She can even be brought to see empathy as essentially the same thing as helping. In the long run, empathy can become a substitute for either physical assistance (meals or mercifully timed babysitting) or spiritual assistance (praying with someone, offering a word of advice from the Book that might invite her friend out of the quagmire of emotion, etc.). Her “help” can be reduced to a one-size-fits-all program of listen and agree, listen and agree. And, in the end, you get two people swimming about in emotional backwater instead of one.
