When Causing Unfavorable Circumstances Is an Act of Self Love

On the sacred courage of disrupting your own comfort in service of your own becoming

By Paolo Peralta · May 2026 · 11 min read

Can Causing Unfavorable Circumstances Be an Act of Self Love?

Yes, absolutely and often. Self love is far larger than comfort. Sometimes the most loving act available to you is the one that causes the most immediate disruption: the relationship you choose to change, the job you walk away from, the boundary you finally hold, the truth you finally speak. When a difficult circumstance originates from your own growing self respect and inner knowing, it is among the most sacred acts of love a person can offer themselves.

Hello there, friend.

I want to talk with you today about something that tends to get quietly misread, both by the people around us and sometimes by ourselves. And it is a misreading that costs people real peace, real forward movement, real permission to honor what is true within them.

There are moments in a life when you cause something to become difficult. You are the one who initiates the conversation that changes everything. You are the one who says the thing that shifts the room. You are the one who makes the choice that, from the outside and often from the inside too, in the first raw hours of it, looks like damage. Like disruption. Like something going wrong.

And somewhere in the middle of that difficulty, a voice arrives. Sometimes it is your own. Sometimes it belongs to someone who loves you and is watching from the outside. And what the voice says is: why would you do this to yourself? Why would you choose this? Why would you cause this kind of upheaval in your own life when things were stable?

Here is what I want to offer you today. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for yourself is the very thing that creates the most immediate difficulty. Sometimes what looks from the outside like self destruction is, from the inside, the first truly self honoring act you have taken in years. Sometimes the unfavorable circumstance you caused is not a sign that something went wrong. It is a sign that something in you finally got it right.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi

Comfort and Love Are Two Very Different Things

Here is the first thing worth getting clear, because so much confusion about self love comes from this one misunderstanding.

Comfort is the feeling of familiar. It is the absence of friction, the maintenance of the known, the continuation of arrangements that have existed long enough to feel like walls rather than choices. Comfort can be a genuine gift, a season of rest and consolidation that the soul genuinely needs. And comfort can also be a holding pattern, a way of staying in a shape that no longer fits because the familiar feels safer than the true.

Self love, on the other hand, is an act of faithful seeing. It sees what is genuinely nourishing and what is quietly diminishing. It sees where the life is flowing and where it has stopped. It sees what the soul is asking for even when that asking is inconvenient, even when honoring it will require disrupting something that everyone around you has grown comfortable with, including the version of you that existed before the asking began.

Pema Chodron writes in The Places That Scare You that the genuine heart of bodhichitta, of tender and awakened heart, is found precisely in the willingness to be present to difficulty rather than to move away from it. True self love asks the same. It moves toward what is real in you rather than what is convenient. And what is real in you will sometimes require circumstances that feel, at least initially, deeply unfavorable.

Comfort says: stay. Self love sometimes says: grow. And growth, by its nature, requires leaving the shape you were in.

“Real self love is faithful seeing. It honors what is true in you even when the honoring is inconvenient, even when the circumstances it creates feel painful in the first hours of them.” — Pema Chodron

The Boundary You Finally Held Was a Love Letter to Yourself

Think about the last time you held a boundary you had been softening for a long time. Maybe for months. Maybe for years.

There was likely a moment where something in you reached a kind of gentle but absolute clarity. A stillness underneath the habit of accommodation. A knowing that arrived without drama but with enormous quiet certainty. And from that place of knowing, you said the thing, or did the thing, or chose the thing, that changed the arrangement.

And in the immediate aftermath, everything may have felt unfavorable. The relationship shifted. The dynamic changed. The comfort of the familiar gave way to the rawness of something new and unestablished. The people involved may have expressed hurt or confusion or disappointment. And some part of you, the part that had learned very early to measure its worth by the comfort of others, may have felt that all of this disruption was evidence of something having gone wrong.

But here is what Brene Brown has spent her career documenting with extraordinary research clarity: boundaries are the most compassionate thing in any relationship. They are the act of saying, I value this connection enough to be honest about what I can genuinely offer and what I genuinely need. A boundary held with love is a gift to both people. It is the foundation on which anything real can be built.

The unfavorable circumstance the boundary created was the price of your own integrity. And your integrity, held with care and consistency over time, is the most valuable thing you carry. It is the substance of your self respect. It is the living proof that you take yourself seriously enough to honor what is true within you even when honoring it costs something.

“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others.” — Brene Brown

Self Love, Hard Choices, and Difficult Circumstances

How do you know if a hard decision comes from self love or self sabotage?

Self love moves from a place of inner knowing, a quiet, rooted clarity that often arrives beneath the noise of the situation. Self sabotage tends to carry the signature of fear and urgency, a reactive quality that seeks escape rather than growth. The morning practice is the space where you develop the inner discernment to feel the difference between the two. Stillness reveals the source.

