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She never just has to let me feel something or deal with something on my own. She HAS to be a part of it in some way. She has to be involved. She won't let me process my own experiences because if I do she gets mad and says I'm being defensive. The truth is I just want to be my own person away from her and I don't feel like she has to know everything about me just because she's my mother. I am so frustrated with the way she disrespects my decision about what to talk about and what not to talk about.

I dont' know if any of that makes sense, but I hope it does.

I'm sorry oliviallamb… your mother sounds kind of like mine in that respect. When I was younger I used to feel obliged to tell her everything and that it was essential for "bonding"… but in reality it's not so much bonding as it is: controlling, enmeshing and preventing the other person from becoming their own, separate, individual.

I don't know if the same is true about your mother but mine always ended up making me regret telling her anything because she'd remember it all and somehow always find some way of using it against me, even years later… I have to admit, come to think about it, that there was a time when I used to love being enmeshed with her and because of that I used to want to tell her everything… but this made it simply impossible. The funny thing is that in the end it turned out that she had been keeping quite a few rather major, major secrets from me all along…

Anyway, I wish you a load of luck when it comes to setting boundaries with your mother about you having your own private matters that you keep to yourself. I wasn't strong enough for that and mostly just resorted to hiding things from her and that seriously wasn't fun.

That is the problem actually. Whenever I tell her information she always uses it against me in the future when she's angry. She doesn't see it that way though and if I tell her about it she acts insulted that I would suggest that she is trying to "compromise" me.

Ugh.