QUOTE : To feel safe, the child must maintain an idealized image of a parent who is loving, nurturing, and invincible. Recognition of real shortcomings in the parent would threaten to destroy the fantasy bond and the imagined self-sufficiency it provides. If children were to find fault with their parents and see them as lacking, their situation would truly be hopeless. To defend against the realization that their parents are inadequate or even threatening, children deny their parentsʼ limitations and failings and instead conceive of themselves as bad or unlovable. Children develop an internal split and come to view themselves as a combination of the good, omnipotent parent and the bad, needy child. The more they retain the division of this dualistic notion, the more dysfunctional their actual relations are with others. The more pseudo-independent and reliant on fantasy children are, the more dependent and helpless they become in the real world and the more they feel the need to be taken care of (R. W. Firestone, 1997a, 1997b).