Joyful Commitment and loving Perseverance in consecrated life requires affective maturity and education of emotions. Often this is an area relegated to private sphere and many good missionaries suffer burn out due tensions arising from poor management of aggressiveness and affections. Research shows that higher levels of emotional maturity is related higher spiritual consciousness (studies on spiritual intelligence by Cindy Wigglesworth).

Formation in affective dimension too requires self-capacities such as:

Self-acknowledgment: Capacity to renew belief in one’s own wor­thiness and to acknowledge having effec­tively coped with a crisis or concern.

Spontaneity: Capacity to experience a wide range of feelings appropriately, deeply, and without blocking or deadening their impact.

 Self-soothing: Capacity to limit, minimize, and soothe painful affects without recourse to emotional numbing, depersonalization, or de-realization.

Intimacy: Capacity to express the self fully in a dose relationship with minimal anxiety or fears of rejection

Self-continuity: Capacity to recognize and to acknowledge that the inner self persists and is continuous through space and over time.

Creativity: Capacity to use the self to replace old familiar patterns with new, unique, and different patterns.

Autonomy: Capacity to regulate self-esteem and to be alone with minimal fear of abandonment or engulfment.

Virtues that supports affective transformation:

Compassion: Disposition that enables one to understand and respond with car­ing and concern to the other’s frame of reference.

Self-care: Disposition that eensures taking responsibility for one’s own psy­chological health and well-being, which is the expression of the virtue of self-love.

Spiritual practices that facilitate affective transformation:

Healing the heart and learning to love: It includes practices that leads to forgiveness; reconciliation; inner healing work and reframing fear, hurt, and anger. Meaningful celebration of the sacraments of reconcilitation is an effective spiritual means to affective transformation.