To deal with afflictive emotions, we must face them, deal with them, and let them be evacuated.

Take time now to think back over your life, and write a list (it might be very long) of all the emotional trauma and hurt that you experienced from your earliest memory until today. Write the details (even the ones that you have never told anyone about before, and maybe have even hidden from yourself). Then assign a number 1-10 (10 being the strongest. Our emotions need to be identified, fully felt, and expressed in order to be processed! To evacuate these painful emotions and let them go, I need to pour them out before God and let him heal them and take them from me.

For me, I have discovered that, in the process of silent meditation, God gradually exposes me to my unconscious negative and destructive emotions at a rate that I can handle and enables me to gradually let go and evacuate these and the false self that has been hurting me and others, and has been hindering my true created self from being fully realized and allowed to grow to greater maturity. I had been stuck in many emotional places where I had been deeply wounded. Facing my inner pain and gaining interior silence in increasing measure has led to deeper healing, greater serenity and growth in my maturity. I’m still in the process, like all of us are, but until our emotions are under our control, we remain stuck.