Why does self-improvement sometimes feel like a war with myself?

Rabbi Landau explains that “every emotional problem starts the same way. You try to get rid of one side. You can't.” And then, he says, “you spend your whole life fighting yourself and you keep calling it self-improvement.”

The problem is the goal. As his caption puts it, people try to become fully positive, fully confident, fully calm, fully spiritual. But that isn't how human beings were designed. We are built from contradictions: strength and weakness, confidence and fear, dignity and shame.

So his advice is not to fight harder, but to stop trying to delete. “Don't heal yourself by deleting yourself. All parts of you is a part of the design.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Trying to get rid of one side of yourself turns growth into a war.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Why do my efforts to change keep failing?

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau asks whether the real question is not “Why couldn't you change?” but why you ever believed you had to erase a whole side of yourself.

Deepest human truth

Contradiction is not a mistake. It is the design.

More questions from this teaching

• How can I be at peace with myself when I'm full of contradictions?