Our relationship to our mothers and fathers are very complex. Part of the path of individuation/becoming requires the coming to terms with our mother and father complexes. This involves recognising your parents as individuals with hopes and fear, failures and successes… as well as repressive of the idea of mother and father – nurturer, protector, teacher, discipline…

As an archetype, the mother points to nurturing, growth and unconditional love (not to be mistaken for unconditional allowing)
When we connect to this archetype energy in a positive way we learn how to nurture and nourish ourselves, we learn how to love ourselves. When we relate to the archetype negatively the mother becomes the “step mother” the negative self talk that we repeat telling ourselves how horrible we are…. Becoming unable to nurture and love ourselves.

Our parents become our first projections of the archetype of mother and father as well as our mother and father. Part of the task of becoming requires that we separate our experience of our mother, as an individual, human, issues of her own and as the ideal we hold of the ‘mother’. Doing so we learn to become our own mother, our own nurturer. You appear to be well into this process

An apology from you mother the individual who failed to provide you the nurture you needed (but also must have succeeded as you seem to have developed the strength to overcome) may or may not help you but in my opinion is dependent on your mother’s personal growth. Sometimes we can only give ourselves what others cannot give us even a apology.

Anyway, you may find the book helpful ‘Shame and Grace Healing the Shame we Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. Lewis B. Smedes

Dear Megan:

Your mother did not only not help you with your years of eating disorder, she harmed you with her shaming comments. Her lack of empathy and her hostility toward you, evident in the comments you listed here, indicate to me that her lack of empathy toward you and her hostility toward you (her intent, evident, to cause you hurt)- extended beyond her comments about your disordered eating, and probably is a good part of the cause you developed the anxiety that is in the core of your bulimia/ disordered eating.

In your last post you wrote: “I need to learn how to not attach judgment to the way my mom raised me.”-

If you don’t attach judgment to the way your mother raised you, specifically, if you don’t attach the judgment that it was and is wrong to SHAME you and hurt you like she did, then what will stop you from hurting yourself more, and letting others hurt you?

You need to judge her behavior as wrong so to keep such behavior out of your life!

Please do post again.

anita

Dear Megan:

For your own healing, you need someone to have empathy for you.

Of course, “clearly something is going on inside of her that caused to react in that way during my times of need.”- there is always something going on, a distress going on in a person right before they intentionally inflict injury to another- but once committing the injury, it is the injured deserving and NEEDING the empathy.

If your mother went to therapy, it would be appropriate for the therapist to express empathy to your mother. It is in the context of the abused- the abuser, that it is not appropriate (counter productive to healing) for the abused to express empathy for the abuser.

I am all for her shaming comments not having power over you. This is why I am recommending you have empathy for yourself and not for the one shaming you.

You wrote: “I think anyone could shame me, it’s whether or not I give power to them for doing so.”-

when you were a child, you didn’t give your mother the power to shame you or not. She abused the power she had, as your Mother, as the authority figure in your life, as the person you dearly loved, so to shame you. It is not possible for a child to not take a parent’s shaming comments to heart, deeply.

I don’t think that now, as an adult, you can retroactively undo the shaming of her comments. You have to heal from those, over time, with help and work.

anita

Dear Megan:

I think that healing for you is to learn who your mother is, no longer seeing her from the desperately needy child, a child needing her mother and seeing her in the best possible light so to feel safe around her, but to see her as she is.

So, let’s say you tell her, “mom, I felt shame when you asked me if I enjoyed my binge.”

Here are a few possibilities for her response (not exact words, of course):

1. You are overly sensitive. I meant nothing by it.

2. I must have been in a bad mood. Can’t always be in a good mood.

3. You were bingeing like crazy! It was embarrassing to look at!

4. Are you criticizing me? After all I did for you….

5. Oh, I am sorry (and move on to another subject, or just leave the room).

Numbers 1-4 mean your mother is not the kind of person to support your healing. Keeping a relationship with her will hinder your healing.

Number 5 means the same as the above, but here is the trap: you hear “I am sorry”- three words said in a couple of seconds. And you think: Yes! She apologized! My mother is wonderful after all! I am so getting closer to her now! Such thinking on your part will be incorrect. An “I am sorry” or any response that does not include her asking you to tell her more about how you felt then and how it affected you since, is inadequate and meant to shove something she finds unpleasant under the carpet.

Would you like to compose here a possible answer on her part that will satisfy you, that a relationship with her can help your healing?

anita