Your descriptions and stories of your mother sound so much like mine. Asiablue's post really resonates with me. As I began to put more boundaries into place with my mother (when I was your age, before therapy), the guilt trips and manipulation got worse and worse. It was hard for me to stop caving in to that. But it was good for my mental health and improved the interactions that I do have with my mother.

Speaking from my personal experience, I did a lot of questioning, minimizing, denying of the trauma of my childhood when I got into therapy. I think this was a defense that kept me from acknowledging my anger about it (the anger was there, though, boiling and seething, though I didn't know it) and kept me from mourning for what I can never go back and get. In your posts, I see a lot of internalizing and guilt. I seem to remember you saying that you used to be very angry until you learned to have compassion for your mother. But you can be both at the same time. I wonder if the compassion for your mother isn't a way of shielding yourself from feeling some very justified anger; that's how it was for me, anyway.