haven’t spoken more than a few times since. I haven’t seen him in 12 years, haven’t spoken in ten years.”

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