"she sees YOU are her bad self" Right. It is the projection of her unwanted disowned self. The NM defines your personhood growing up and the task is to own back your personhood through self ownership of our ideas, beliefs and even our own N traits and faults that resemble our mother's; it is quite a task to weed through all, the question being what is mine stuff and what was hers. I can so relate. I still have blind spots, my own anger is always one blinding force in my life.
My NM defined my realty for me as well as who I was. It is the peeling of the onion layer that we so talked about here. And, as you said, underneath all of those nasty smelly layers is a beautiful soul.
I, like you, have stared hard at the ugly parts of self long enough to allow them to lose their power over me in terms of shame, at least not has much shame as in the past. That has been the trick, the more that I could see me, looking at me first, the more clearly I could see the abuse of my mom and others clearly for what it was, I think that I had to shed or weed my "ugly coats" first before I could start to see my NM mom clearly and then forgive her more.
