I also know what it is like to be betrayed again and again by my family.

Just tonight I rang my father to tell him I’d found the mother and her child that my sister had denied was the result of a union with her deceased son 18 years ago.

I know, it sounds positively Dickensian.

My father had asked me to find out the woman’s name and details a week ago. I needed to speak to my youngest sister to get those details. I had recently discovered that I had been told what appears to have been a series of lies that repudiated the baby’s paternity and maligned the mother’s character.

My nephew’s superannuation appears to have been the reason the mother’s claim was rejected. My youngest sister provided the contradictory evidence. She then volunteered to find the current whereabouts of the woman and her child., but I felt she was going to procrastinate as she has done before.

My dad had asked me to find out the identity and name of the mother with a view to knowing more about her and her child.

Today I rang my father with the news he had been looking for; I had found her. My father crossly said, “Now what did you do that for?” I replied, “Because it is the right thing to do and you asked me to!” He then gave me a long spiel about how unfair I had been to put the matter onto my sister who “already had far too much on her plate”.

He went on to repeat even more negative information about the young woman told to him by my youngest sister, suggesting she had not only one extra boyfriend to my deceased nephew, but two. This is new gossip about the woman.

I really feel that both my sisters have consistently slandered this woman. There is simply too much information that is sordid and too much of it is contradictory.

Both sisters have revealed a propensity to lie in the past.

My youngest sister told my father that the woman had never reached out to the family. That is simply not true. She reached out to both my sisters and two of my nieces, inviting them to her son’s Christening, but they all rebuffed her. I repeatedly tried to explain to my father that my sister had volunteered to find the woman.

I had later decided to go ahead as well as my sister had been very unclear about when, as well as where she would look for the woman and now 18 year old child. She has a history of making commitments and not following through on them.

Once again I feel betrayed by my sister. As a result of talking to my youngest sister, my father has decided that this woman is evil and she would only bring problems to the family.

He is no longer interested in knowing her and her child even though there is a strong possibility that the child is his great-grandson.

It has been years since I have had anything to do with my sisters. I only recently, at my father’s request began seeing them again.

Despite helping both of them almost whenever they’ve asked me, they have ganged up on me time and time again. They demonize me and do not speak to me for years at a time

Friends warned me not to get too involved with my sisters again this time. I think they were right. Now my youngest sister is laying low and won’t even answer the phone to me.

This is all taking place at the same time as I am taking care of her adult son, rent/board free who has had a lot of issues.

I despair of ever getting through to my sisters. I really feel they both suffer from borderline personality disorder. The youngest one is too easily led by the older one. I have realised that I am completely out-of-step with both of them because I have a totally different value system.

I am about doing the right thing. My sisters operate on the basis of expediency and self-interest. They are about “letting sleeping dogs lie” as my father said.

I am also really cross with my father. He may be an old man, but he knows right from wrong and he had been fully supportive of my quest before my youngest sister got into his ear. He really will not think things through for himself.

I have decided that I am going to go ahead and contact this woman and meet her son and judge the situation for myself, without telling the rest of the family.

My nephew, currently living with me, is 100% supportive of me, saying that his mother is too easily poisoned in her thinking by my other sister. He agrees that it is the right thing to do to contact the woman and her son to find out the truth and establish an ongoing relationship if at all possible.

~Julie-Anne Bennett

I truly, truly understand what the people who are betrayed by their families are going through.

I have been betrayed by my daughter and son-in-law. They were experiencing cash flow problems, so I lent them a lot of money in good faith, thinking that of course, they would pay me back.

However, all I’ve had in return for my generosity is lies and deceit. Whenever I try to broach the subject of the money with my daughter she gets very abusive, and I just end up feeling devastated.

I’m 61 and was relying on that money to help me in my retirement, but they have cleaned me out. They are better off now. Far better off than me. But it looks as if, sadly, I’m not going to get my money back.

I’m heartbroken.

I have no other family to turn to.

One of my sisters lives on the other side of the world and the other lives in a different part of the country, and she doesn’t want to be seen as the bad aunt by supporting me, which is ironic because my daughter can’t stand her and her family. Not that my sisters and I were ever close in the first place. My mother made sure of that!

My daughter also makes it very difficult for me to see my grandchildren, so it’s a double whammy of betrayal. I don’t think she has said a kind word to me in years, even though I have tried my best to be a supportive mother. I know that I’ve done a lot more for her than some mothers I know would do for their children, so I just don’t get it!

Why? Why? Why?

My daughter is toxic beyond belief. She told me recently that she is happier not having me in her life. Of course, if I’m not in her life, she won’t have to pay me back will she?

I know that I’ve just got to accept that she is lost to me. Being without family is indeed a very lonely place to be.

With that in mind, I would like to start a support network for like-minded people. Is there anything this site can do to help me in this endeavor?

~Lynn Dean

I’m crying after reading How to Get Over Betrayal by Family.

My whole life I tried to be the good daughter but the harder I tried the more my family beat up on me. I was the scapegoat.

Every single success I had was met with name calling or criticism or beatings.

Even as an adult, I was treated differently from my siblings.

There was one point in my life where my sister betrayed me and my children then I found out through my father, so matter of factly, that he and my mother were also behind it.

One could say I was conspired against. The worst part about this was I was just on the crux of ‘making it’ it a very competitive industry. They sabotaged me so badly that I was in financial ruin and couldn’t attend a huge presentation for one of my projects. I missed something so special to me. I had been working on it for years. But that wasn’t the end of it.

Even from afar they would call people up and tell them what a rotten mother I was.

My mother died recently and nobody bothered to tell me. Not that I shed a tear since I can’t imagine my worst enemy doing what she did to me throughout my childhood. But again, my siblings probably raided the house. She died without ever saying she was sorry or was proud of me or loved me.

This happens to a lot with people. And since we still go by ‘honour your parents’, people don’t talk about the abuse and betrayal at the hands of their own family.

This leads to self-blame and a continuation of attracting saboteurs.

I told my doctor, I get better treatment from strangers than my own family. Knowing my history, she said she wasn’t surprised.

In my case, I will probably never see any of my family again. Which, logically, I know is the right thing for me, but I still need to give up and truly mourn the dream of ever having a loving father and siblings.

~MK