Understanding this anecdote, after I wrote it up nicely with the intent of making the power of it cognitively intelligible, is completely different from being a therapist, sitting with a patient's experience in the moment and feeling enough empathy to say the thing he said.

No doubt it's possible to reason your way into the same ideas and even share them with a client. What I'm trying to tell you is that the power of the moment was entirely in the fact that he didn't explain anything to me. He felt what I was feeling and expressed his personal emotional reaction to it, which happened to be profoundly empathic. The fact that he felt it was healing.

And you can't fake that. No amount of smarts can get you from "what does that mean for you" to "what does that mean for all of us" spoken in that tone within those few seconds. Don't let Sherlock fool you.