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

Discovering that someone has secretly read your private thoughts can feel like a gut punch — and when that person is a parent, the betrayal can cut even deeper.

One Reddit user shared how a routine visit to her childhood home turned into something far more painful. While clearing out boxes in the attic, she came across a small stack of old notebooks.

“I kept journals from ages 13 to 22,” she wrote, “filled with everything… crushes, trauma, fights, secrets I never told anyone.”

But as she flipped through them, her stomach dropped. In the margins were her mother’s handwritten notes — underlines, comments, even corrections. What had once been a private record of her inner life now felt invaded and judged in ink.

When she confronted her mother, the response wasn’t apologetic. Her mom admitted reading them and said calmly, “I had to know what was going on with you. I’m your mother.”

She went further, calling her daughter “ungrateful” and insisting that parents “earn the right” to know their children’s inner world. Then came the line that shook the poster most: “If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t be upset.”

Since that moment, the woman says she’s been torn between anger and grief. Her mother keeps calling her, crying, and saying she “broke her heart.” Her sister has urged her to move on because their mom “meant well.”

But the poster can’t shake the feeling of violation.

“I feel sick. I feel exposed. I feel like my entire adolescence got read like a gossip magazine,” she wrote. “I don’t know how to forgive this. And I don’t know how to talk to her without wanting to scream. Am I overreacting, or is this as disturbing as it feels?”

In the comments, most readers were firmly on her side. Many called it a serious breach of trust and rejected the idea that a parent’s intention automatically makes it acceptable.

“That’s a huge breach of trust and your reaction makes complete sense,” one commenter wrote. “Reading a kid’s 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.”

Others said the annotations in the journals took the violation to another level.

“Reading was already a deep breach, but writing in the margins takes it to a whole other level,” another person pointed out. “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.”