For those of us who seek a villain in every story, find someone to blame, the mother here takes on that role. Aside from some momentary gratification, finding and blaming a villain, seeking some kind of vengeance, serves little purpose. Vengeance exists as a meaning perspective which brings with it doubtful value. We can understand that the mother perceives, responds, and acts out of a very powerful, identity defining meaning perspective. She acts out of her meaning perspective and conception of motherhood. She also acts out of love.
This mother, who worked her way through her own struggles with conformity and individuation, feels that the child for whom she cares will wander far enough away from the mainstream to be seen, forever, as a misfit. Such a role takes on some very uncomfortable characteristics for the identified misfit. Such people become permanent exiles in relation to the mainstream. Worse than an actual exile, these misfits feel the sting of the otherness of the exile but from no country that exists in the world. Although she may not have thought about this directly at the time, she would essentially feel the truth of the role of the exile and the misfit: misfits and exiles rarely feel the comfort of the clear recognition of unconditional positive regard. Paradoxically, one more time, at the same time the mother wishes to show her unconditional positive regard for Silvia, she has to withdraw the unconditional positive regard to do so. That may well come as a painful paradox for anyone in a position of offering unconditional positive regard and still do things for others which we perceive, often through an unquestioned meaning perspective, as the right and even loving thing for the good of the other person. We withdraw the unconditional even as we feel that we give the unconditional.
In this light, in our recognition of the determinative power of unexamined and unquestioned meaning perspectives, we may perceive that very few absolute villains really exist. That doesn't mean that evil doesn't get done by certain people. It means that we can understand those acts more complexly than we have before. When we do that, we can still deplore and condemn the evil itself, and still try to work with the actor in such a way as to keep us within the moral sphere as much as possible.[114] This also allows us to reflect on our own questionable actions, actions that have caused unwanted results or harmful results, in a much more productive, gentle, and forgiving manner. In our search to return to the becoming self, it will help extraordinarily if we can see the forces within us that prevent that return. Those forces stem from our meaning perspectives and from the manipulation of our perceptions and conceptions of the world and ourselves by these meaning perspectives.