Questions such as, “When did this begin?” constituted the most frequent response; they give the appearance that the professional is obtaining the information necessary to diagnose and then treat the problem. In fact, such intellectual understanding of a problem blocks the kind of presence that empathy requires. When we are thinking about people’s words and listening to how they connect to our theories, we are looking at people—we are not with them. The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing. This quality of presence
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I guess the difference between sympathy and empathy, to Marshall, is sympathy means you're in your own feelings (resonating from theirs) instead of in presence with theirs .... I wish he would spell this out more clearly as i think there's something profound here
