I realized I let my family walk all over you, he said, because I was too weak to stand up to them, and I’m sorry, and I need help learning how to not be that, because I don’t think I know how on my own.

And that, more than the no to his father, was what made me reach across the table and take his hand, because it is one thing for a man to win a single argument with his father in a flush of anger, and quite another for him to admit, soberly, in his own kitchen, that the pattern went deeper than one dinner and that he could not fix it by himself and was willing to sit in a room with a stranger and be told uncomfortable things about his own character in order to change.

People do not grow from being told flattering things.

They grow from hearing, from someone who loves them, the one true thing they have spent years arranging their life so as never to have to hear, and then deciding not to flinch away from it.