We also go one crucial step farther: we experience reality as if it were also morality. We begin to believe that any wish for special caretaking and love is forbidden, off-limits, as if it meant asking for too much, for something we aren’t supposed to have. We not only have to accept neglect, but we must make it seem as if the fault lies with us, n

Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop

In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me. • There was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from ev