In her brief but well-received acting career, singer Jill Scott has portrayed a Botswanan private investigator, a scorned wife who finds redemptive love and real-life blues legend Big Mama Thornton. But her latest role — as an alcoholic mother seeking her daughter’s forgiveness in the midst of a difficult recovery — may be the most personal to date.

Herself the daughter of a woman who was physically abused by a heavy-drinking husband (“The scars were deep,” she said of that experience, and “the images and the memories from all of that still haunted me for years”), Scott first considered preparing for the role of Nona in “Sins of the Mother,” airing Feb. 21 on the Lifetime Movie Network, by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

However, a series of chance encounters with people who have been endured similar challenges — of eight such meetings, one was on a plane and another was in line at a home improvement store — gave the Philadelphia native the insight she needed to excel in a role that requires her to depict a range of emotions. While acknowledging that it was often exhausting to be called upon to express anger, sadness, confusion, happiness and fear while portraying Nona, Scott said the experience was not unlike the emotional paces in her own personal life.

“I’m the type of person where if I feel something … I allow myself to have those feelings,” she said. “I can look at my characters and remember rage because I’ve felt it — I’m not searching for something that I’ve never felt before. I know fear, I know exhaustion, I know grief, I know happiness. And because I have investigated those feelings, I can let them slide out. That’s how I have created my art thus far.”

This self-examination was key to perfecting the role, because the emotions displayed on the screen come from a real place. But could she truly relate to alcoholism if she was never been through it herself? Those chance meetings, which occurred over the course of a month, were key to the process. For reasons that even she cannot fully explain, Scott said conversations on innocuous topics — such as the weather, or the price of an item — blossomed into meaningful testimonials. She walked away with a deeper understanding of her character.

“I noticed that nobody had a problem with talking about it,” said Scott. “They are people who are in recovery that are proud that they are in recovery, that are proud that they’ve made the necessary steps.”

Emotion-wise, the mother-daughter dynamic is a beast in itself, said Scott, “then you add a disease like alcoholism to it and you have memories of being left, of being hurt, of your parents being more concerned about that next drink than about you. When I watched it — even when I read the script — I enjoyed it because I understood [the daughter’s] point of view, I understood why she was angry and she had every right to be; to be cold, to be distant, to be confused about being a woman, because her mother wasn’t there and now she’s trying her best to recover, you don’t necessarily as a daughter accept that or forgive so easily.”

Still, Scott strives to incorporate those small mercies into her own life. Not long after her first album was released in 2001, she called the hard-drinking man who had been violent with her and her mother — fortunately, she and her siblings were removed from the situation when Scott was about 5-years-old — and expressed to him how his actions had nearly broken her spirit. Then she offered forgiveness and left it at that. The pain remains, she said, but by forgiving him she was able to move on.

This is a practiced behavior, one that Scott herself is still trying to master. Over the past couple of years, she has given birth to a child, gone through a divorce, and broken off an engagement. She has found a sense of release by pouring these experiences into her music. When her new album, “The Light of the Sun,” is released later this year, listeners will hear a catharsis that even Scott herself found surprising.

“It’s the truest place that I’ve ever been. What you hear is the truth, it wasn’t written at all, it all came out like a burst,” she said. “I didn’t think I would say the things I had said. I don’t even think I was prepared to say the things that I said. If I tried to write them then something would have blocked me… It’s a huge peeling and lift off of my shoulders.”