Hi Nichole:

Sorry for your loss and that you experience with your mother was so complicated. Its understandable that your having issues coming to terms with all the emotions and contradictions of the relationship. (Role reversals and the like)

When it comes our relationship to our mothers and fathers its indeed complex. Jung felt that one of the tasks of individuation and becoming an adult is to come to terms with the Mother/Father Complex. Often this is forced on us when we lose a parent.

The task is to take ownership of our ability to nurture and protect ourselves – in a symbolic way become our own mother and father. The difficulty is that our ability to nurture and protect ourselves has been greatly influenced by our relationship to our mother and father and sometimes we can’t separate the experience from our own abilities nurture and protect ourselves.

We take ownership by becoming conscious of our experience of our mother and our inner mother – Symbolically if we may have to overcome the ‘evil step mother’ the problem of overcoming the negative self judgment and internal dialog we might have. But even the To Good Mother must be dealt with as in this case we may have to over come a tendency to be overly trusting, naïve or the expectation that others will always nurture and take care of us.

The book ‘The Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed is a good example of coming to terms with the mother complex. Cheryl life spirals out of control when her to good mother (her idealization of her mother) died. With the loss of her mother Cheryl loss the ability to nurture herself in a positive way. It was only after Cheryl was able to see her mother as an individual, the good the bad and the ugly and not only “Mother” that she was able to connect to the positive inner mother and begin to be able to nurture herself.

Don’t be to hard on yourself as you work you way through this experience.