Why Discomfort Is the Beginning of Growth: Four Ways the Psyche Pushes for Change
Updated: Oct 1
Have you ever noticed that you’re not that motivated to change when life feels good? When we're reasonably happy or satisfied, we tend to keep doing what has worked, driven by an innate preference for the familiar and comfortable over the unknown. In this way, happiness can become psychologically conservative, encouraging preservation rather than expansion.
For change to be appealing, something else usually has to be present. Some pressure or disruption to the equilibrium of our lives. Long before our conscious mind feels a desire to shift, our souls may begin to want something more, sending signals that trigger discomfort, discontent, or pain to push for growth or change.
Here are four common catalysts that push us towards change. Each one disturbs the flow of the status quo. And each one, if we are willing to listen beneath the surface, may reveal where the psyche is ultimately trying to lead.
Ennui: When Life Feels Empty
We've all encountered passing periods of boredom when our current circumstances lacked sufficient stimulation to spark our interest, such as sitting in a waiting room or performing a mundane task at work. But what does it mean if that's not a passing, time-limited or circumstance-limited feeling but something more pervasive?
In our technological age, ennui is perhaps the easiest catalyst to dismiss. It can so readily be muffled through "cotton-candy" entertainment like social media and streaming services which may help to distract but can't fill us. But ennui can be a form of psychic intelligence. Nothing may be obviously wrong in our job, relationships, roles, or routines, yet something crucial is missing. Chronic boredom may be the soul's way of telling us that something has become too empty of meaning or too disconnected from our wellspring of vitality.
Since ennui can lead in different directions depending on one's personal risk tolerance and commitment levels, understanding it requires the use of discernment rather than reflexive action. For some, the desire to avoid feeling bored or empty drives an almost compulsive search for novelty. Whenever a job, relationship, or situation loses the exciting sheen of newness, the novelty-seeker flees to the next thing, relying on newness to provide a sense of life rather than fostering a deeper, longer-lasting sense of internal meaning and purpose. For others, particularly those who are cautious about risk or afraid of change, boredom may be ignored while they tell themselves, "People want exactly what I have, so I should be happy."
Despite the unexciting surface, boredom is an invaluable emotional energy to work with because it points toward the places where life has become flattened, automatic, or insufficiently meaningful. Sometimes it asks us to invest more deeply to our higher values in our everyday, to renew our relationship with creativity, or to more mindfully engage in our routines. Other times it asks us to risk shaking the "fine" life up and allowing something new to enter. To receive the wisdom ennui offers, it requires a willingness to stop distracting ourselves from the emptiness we feel and to spend long enough with that emptiness to discover what is missing.
Desire: The Compass of Longing
Desire is another force that can unsettle the status quo, pointing toward something we want but don't yet have. While we often associate desire with a good feeling, it's easy to forget how torturous it can be, particularly when we aren't sure we can have what we crave.
At its best, desire is a profoundly moving force. Our ambitions, creative pursuits, relationships, and life goals are often animated by it. Desire gives direction and energy, catapulting us out of inertia and into participation with life. However, as many have learned the hard way, unbridled pursuit of desire can become destructive and lead to immense regret. We may confuse the intoxication of desire with a sense of destiny or fall prey to the myth that we will feel complete if we can only acquire that person, thing, or life goal.
Desire and its various iterations (e.g., lust, envy, ambition, passion, pining) always point toward something we need but not always in the form we first imagine. Many a person has become convinced that becoming rich will make them happy and have chased that without ever realizing that what they wanted was a sense of inner worth that doesn't come through material possessions. Still others have found themselves in the throes of relationships that felt obsessive and unhealthy because they lacked the insight into what they were seeking in the other person. Sometimes, it needs to be translated into psychological meaning.
Because of the pull of attraction, it can be easy to chase the literal version while missing the symbolic one. By shifting to a symbolic perspective, desire becomes not merely something to satisfy or deny, but something to learn from. The symbolic understanding also often clarifies whether the desire is worth pursuing literally or keeping figurative.
Suffering: The Crucible of Transformation
If boredom or desire can prompt wanted change, suffering often indicates unwanted change. Sometimes it’s forced on us by outside circumstances, such as trauma, the loss of a loved one, getting laid off from a job, or developing an illness or injury that upends the way we had expected life to go. This kind of suffering can shatter our sense of self and the way we see the world, forcing us to reorganize and rebuild ourselves in the aftermath.
Other times, suffering comes when change is forced from within. Depression, lack of motivation, or inner deadness can signal that some part of the psyche has withdrawn its energy from the way life has been organized. Like ennui, these forms of suffering may protest the status quo long before the conscious mind knows what needs to change.
Because suffering is painful, our first impulse is often to numb it, distract from it, or make it disappear as quickly as possible. When supported and approached with care, suffering can become a threshold: a place where old ways of being can loosen and fall away, making room for something new. Across many symbolic traditions, images of renewal remind us that transformation often involves a passage through loss, anguish, or dissolution before new life can emerge. These symbols serve as a reminder that none of us can escape suffering as well as a promise that suffering, approached in the right way, can be meaningful and important to our psychological growth.
Conflict: When Opposing Parts Demand Engagement
If suffering is often experienced as rupture, loss, or breakdown, conflict is friction between opposing forces that both have some claim on us. It may appear as tension between belonging and freedom, adaptation and authenticity, or some other seemingly opposing needs or wants. Conflict exposes what is divided. As such conflict can become a clarifying force, revealing our desires, fears, values, and limitations.
Sometimes this conflict is internal: one part of us wants one thing while another part wants something different. Our instinct is often to pick a side—to decide which part is right and suppress the other (usually whichever part is most aligned with our ego stance). But in most meaningful inner conflicts, both sides hold something important about us. The growth comes not by rushing to declare a winner but from learning to hold the friction and tension as the divided parts of the psyche meet, contend, and eventually learn to belong to a larger whole.
Obviously conflict also appears in relationships, work, family systems, and communities as people's needs and goals clash. But even outer conflicts often reflect our inner ones. Couples locked in a miserable distancer-pursuer pattern may each be expressing different sides of the ambivalence between independence and intimacy that they both hold. The outer conflict allows each of them to project one side of the conflict onto the other to hold and express, but each may need to wrestle individually with both sides of that conflict.
Our initial impulses in dealing with conflict reveals something about how we've learned to handle tension, whether that be to collapse in the face of it, stubbornly and blindly hold our ground, or avoid it entirely. If we can get a better sense of the underlying archetypal elements involved, the conflict can become a teacher. Through conflict, we may discover what we have been neglecting, in what ways difference feels threatening, or what is out of balance within ourselves or our relationships.
Turning to the Deeper Question
None of these experiences is particularly comfortable, but they are important for psychological growth. They reveal where life has become too narrow for the soul’s ongoing development. If we can meet these disturbances with curiosity, humility, and compassion, they have the opportunity to enliven us.
Next time you feel them, ask yourself: What is boredom wanting to deepen? What is desire calling in? What is suffering seeking to renew? What is conflict trying to reveal?
Rachel Oblak, LCMHC is a Jungian analyst-in-training and licensed clinical mental health counselor in Williston, VT, writing about depth psychology, cult recovery, and Tarot. She is the creator of "More Than a Fool's Errand: Tarot's Gateway to the Soul," a self-paced digital course exploring the archetypal foundations of Tarot. Read more about her work and her practice →
