Woman says learning her daughter hid her father’s affair hurt almost as much as the cheating — and the therapy meant to fix it only seemed to break them further

A 49-year-old woman on Reddit said the end of her marriage did not just leave her reeling from her ex-husband’s two-year affair. It also left her struggling to process the fact that her 22-year-old daughter had known about it and kept it from her. In a story later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that the betrayal from her ex shattered her, but the daughter’s silence created a second wound she could not seem to close. She said she still loved her daughter, still answered her calls, still showed up for events, and still supported her financially, but emotionally she had pulled back because every interaction brought the hurt rushing back.

The first wave of fallout turned ugly when the daughter saw a photo from a Disney trip the woman had taken with her new boyfriend, his daughter, her son, and other relatives. The daughter called crying and accused her mother of replacing her with a new family. The mother wrote that the call quickly turned into a fight over forgiveness, with the daughter insisting she had been only 17 when she found out about the affair and had been terrified of breaking the family apart. The woman’s ex-husband then got involved too, calling her selfish for “moving on” and accusing her of abandoning their daughter, even though he was the one who had blown up the marriage through the affair.

As the story unfolded, the mother said the damage between them went beyond the affair itself. In a later update, she described a relationship that had already been difficult before the cheating came to light, including years of conflict after the daughter was removed from school for severe bullying. She wrote that her own childhood experiences as a bullying victim made the incident especially painful and that she may have overcorrected in response, taking away electronics, monitoring homework use, requiring volunteer work, and putting her daughter in therapy. Even years later, she said, the resentment from that period never really went away, so the revelation that her daughter had also hidden the affair landed on top of old wounds that were already deep.

Trying to repair the relationship did not bring relief. The mother said she and her daughter began joint therapy, but instead of helping, the sessions quickly started reopening everything at once. She wrote that the therapist wanted them to air out years of grievances, “starting from childhood and moving forward,” and the process left her unable to sleep, emotionally raw, and increasingly convinced she was falling apart. In one post, she said therapy felt like it was tearing apart the fragile peace she had managed to rebuild and that she was “so fucking tired” she could barely breathe through it. Commenters on the BORU thread focused heavily on that therapy approach, with multiple people saying the process seemed to move far too fast for a relationship carrying this much betrayal and history.

The final update did not bring a big reconciliation. Instead, it sounded like a weary truce. The daughter chose to stop therapy, saying it was not helping, and the mother said she did not fight her on it because forcing healing had only pushed them further apart. They stayed in contact, but only on a surface level. The mother wrote that she had come to accept the possibility that the relationship might never fully heal, even though the door would remain open if her daughter ever wanted to meet her there. At the same time, she said her life outside that conflict was moving forward: she and her boyfriend were planning to move in together, and her son had gotten into a great college.

What made the story hit with readers was that it never turned into a neat forgiveness arc. It stayed messy the whole way through: a mother who loved her daughter but could not stop feeling betrayed, a daughter who said she was young and scared but also kept demanding that the pain should have faded by now, and a therapy process that seemed to leave both of them more bruised than before. By the end, the Reddit posts read less like a story about choosing sides and more like a story about what happens when one family betrayal exposes years of unresolved damage that no one really knows how to carry.

Here’s the original Reddit post.