If we want to set our lives right and find peace, it is not the tolerant attitude of others that will do it for us. It will come about, rather, by our learning how to show compassion to them. If we try to avoid this hard struggle of compassion by preferring a withdrawn and solitary life, we will simply drag our unhealed obsessions into solitude with us. We might well have hidden them. We certainly will not have eliminated them. If we do not seek liberation from our obsessions, then becoming more withdrawn and less social may even make us more blind to them, since it can mask them. (John Cassian)

Cassian sounds like a precursor of Sigmund Freud. We do not progress by suppressing.

Retreat, even into the arms of God, is no relief if we bring the cause of suffering with us.

Unlike Freud, however, I will not be healed by focusing more and more on myself. Rather it is through cultivation of compassionate relationships with others that I will purge myself of obsessions.