I feel like I hate my stepson

Lots of motherless boys get shipped off to boarding school by clueless fathers, they don’t all turn into creeps. I know two men who lost their mothers as children, the one that was sent to boarding school is better adjusted than the other, many factors involved so I’m not saying boarding school is a good thing just that it won’t be the only cause of your SS issues. It’s pretty clear this boy needed emotional support early on and his father doesn’t seem to have dealt with it.

However there is nothing you can do respectively about how things were handled or not by her DH in the early days.

You absolutely need to keep some boundaries in place now, so don’t remove your bedroom lock, I understand why he makes you feel uneasy. Right now he sounds a disturbed young man who likes to scare women and you don’t have to accept that. But boundaries need to be calm, firm and consistent.

Your DH needs to do family therapy with his DS. Your SS needs therapy but your DH needs to understand how his behaviour has contributed to the problems and how he can help improve things. Later you might need to be part of that family therapy but first your DH is going to need to put the work in and he needs to be honest and try to understand the underlying issues without blame or being defensive.

I find it very strange that you've been in this boy's life since he was 2 and yet you still very much see him as a stepson.

My daughter's father died when she was 2. DP has been in her life since she was 5, and living with her since she was 6. She is his daughter and he would never see or treat her as anything else, no matter what might happen.

It doesn't sound like an easy situation for anyone. But at the heart of it is a kid who lost his mum, spent the majority of his life living with someone he had to watch being a mother (but not to him), and was then sent away when things got tough. That's a lot of trauma.

I agree, he even talks about a dog he never had running away! Most therapists would have been curious about this as although he might be 'lying' about this it's actually an indication of feeling abandoned and rejected.

I would have thought that the therapist would have put this to his parents as OP lacks insight into this and just more blame that he was 'lying' etc.

The OP and DH need therapy first before SS as otherwise it might feel like he is the problem when it's likely to be the way he was parented.

He was 4 years of age when his sister left for college.

"Weed" is very strong nowadays. I've seen it trigger paranoid psychosis in young men, and they can be quite good at hiding it.

This boy sounds dangerous and I don't think you should be living with him. The underwear theft is sick and no woman should have to tolerate that.

However this boy is also very traumatised and in need of strong parenting. Agree with other posters that the DH should take the DSS away for a number of months and focus on him, have therapy etc.

Absolutely this- sounds like this poor boy has grown up with alot of abandonment and rejection, yet your DS is the golden boy.

The fact you clearly think a child CAN be 'awful' is telling and using the word 'Hate' seems unkind, although i'm not saying your situation isn't extremely challenging.

He should have had therapy many years ago to help him process the loss of his mum.... has he ever had much opportunity to talk about it? 16 is a tricky age for even a child who has had a relatively easy life, not alone one in his situation.
Losing a parent at whatever age will cause significant and lifelong trauma, even if he was too young to remember it, it will be there....there will be constant reminders and triggers that he doesn't have a mum, and these things usually peak in teenagers too.

Rather than clamping down on the heavy discipline, he needs reasonable boundaries aligned with compassion and understanding that he has faced the most horrible thing a child can go through, and no wonder life feels bloody hard because of it.

Step-parent or not you've shipped the poor kid off first pt then ft so you didn't have to deal with the problems as parents should. Poor poor kid, he will absolutely feel un wanted, un loved for years plus losing his own mum, he will absolutely feel like nothing compared to the other siblings. Absolutely no way you knew this kid well if he wasn't with yous for quite a time so he's turned to what makes him feel better bad stuff. If the disdain comes across just by what you've written to a stranger wow how much more so it will feel in person. Poor kid, you both have time to turn the relationship around by actually being parents. Never would I have treat my step children like this there all one and the same the kids together

He was lying to his therapist but really random lies like we had a dog that ran off because of DH and the therapist said he seemed really upset by it except it never happened, we have never even had a dog and he’s never asked for one or seemed interested in wanting one, quite the opposite actually.

So his mum died when he was a baby, his sister left when he was four and he lied to his therapist that he had a dog that ran off. Well thats a clear sign of a child that doesn't need therapy at all.

And also a pretty craoot therapist if they couldn't work out why he made up the dog to talk about loss.

He’s 16. His prefrontal cortex isn’t even half formed. There is plenty of time to turn this around.

And if it turns out he has or is developing a personality disorder, this is also reversible with the correct therapy.

And as I said, it comes from the adults first.

Are you taking on board that it isn’t the boy, who needs therapy in isolation??

Whatever he said, he said. And clearly if the therapist got upset, they’re not trauma based specialists and very ill equipped to deal with what your dss is going through.

The majority of the work needs to be put in by the adults, not the child. I know someone, who can help by zoom if your dss won’t engage in family therapy. Otherwise do face to face family therapy and work with the therapist alone until your dss is ready to join.

Serves me right I didn’t really look at the ages more this bit.

she still lives there and we see her a couple of times a year but she doesn't come here much, she's said she's sick of SS and has referred to him as DH’s “golden boy” and has said he lets him get away with anything to which DH shuts the conversation down.

