how to annotate an entity with a list of itself in it using Hibernate Annotation

I have a category entity that has a category as parent and a list of category as child. here's it's declaration:

@Entity
 @Table(name="CATEGORYENTITY")
 public class CategoryEntity extends BaseEntity<Long> {
     private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
 
     @Id
     @GeneratedValue
     @Column(name="ID")
     private Long id;
 
     @Column(name="NAME")
     private String name;
 
     @Column(name="VIEWSCOUNT")
     private Integer viewsCount;
 
     @OneToMany(fetch=FetchType.EAGER, cascade={CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE, CascadeType.REFRESH})
     @Cascade(org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE)
     @JoinColumn(name="CATEGORY_ID")
     private List<CategoryEntity> childCategories;
 
     @ManyToOne(fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
     @JoinColumn(name="CATEGORY_ID")
     private CategoryEntity parent;
 
 setters and getters...
 

It works fine when saving and updating but when try to get all of the categories... for each child returns a parent too!!! I mean if i have a mainCat and this mainCat has 4 child for example, when getting all categories from db, it returns all of the four child and surprisingly 4 mainCat... the weird part is that returned objects are correct and their properties are set correct and 4 mainCat are same!!! what should I do?

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