Q: Is it selfish to prioritize your own growth even when it causes difficulty for others?Choosing your own growth is one of the most generous long-term acts available to you. A person who honors their own becoming brings more genuine presence, more authentic love, and more real capacity to every relationship in their life. The difficulty caused in the short term by an honest, growth-oriented choice almost always yields deeper and more real connection over time.

Q: How do you stop feeling guilty for choices that were right for you but hard for others?Guilt dissolves when we fully understand that our growth serves everyone in our lives, even if that is impossible to see in the immediate term. The morning practice, journaling, and the inner work of building self trust all help. You learn, through repeated experience, that the choices that honor your deepest knowing tend to open more life rather than close it.

The Ending You Caused Was Also a Beginning You Chose

Every ending, every genuine and considered ending, is also an act of extraordinary creative courage. It is a declaration that the future you are capable of is worth more than the comfort of the arrangement you are in right now. It is a vote for the self you are in the process of becoming over the self that has learned to survive in a container that was always a size too small.

Carl Jung wrote that what you resist persists and what you are willing to face, you can transform. The endings we choose, the relationships we complete, the roles we release, the identities we outgrow and choose to lay down with gratitude rather than carry forward from habit, all of these are acts of inner courage that Jung recognized as essential to what he called individuation. The process of becoming, over a lifetime, more fully and honestly yourself.

The relationship you completed may have caused real grief, real disruption, real periods of difficulty for everyone involved. And it may also have been the single most self loving act of that entire chapter of your life. Both of these things can be true at once. The grief and the gift can coexist. The difficulty and the rightness can occupy the same moment. In fact, they almost always do. Because anything worth choosing tends to require something of us first.

Parker Palmer, in A Hidden Wholeness, describes the soul as something wild and instinctive, something that moves toward what is genuine and away from what is false with the reliability of a compass seeking true north. When you cause an unfavorable circumstance in service of what your soul has been moving toward, you are following that compass. You are choosing the true north over the comfortable direction. And the soul, which has been waiting for that choice, opens fully in response.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung

Shake the Ground To Find Balance

There is a way of understanding disruption that shifts everything about how you hold the difficult choices you have made or are in the process of making.

Every significant growth in a human life requires a period of what feels like chaos. The caterpillar, before it becomes what it is becoming, dissolves almost entirely within the chrysalis. What looks from the outside like destruction is, from the inside of the process, the most profound and necessary reorganization of substance. The creature that emerges is the creature that was always intended. The dissolution was the path, not the obstacle.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, speaks of this as the Wild Woman archetype, the deep instinctive knowing within each person that calls them back to their own authentic nature regardless of the social arrangements that have grown up around them. When you feel that calling, when you act on it even though the acting creates difficulty and disruption and the discomfort of the unknown, you are following one of the most ancient and most trustworthy forces available to a human being. The force that moves life toward more life.

This is what it means to treat the unfavorable circumstance you caused as an act of devotion. Devotion to your own becoming. Devotion to the life that has been asking to be lived through you. Devotion to the version of yourself that deserves to exist in conditions that genuinely match what you know yourself to be.

The morning practice holds a particular gift here. In the quiet of the early hours, before the world has an opinion about the choices you are making, you sit with what is true in you. You feel the aliveness of the direction you are moving in. You hold the inner image of the life that is becoming. And in that stillness, the difficulty of the circumstance you caused takes its right proportion. It becomes what it always was: the cost of admission to a truer life. And you find, in the honest accounting of your own heart, that it was worth every bit of it.

“You must be willing to give up the life you have planned in order to receive the life that is waiting for you.” — Joseph Campbell

The Truth You Finally Spoke Was a Gift Wearing a Hard Face

There is a particular kind of unfavorable circumstance that deserves its own careful attention. The one caused by telling the truth.

We live in enormous amounts of accumulated silence. In relationships, in workplaces, in families, in friendships, in the quiet arrangements we make with ourselves about what we are willing to acknowledge and what we prefer to leave unspoken. And the silence, for a while, keeps the surface smooth. It keeps the arrangements intact. It keeps the peace, or at least what passes for peace in the absence of genuine honesty.

And then something shifts. A moment arrives when the truth that has been building in you reaches a threshold of pressure that the silence can no longer contain. And you speak. And the surface breaks. And the arrangement changes. And what felt like peace is revealed to have been something quieter and less nourishing than peace: the mere absence of conflict. The truth you spoke replaced it with something more demanding and more real.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the most extreme circumstances imaginable in Man’s Search for Meaning, observed that the last human freedom, the one that cannot be taken away by any outer circumstance, is the freedom to choose your response, your attitude, your inner orientation toward what is happening. Speaking a difficult truth is an exercise of exactly this freedom. It is choosing authenticity over the performance of comfort. It is honoring the relationship enough to bring your actual self into it, even when your actual self carries something the other person may find challenging.

