r/CovertIncest

I (23) am currently going through the diagnostic process for (C)PTSD with a therapist for a lot of different issues from my childhood but i'm a little hung up on whether the way my mother treated me would be considered CI. here's a rambling list of some memories that have come back to me in recent months.

firstly, my parents would often walk around naked in the house / shower with the door open but that's not really all that serious i think. i feel it's relevant because when i was a teenager my mother would yell at me for covering up after i took a bath because it would teach my little brother to be ashamed of his own body(?). on the one hand i get that you wouldn't want to be too sex negative as a parent but on the other hand it went a little far.

when i was very young (under 10) she shared a lot of private information with me that i wouldn't consider appropriate to tell your child. she also often vaguely told me about her sex life, like how she and her friend always slept naked together and almost(?) had sex when they were drunk.

my mother was borderline obessed with giving me sex ed / talking about sex before i hit puberty. when i was around 8-10 years old she wanted me to watch them have sex (to teach me) and even though i refused she only gave it up because my dad didn't want to go through with it.

also around the same time when i was a little older (10-12?) she, being deep into new age spiritual bullshit, made me go through a ritual that involved a sexual element where she made me hold my genitals and promise / swear that i would bring people happiness and pleasure with them / my body.

when i was older (17-18) i started doing art commissions for friends but when they found out i was earning money for myself and had a paypal account they were CONVINCED i had to be doing online sex work, so under threat of evicting me they made me go through every file on my computer to prove i had no sexual images of myself on there / was selling that kind of content online. i have no idea why that was their first thought.

there are other things that happened but the memories are too vague to write them out for now

I don’t really know how to say this, but I’ve been holding it in for a long time and it’s starting to weigh on me.

Me and my sister have always been close. She’s 27 now, I’m 20, and we’ve basically been around each other my whole life. Same house, same routines—at one point even sharing the same room. It was always just normal, nothing I ever questioned.

But at some point, something shifted. I can’t even pinpoint exactly when it started—it just feels like things stopped feeling as simple as they used to.

The night that really stuck with me was when she came home drunk. I had been drinking a little too, and everything felt off. The boundaries that had always been there didn’t feel as clear in that moment, and something happened that shouldn’t have happened. Ever since that night, I haven’t been able to look at things the same way.

What’s been messing with me is not just what happened, but how I’ve felt about it since. I didn’t know how to react in the moment, and even now I keep going back and forth in my head—trying to understand if it was just a mistake, if it meant anything, or if I’m overthinking everything.

Part of me wants to ignore it completely, act like it never happened, and just move on. But another part of me keeps replaying it, trying to make sense of feelings I don’t fully understand or even want to have.

I haven’t told anyone about this. I’ve just been carrying it by myself, and it’s getting heavy. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, or how I’m even supposed to process something like this.

And what confuses me the most is that, even though I know it crossed a line and shouldn’t have happened, there’s a part of me that reacted in a way I don’t feel right about—and that’s been the hardest thing to come to terms with.