His old attachments are hard; complexes of which he is hardly aware must be broken up before he can use the forces which they enchain.

He must, then, examine without flinching his impulsive life, and know what is in his heart, before he is in a position to change it.

"The light which shows us our sins," says George Fox, "is the light that heals us." All those repressed cravings, those quietly unworthy motives, those mean acts which we instinctively thrust into the hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought to the surface and, in the language of psychology, "abreacted"; in the language of religion, confessed.

The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges on this question of abreacting painful or wrongful experience instead of repressing it.

The broken and contrite heart is the heart of which the hard complexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and their elements brought up into consciousness and faced: and only the self which has endured this, can hope to be established in the free Spirit.
It is a process of spiritual hygiene.
Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keeping skeletons in the cupboards of the soul, the importance of tracking down our real motives, of facing reality, of being candid and fearless in self-knowledge.