Why Nothing You Achieve Will Ever Make You Feel Worthy | Marisa G. Franco – EP 821

Psychologist Marisa Franco reveals why lasting self-worth doesn’t come from achievement, confidence, or validation from others, but from learning to trust yourself, process your past, and reconnect with the parts of yourself you’ve learned to ignore.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. What if people with low esteem actually prefer to be seen negatively? It sounds completely backwards,

• 0:44John R. Miles?

  but Dr. Marisa Franco found research showing that when someone has a deeply rooted belief that they're unworthy, being seen too positively can actually create anxiety. Because if you see them differently than they see themselves, they may start thinking, "You're gonna figure out who I really am." And it gets even stranger. Research suggests that for people struggling with self-esteem, compliments can raise their blood pressure. Positive affirmations can make them feel worse. And even positive experiences can have negative effects. So why does this happen? Because sometimes the problem isn't happening around us.

• 1:29John R. Miles?

  It's the story we've learned to believe about ourselves. Take a listen.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  People with low self-esteem prefer to interact with someone who sees them more negatively. Because if you see them too positively, they're like, "You're gonna figure out who I really am. There's all this anxiety. I don't trust you. I don't believe you." If we struggle with our worth, we can have the greatest love of our lives. We can have the successful career, but all of it slides off of us because it doesn't resonate with our sense of self, and thus we can't actually internalize it.

• 2:01John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 2:42John R. Miles?

  Welcome back to Passion Struck. This is episode 821, and we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past several conversations, we've looked at adaptation from very different angles. Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about how much our situation shaped who we become. Dr. Marty Seligman took us deeper into agency, the belief that our actions can make a difference. And yesterday, Cole Brower showed us what adaptation looks like when you're 27,000 miles from home, alone at sea, and there's no one else who can take the helm. But there's another dimension to adaptation that's deeply personal.

• 3:28John R. Miles?

  How do we adapt without losing ourselves? Because sometimes the challenge isn't changing our circumstances, it's changing the way we relate to ourselves. My guest today is Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist, a researcher, and the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic. She's back on Passion Struck with a remarkable new book called Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. And this conversation goes much deeper than simply asking how to feel better about yourself. Marisa explores why our earliest experiences can shape the way we see ourselves,

• 4:12John R. Miles?

  how our memories can continue influencing us decades later, and why some of the behaviors we think make us more secure can actually pull us farther away from ourselves. One of the ideas I found particularly powerful is her argument that healing isn't about becoming perfect. It's about becoming more honest with what you're actually experiencing and learning to stop abandoning the parts of yourself that you've decided aren't acceptable. That connects with some of the themes I've been exploring in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, but from a different direction. Because The Mattering Effect asks what happens when our environments communicate that we're invisible, replaceable, or insignificant. Worth asks a different question.

• 4:56John R. Miles?

  What happens when the disconnection inside us, when we don't believe the good things happening around us are actually meant for someone like us? And I think those two questions belong in the same conversation. I'm really glad you're here for this one. Let's dive in. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 5:27John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome back Marisa Franco to Passion Struck. Marisa, it is so great to see you again.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Likewise, John. So great to be back.

• 5:38John R. Miles?

  I am so excited. You have a brand-new book coming out, and your first book, Platonic, was a New York Times bestseller, an amazing book, one of my favorite books over the past five years. This new book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, is deeper, in my opinion, than I thought Platonic was in all the right ways. So congratulations.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 6:03John R. Miles?

  For the listener, if you want to catch up on our previous discussion, Marisa first joined me in episode 207, and if you can believe it right now, we're about ready to release episode 778. The podcast has had a lot of interviews since then. But when we spoke about Platonic, Marisa, the central problem you and I were talking about was loneliness, which now everyone seems to have on the tip of their tongue. But as I was explaining earlier, in Worth, the problem feels deeper. You write about people who are loved, successful, surrounded by others, yet they still feel like they're not worthy of connection.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:43John R. Miles?

