Mom Secretly Reads Daughter’s Private Journals, Says She Has a ‘Right’ to Know Her Inner Thoughts

Discovering that someone has read your private thoughts can be deeply shocking, especially when that someone is your parent.

One Reddit user recounted how a simple trip to her childhood home turned into an emotional ordeal after she found her old journals had been secretly read and annotated.

While cleaning out the attic and moving boxes, the woman found “a small stack of my old notebooks. I kept journals from ages 13 to 22, filled with everything… crushes, trauma, fights, secrets I never told anyone.”

To her horror, however, she discovered her mother’s “handwriting in the margins. Little notes. Comments. Underlines. Sometimes even corrections.” Journals that were meant to be private were suddenly filled with judgment and scrutiny.

When the user confronted her mother, she didn’t deny reading the journals. She said, completely calmly, “I had to know what was going on with you. I’m your mother.”

She insisted her actions were justified, calling her daughter “’ungrateful’ and that parents ‘earn the right’ to know their children’s inner world.”

“Then she said something that genuinely made my stomach drop: ‘If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t be upset.'”

Since then, the poster has struggled with how to respond. Her mother keeps calling, crying, and saying she “broke her heart,” while her sister suggests she should “just let it go” because their mom “meant well.”

Still, the poster admitted, “I feel sick. I feel exposed. I feel like my entire adolescence got read like a gossip magazine.”

“I don’t know how to forgive this. And I don’t know how to talk to her without wanting to scream,” she concluded. “Am I overreacting, or is this as disturbing as it feels?”

Commenters found the entire experience deeply unsettling and largely sided with the original poster, validating her feelings of betrayal.

“That’s a huge breach of trust and your reaction makes complete sense,” one user wrote. “Reading a kids journal isn’t parenting, it’s control and doubling down now is her trying to dodge accountability. You’re not responsible for managing her guilt or emotions.”

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Others commented on her mother’s annotations in the journals, with some even describing it as “diabolical.”

“Reading was already a deep breach, but writing in the margins takes it to a whole other level,” one user emphasized. “That’s not just snooping, that’s rewriting the narrative of someone else’s private thoughts. Then to twist it around and act like the victim? That’s manipulation, not parenting.”