When a son says to his father, “You don’t understand!” he may mean, “I can’t show you my feelings because you can’t handle them.” He is protecting his father from ever having to face those frightening feelings. We may stay in this role all our lives, implicitly believing that some people are too fragile to receive our feelings. When we despair of mirroring and of the possibility of trusting in others, we despair of the very things that make intimacy possible. Intimacy is mutual mirroring.