  What changed in your thinking between the two books?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I guess when I was writing Platonic, it was really all about what can you do? How can you treat people to feel like you have fulfilling connections? Then I was coming across this theory, the theory that got away, self-verification theory, which is this idea that we look for people that verify our sense of self. So fascinating research that people with low self-esteem prefer to interact with someone who sees them more negatively. Because if you see them too positively, they're like, "You're gonna figure out who I really am. There's all this anxiety. I don't trust you. I don't believe you." And other research that their blood pressure goes up when they get compliments, that when they affirm themselves, say, "I am loved," they feel worse. That when positive things happen to them, they're sicker months later.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And so there's this way that if we struggle with our worth, we can have the greatest love of our lives, we can have the successful career, but all of it slides off of us because it doesn't resonate with our sense of self, and thus we can't actually internalize it. And I thought that was so counterintuitive because if someone told you how to feel worthy, they'd probably say, "Gain compliments, do those affirmations, find a successful job." But in fact, when you feel unworthy, sometimes all of those things can reveal how deeply entrenched your struggles with your sense of self are.

• 8:01John R. Miles?

  Yeah, so you and I both are really big in this topic of worth. I'm interested in your definition of it.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  It took me a while to understand what worth is because when I read the research on self-esteem, there are people that report having high self-esteem. They say, "I feel good about themselves. I feel worthy as a person. I don't feel like a failure." But when I looked deeper into the research, there's two different types of people with high self-esteem. One type, in the book I call it the bad twin versus the good twin. Let's call it the bad twin for now. They are hostile towards others, antagonistic, defensive, reactive, have poor relationships than anybody, even people with low self-esteem. Versus the other type, the good twin, they have the most smooth relationships, live in good harmony with other people, have compassion for themselves and others, have better relationships than anybody.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And so I thought to myself, I can't just define worth as feeling good about yourself because then I can leave, the stakes are everyone we ever love. If we can become this bad twin that says they feel good about themselves but harms other people. And so I had to really understand what's the difference between this sort of very egotistical sense of high self-esteem versus the more grounded, genuinely grounded sense of high self-esteem. And as I read, I talked to this colleague of mine, Beth, and I was like, "Isn't it wild? These bad twins are so reactive and mean, but they say they feel good about themselves. I don't know, raising my eyebrows." And Beth took a moment to identify with the quote-unquote "bad twins" and says, "What I'm trying to think about myself, when I feel defensive, when I feel reactive, usually I'm feeling so much shame."

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And that clicked for me because I realized that it's not that the good twins, or any of us for that matter, never feel defensive or hostile, or we want to be aggressive towards other people. But in that moment, what Beth did is she acknowledged those feelings. And you can only regulate what you acknowledge. And so these quote-unquote "bad twins", they're compartmentalizing all these negative feelings about themselves. They're trying to push away, avoid, deny any shame that's within so that when you offer them feedback, when you do something that irritates them, all of that feeling that they've pushed away comes out at you. And so that's why I define worth as being able to feel everything that you feel

• 10:22Speaker 01

  from a grounded place, of treating every feeling within you like it matters. And in the research on securely attached kids, there's these two terms that come up for how parents treat these securely attached kids with sensitivity, which means they recognize their kid's feelings, recognize when their kid's in distress, angry, and also responsiveness, which means they respond to those feelings in a way that helps the kid regulate them and understand that. And I think worth is doing that within ourselves.

• 10:50John R. Miles?

  I have really been trying to look at early childhood as a core subject that I'm researching in much more depth. You probably don't know this, but I put out a children's book earlier in the year because I think in many ways, there are two periods that I call of wet cement that a child's identity is formed. One is the ages of three to eight. And then I think you have another opportunity where in that aspect, they're like a sponge, but they're not old enough to understand the deeper questions to ask. And then I think there's another period between the ages of nine to 14, before that cement gets locked in place where they're asking the deeper questions, searching for more knowledge.

• 11:34John R. Miles?

  And if you don't intervene in those two places, then you get into this point where self-worth is shaped. And now you're having to break the concrete to fix a lot of what's happened during those two periods if it's not reinforced. Does that resonate with you?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  It does resonate with me because when I tried to understand these people with low self-esteem and why are they rejecting all of the signs of love and acceptance? What I've came across was this idea of worth as a theory of self, that if you feel unworthy, it's that everyone will reject you and harm you. And if you feel worthy, it's the sense that you will be accepted and positive things will happen to you. And how that theory really forms is through your memories. Memories are the database of self-esteem, researchers say. And so you can see how if your memories at that young age particularly, you had these memories of rejection, abuse, neglect, then our memories don't just record the past, but they predict the future. So a part of you thinks that's going to happen again.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  And that's why insecurity is so adaptive. If you're living in a world where that's going to happen again, it's adaptive to not feel too good about yourself because then you just plummet and crash when that does happen again. And so I think in this young childhood period, it's a really central period of life because our memories are not predicting the future. We are instead creating those core memories that will then guide us in the rest of our lives in terms of how we feel about ourselves and how we interpret the world around us as a confirmation bias for what we already know based off of our early life.

