meaning of "in terms of" in the below sentence

I am translating a book called "Missing Out" by Adam Philips. In the text below I need to understand what does the "in terms of" means. Please note that I know the usual meaning of the phrase as you can find it in every dictionary but I cannot understand and fit that phrase in the below text. So please have a read and let me know what can you understand.
This text need some reflection and thinking as the language of the book is hard and not straightforward.

Not getting this coincidence of his mother’s words and his actions was
a formative anguish for him; his getting me, whether or not it was his
intention – and my guess is that it was an unconscious probe to find
out which group I belonged to, which gang I was in – was a formative
link. His reference to Walden made me feel we had a shared world. Both
experiences you will notice are fantasies of understanding, what we
might call the promise of knowing things in common; though it would be
difficult to describe what kind of experience this knowing was, or
indeed whether it was a kind of knowledge. The art teacher needs to
know, to understand, what is going on between him and his mother (and
in terms of what might be going on between me and him); I might think
that I don’t need to know what’s going on between him and me because
in speaking Walden we seem to be on the same page, even though we are
quite different people and have only just met.

note: the bold effect is applied by me