The unfavorable circumstance the truth created was the clearing of the ground. What grows in that cleared ground, when both people are willing to stay with it and tend it, is something far more alive and far more sustaining than what was there before. Honesty is the most generous long-term gift available in any relationship. The difficulty it causes in the short term is the price of something genuinely real.

“An individual has not started living fully until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

How to Know the Difference between Self Love in Disguise or Something Else

I want to spend a moment here with the question that this essay genuinely asks of you, because it is an honest and important one.

How do you know, in the moment or in the morning after, whether the unfavorable circumstance you caused was truly self love or something else wearing self love’s clothes? Fear wearing the costume of courage. Avoidance dressed as growth. The impulse to escape a situation that genuinely needed to be stayed with, reframed as the wisdom of knowing when to leave.

Here is what I have found to be true, both in my own inner life and in the lives of the people I work with. Self love that comes from a genuine place tends to carry a particular quality in the body. A kind of deep, quiet, rooted certainty that coexists with the difficulty of the choice. It tends to arrive after reflection rather than in the heat of reactivity. It tends to move toward something rather than away from something, even when the moving toward requires leaving something else behind. It tends to be something you could, in your most honest and settled moments, fully explain to yourself with compassion and clarity.

Ram Dass, whose wisdom has been one of the great steadying forces in my own life, taught that the only way to know the difference between the voice of the soul and the voice of the ego is to get quiet enough to hear which one speaks from love. The ego speaks from urgency and fear and the need to manage how things look. The soul speaks from a place of patient, loving, absolute knowing. The morning practice, the journaling, the stillness of the early hours, all of it is practice in learning to hear the difference. And the more consistently you practice, the more clearly you can feel which voice is speaking when a significant choice arrives.

• Self love tends to feel rooted and clear, even when it is also difficult.

• Self love tends to consider the whole, even when it chooses the self.

• Self love tends to move toward aliveness rather than simply away from pain.

• Self love tends to leave you more genuinely present over time, even when it creates disruption in the short term.

• Self love tends to be something your most honest and quiet self can fully recognize and stand behind.

“The most important relationship you will ever have is the one you have with your own soul. Everything else follows from there.” — Ram Dass

Give Yourself the Grace the Circumstance Deserves

Here is the final thing I want to leave with you, friend, and it is perhaps the most important.

When you have caused an unfavorable circumstance in service of your own becoming, you deserve to be held gently by yourself through the difficulty of it. You deserve the same warmth and understanding and patient presence that you would offer to anyone you love who was moving through something hard.

The circumstance may still feel raw. The people involved may still be finding their way through their own version of it. The outer world may still be organizing itself around the change you initiated. All of this asks for your patience, your steadiness, and your continued inner clarity about why the choice was right even as it continues to cost something.

Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, writes that the soul is fed by depth rather than by resolution. By genuine engagement with the full texture of experience rather than by the management of it into something comfortable and clean. The unfavorable circumstance you are living with right now, the one you caused in service of something true in you, is exactly this kind of depth. It is asking something real of you. And what you bring to it, the quality of presence and honesty and self compassion you offer to yourself through it, is the very substance of what your soul is being built from.

So sit with the morning. Take the quiet time before the world begins. Hold the inner image of who you are becoming. Let the difficulty have its honest place in the accounting of your life without letting it take more room than it deserves. And offer yourself, gently and without condition, the recognition that what you chose, even though it was hard, even though it caused disruption, was also this: the most loving thing you knew how to do for yourself at that point in your becoming.

That deserves to be honored. You deserve to be honored. Always.

“The soul is healed by being with children, by the elderly, and by those who have the courage to live authentically.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

✦

The unfavorable circumstance you caused in service of your own truth was a sacred act. You were, in that moment, honoring what is most alive in you. The world will catch up to the love that was in it. Give it time. Give yourself grace. And keep going.

Begin again with tenderness. That has always been enough.

With warmth and full presence,

Paolo

Keep Going: Related Reading

• How to Build a Morning Practice That Actually Changes Your Life The daily container for inner discernment and self trust.

• Gene Keys: Moving from Shadow into Gift The inner map of every difficult season and what it is growing in you.

• Let Go of the Need to Be Understood On releasing the need for others to approve of your most honest choices.

• Make Pure Thy Heart: Daily Dispatches on Consciousness and Intentional Living Your daily companion for the examined life.

• 30-Day Morning Practice Course Thirty days of building the inner clarity that every honest choice requires.

Sources and Further Reading

1. Pema Chodron: The Places That Scare You

2. Brene Brown: The Gifts of Imperfection