• 13:05John R. Miles?

  I have found, and then I'll promise I'll get off this topic, that if I summarize this into two camps that I think a lot of us grew up in, one is the individual who grows up in a household where they are seen, but they're told not to be heard. So they grow up learning that if they speak, that is going to bring them pain. And so they isolate themselves and learn to remain invisible. And then I think you have this other camp, which is more prevalent in modern day, where in order to be seen, you have to perform because that's how you get recognized. You're seen by your sports accolades, you're seen by how you

• 13:50John R. Miles?

  perform on a stage. If you're in a play, you're seen by the grades you get. And if you're not achieving those things, then you get the opposite reaction. Have you run across that as well?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I think Carl Rogers, he's a popular therapist, he calls it contingencies of worth. And it's this idea that to be worthy, you have to do something, you have to achieve something. And I think in practice, that can look very subtle. It can look like, for example, my niece, she tried to get the star in the school play. And she was like, then will you come see me? And knowing this research on contingencies of worth, that if I say to her that seeing her in this play is contingent on her having the star part, right? What am I indicating to her? So instead, I had to tell her, no matter what position you get in the play, no matter what role you get in the play, I'm going to see you and I'm going to be proud of you. Right? And so I think related to the sort of second one

• 14:44Speaker 01

  where I have to constantly prove myself to be worthy, internalizing those contingencies of worth, that your worth is contingent on something, dooms you to forever be in a hamster wheel of worth. You may have the misconception that once I achieve that thing finally, I will feel worthy. But that's actually false because feeling worthy is about not having a hierarchy or not feeling like you need to do anything in order to be worthy. It is relinquishing the hierarchy of achievement worth to worth pipeline altogether. And so I think this kind of sounds more like if we talk about the attachment styles, which I talked about in my first book, more anxious style is I have to earn love, I have to earn love versus the avoidant style, which is I'm out of the game altogether. I'm just

• 15:26Speaker 01

  shut down. I'm not going to engage. I don't trust you. So I'm going to keep to myself. And both are different strategies to deal with core wounds around unworthiness.

• 15:36John R. Miles?

  I think one of the most provocative ideas as I was going through the book is that the path to feeling worthy is not confidence, but honesty. Can you unpack that a little bit?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Ah, it's funny. I wrote my first book on secure attachment. And since then, it's continued to blow up, attachment theory, which if people don't know, it's just this, this idea that we have this internal template for how people will treat us based on if our early childhood experience. And if our parents treat us well and loved us, we're secure and assume we'll be loved. If they were inconsistent, made us earn love, we're anxious, we think people will abandon us, we try to move very fast in friendships and they glow up, we see rejection when it's not there. Avoidant attachment is we feel that people, if we get close to people, they'll harm us. So we keep people at a distance. And it's a very research-backed theory that has been cited far and wide. But what I see is the ways that it's been used, which is that secure attachment is now a status symbol.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And I see in relationships, people weaponizing, you're acting anxious, you're acting avoidant. And also people being like, I'm secure on hinge profiles, dating profiles. And I don't think there should be a hierarchy of attachment styles. I think we should just all admit what we are and where we are. And I think when we say we're secure, what we do is we alienate the parts of ourselves that aren't, our anxious parts, our avoidant parts. And those, and then we reenact on those parts, the same thing that got them here. We neglect parts of ourselves, we shame parts of ourselves. That's what made us insecure in the first place. And so I'm arguing that instead of feeling less than because we have insecurities, right, which only makes insecurities worse, perhaps we can have compassion for our insecurities

• 17:15Speaker 01

  and recognize that they're actually trying to protect us. If we think of it from the lens of memories and they're protecting us from these harmful memories happening again, right? And so it's about being honest about those insecurities because you can only transform what is acknowledged in yourself.

• 17:30John R. Miles?

