Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.
— James Hillman
We like to talk about growth as if it’s purely positive.
More awareness.
More strength.
More freedom.
But Hillman points to the part we prefer to skip over: growth later is loss first.
And loss leaves a mark.
This is often the starting point in individual counselling for personal growth and letting go — making space for both the ache and the new life waiting behind it.
You don’t just shed habits — you feel the absence of them. Even the unhealthy ones gave you comfort once. You don’t just leave behind situations — you miss the familiarity they brought. The people you outgrow, the roles you can’t keep playing, the versions of yourself you’ll never return to — they linger in your mind before they fade.
If personal growth — real transformation — is what’s called for, we need to learn to grieve well. Not as an obstacle to the change, but as part of it. Grief is how the heart catches up with what the mind has already seen it needed to accept.
The familiar, even when it kept you small, also kept you safe. There’s a kind of ache in stepping into a room where the furniture has been moved and the lights are off. You can’t quite see where to put your feet. The safety nets you once relied on are gone, and the ground feels further away.
That’s why transformation is rarely neat. Letting go makes it slow, messy, and human. You’ll doubt yourself. You’ll want the old discomfort back because at least you knew how to live with it. This is the tug-of-war between the known pain and the unknown possibility.
But absence, when you can sit with it, creates room for something new. The ache is proof that what’s ending mattered — even if it no longer fits.
The deeper safety you’re looking for isn’t in the old structures. Stability comes from the inside out, not from keeping everything around you unchanged. The more you can stand in the bare, unfilled space — without rushing to rebuild — the more you find that you can survive without the scaffolding.
Hillman’s words aren’t just about courage — they’re about the willingness to honour what’s ending. Because you can’t carry it all forward and still become who you’re meant to be.
Yes, growth means loss. But it’s the kind of loss that, if you meet it fully, if you grieve it properly, makes space for something truer, stronger, and more alive than what kept you “safe” before.
