Dear Erin:

Welcome back to your thread and congratulations for moving out and for having no intention to move back in.

You wrote: “after moving out I am juuust starting/about to start to heal my relationship with her”-

My response to this quote: oh, oh… a pitfall here. I will explain:

A child falsely believes she is responsible for a judgmental parent …and if she corrects her faults, then her mother will approve of her. An adult child, most often, carries on this false belief.

It reads to me like now that you are feeling so much better, way less anxious, more hopeful, having made significant progress, that you believe that now, having corrected yourself, you can make your mother approve of you.

Your mother is still the same judgmental person that caused you to be “ashamed of feeling ‘bad’ or confusing feelings… to be alone with my struggles, and to tense up and limit emotions…unwilling to risk doing anything that may allow me to be (emotionally) hurt by my mum…” (in your February post). She has not changed, has she? She is not the one who moved out and made the changes you made. It is you who moved out, you… not her.

I believe that every effort you make “to heal (your) relationship with her” – however intoxicating the prospect, and however intoxicating it will feel for a moment here and there- will backfire at you and harm you. The result will be not that you heal your relationship with her (it was never harmed by you and cannot be healed by you!), but that you will make yourself sick.

Focus on your life, leave your relationship with your mother alone, in the past. Interact with her if you choose, but a healthy relationship- I would let that idea go.

anita