Only when a person has been freed of this identification with his problems can he face them objectively and transform them into good. The evil within man is truly evil only when it is enveloped in a stigma of total hopelessness and unassailablity. T he three terms, silence, severing, and speech, describe the acts the individual performs in relation to the phenomenon of his psyche which he is confronting. T he Ba'al Shem Tov introduced a second triplet of terms, which describes the same process in terms of the inner psychological process the individual undergoes as he relates to and reacts to the situation confronting him. This triplet is submission, separation, and sweetening.
Submission refers to the humbling of the ego effected by silencing the inner turbulence of thought.
Separation is the process through which evil is isolated, severed from the good, and discarded. Sweetening is the reevaluation of reality in the positive light of the liberated kernel of good that had been trapped inside the evil. By reducing the magnitude of the ego in general, the magnitude of the person's problems dwindles concomitantly. I gnoring anxiety, the second phase of therapy we have described, is the ability of a person to sever his emotional and conceptual ties to the evil within him. As we have noted, this is done by forcefully choosing to fill the mind with positive thoughts, ideally of Torah but also of any optimistic nature.