If this lad was as bad as his sounds I’m not surprised the sister jumped at the chance to leave for college.

He was four years old when his sister left, hardly feels fair he's being blamed for her leaving.

Sounds like dad fucked up by over compensating when he was young because his mum died and that led to a child with no rules and boundaries.

He sounds like his struggling with being gay and violent porn, his stealing woman’s undies and leering at women making them uncomfortable.

He needs therapy and he needs to get a job frankly. Not just let to rot in his room.

Dad needs to stop running to his every tune like with the dinner incident.

If this lad was as bad as his sounds I’m not surprised the sister jumped at the chance to leave for college.

Ultimately though theory and a job or he needs to leave if he refuses because you cannot help someone who doesn’t want help till they hit their rock bottom and finally realise they need help.

Poor boy !!

So he lost his mother as a baby and then his sister moved out when he was four? And the stepmother talks about him like a EOW step child she hardly knows despite being the only mother figure he's had since being 2. And then the solution to him lying in therapy at some age between 12 and 16 was to stop therapy rather than double down on the support.

Exactly. Who would have thought it would get worse? So surprising!

I agree. Developmental trauma is trauma that's affected how the brain has structurally developed, because neutron pathways are built in response to the environment you live in.

You don't have to have a recallable memory to be affected by an early traumatic experience.

Please don’t opine on early childhood trauma when you obviously know nothing about it.
Study after study have shown that losing a parent before recallable memory is deeply affecting for children.

I think the time for really taking care of this boy has passed.

By ignoring his emotional needs and shipping him off to boarding school it sounds like you have created a young man with a personality disorder that will almost certainly be entrenched by now, making him a danger to others.

Unless it's possible to get him some intensive, long-term, maybe even in-patient therapy, all you can do is protect the peace of your household however you can.

How about you all stop saying how much you hate him and this includes his sister and step brother.Try to engage with him ,find a commen interest .Do things as a family this boy is crying out for something.Agree there needs to be consequences for bad behaviour,but you all need to try talking to him.

I’m not so much offended as angry. So many posters dismissing a child’s trauma because he was apparantly too young to know. He was a toddler, not a doll. It’s as if John Bowlby et al never existed.

Children who experience childhood loss, particularly parental berevement, can have poorer outcomes as adults - whatever the age at the time of bereavement parental death leaves a massive scar. I’ve said this before and been jumped on - not ALL bereaved children will experience poorer outcomes, but as a group they are statistically much more at risk for poor educational outcomes, enduring mental illness, substance misuse, inability to form healthy adult relationships etc.

it is very hard for me to read some of these posts in 2026 when there are so many supports out there for bereaved children and their families. A quick google is all it takes -

https://www.childbereavementuk.org/

https://www.griefencounter.org.uk/

https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org/

https://www.cruse.org.uk/

https://www.childrensbereavementcentre.co.uk/pages/category/impact?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23587040628&gbraid=0AAAABC2ThzDRbJh5jGY7b3muOWKgalhx1&gclid=CjwKCAjwtp7VBhBjEiwAJfpV-0nXzPGPU5gJx1I6M7nnYzAXkh1mg2MtDPIbM9JPoUioemIWe38cfhoChAAQAvD_BwE

Op - this sounds like an extremely difficult situation and I’m sure things were done with the best of intentions but perhaps a lack of understanding of the impact of parental loss on a toddler and the continuing impact throughout life.

if I were you and Dh I would seek support now for both of you first to help you both understand the impact of childhood parental bereavement. This will help you to understand how you can support ss and get him the help he needs.

I think he will need to hear, from you both, that you did your best but with the benefit of hindsight you would have done things differently, that you did not understand the impact of such a significant loss on a child.

Be aware also that he himself may not be able to verbalise how the loss has impacted him, he may have built a narrative that he’s fine, he can’t remember etc.

Both individual and family therapy is the ideal for all of you - with the family therapy preferably including your ds and sd at points too as the whole family has been impacted. Your sd will also be one fit from you and Dh having a better understanding and you might find she needs more support around her loss too.

His behaviour may well be entrenched at this point and is not going to change overnight, but with the right guidance and support for all of you hopefully things will improve drastically over time.

Educate yourself on early childhood trauma. Kids don’t need to have recallable memories of an event to suffer because of it.

He sounds extremely troubled, he’s screaming out for any type of attention he can get. He’s obviously in a lot of pain inside to want to cause everyone else discomfort, I don’t think he’s doing it to be ‘bad’ I think he’s just carrying too much pain and confusion and doesn’t know where to put it. I’d try therapy again regardless of the lies explain the situation to the therapist and see if they can break through the walls and actually help him, make sure he goes and explain that he will continue to go until he leans into the support that he needs. You say he never talks about his mum but that might be part of the problem too, does he want to talk about his mum? Could your husband do something special for his mum just the 2 of them? Try and encourage some discussion if he has anything on his chest it needs to come off. And having a safe space with his dad might encourage this.