  Let's talk about you here for a second. You open up this book by being really vulnerable. Here, you're a psychologist, you're an attachment researcher, and you write that you believed you knew what healthy relationships look like. And then you're in one that's beginning to deteriorate. And what do you do when it starts deteriorating?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I fawn, I over-function. I try to be the secure base, what they call like co-regulation, you're trying to regulate the other person and regulate yourself. And that felt like the way to re-center this relationship. And I was really trying to follow the toolkits that I've heard from popular researchers that I've even heard from myself, my research that I've done on like, how to have a healthy trusting relationship, right? But I think what was really missing is step one, which is to check in with yourself. And does this feel okay for me? And do I have the capacity to do these things without feeling like I am betraying myself? And so ultimately, I wasn't feeling good in that. I wasn't feeling

• 18:37Speaker 01

  treated well. I wasn't feeling like I was getting my needs met. And for me to push that away to try to take care of this other person was an act of self-abandonment. And so understanding security as founded in authenticity, in integrity, in honesty, in checking in with yourself, in understanding where you are right now, then even if I did these secure behaviors of co-regulation and giving grace and giving space and starting with curiosity and all of those things, if we think of security as authenticity, then I actually wasn't acting in a secure place that was grounded in my sense of self. And so I say in the book, I think the securest thing I did was actually leave that relationship when I realized that

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I wasn't able to get my needs met, even if I used I statements about how I feel, and it still wasn't working out. And so it really takes me, I think, as someone who was maybe has leaned more anxious at times, it sometimes feels like the other person has to give you permission for your, to have your own sense of reality, to be angry about something, to be upset about something. And if the other person isn't validating that or acknowledging that, then you don't give yourself permission to feel those things, to moving towards a place of this is how I feel, period. Whether or not you can acknowledge that you're hurting me right now, I can sit in the authenticity of my experience and decide what to do from there, rather than doing whatever is going to make us reconcile in this context, even

• 20:03Speaker 01

  if it's cost me my sense of self.

• 20:05John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Marisa Franco. As you've been listening, I want you to think about something. How much of your life has been shaped by who you think you have to be, rather than by who you actually are? Marisa's book, Worth, is ultimately about rebuilding the relationship with yourself, understanding your memories, your emotions, your attachment patterns, and the parts of yourself you've learned to push away. My upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, approaches a related problem from a different angle. I'm looking at what happens when the environments we live in working gradually erode our sense that we matter, when we're valued primarily for what

• 20:49John R. Miles?

  we produce, rather than recognized for who we are. Marissa is helping us understand our relationship with ourselves. I'm exploring what happens when the world around us changes that relationship. The Mattering Effect comes out October 6, and I'd love for you to learn more about it at matteringeffect.com. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 21:20John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Marissa Franco. What I thought was so intriguing about your introduction is here you are, an expert in the space. And yet, what you witness as the reader is the more you, Marissa, are trying to become secure, the more disconnected you're becoming from yourself. And rather than listening to your own hurt, you start performing behaviors you believed a healthy person should display when all it is doing is creating you to feel more and more disconnection. Is that like a good way to think about the scenario?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  And I honestly think it would have been kinder to my ex-partner to express the depths of my hurt, right? Because then he might have taken seriously the need to repair. And when I'm trying to be okay and make him feel okay, that's me not communicating something that could have reconciled us. So it wasn't kind to myself and it wasn't kind to him to not feel grounded in my own sense of reality and trying to regulate him and his sense of reality so much.

• 22:28John R. Miles?

  The central foundation that I think this builds upon is the fact that healing is not becoming a better version of yourself. It's reconnecting with the parts of yourself that you've learned to ignore.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. That healing is authenticity. Healing isn't becoming perfect. Healing isn't using the right therapy speak. Healing isn't using all of the tools that you read about. Healing is starting from a place of authenticity. This is my, this is where my hurt lies. These are what my insecurities are. I'm going to look at them in a non-shaming way. And in fact, I have this quote from the book where I say, "I'm no longer avoiding, I'm no longer trying to avoid the parts of myself that feel antisocial or ashamed. I'm trying to get to know those parts and love them too. I'm so sorry I've neglected you. I'm thankful for the ways you carried the pain I wasn't willing to see. I never want you to stop crying, raging, or screaming out about how hurt you are.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  I want to create an environment within myself where pain isn't something I ignore and shame myself for, because without this pain, I would have never known these depths of love."

• 23:31John R. Miles?

  Man, I love that. What beautiful words.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 23:36John R. Miles?

  One of the things that I thought was really profound is coming out of your opening chapters, I really came to the conclusion that what you're trying to say to people is that the goal is not to convince ourselves that we're extraordinary. The goal is to recognize that we are worthy even when we are ordinary. And I think that is a gap that so many people today are facing, especially when all around us, all we see are people putting on the versions of themselves on socials where they look extraordinary, but oftentimes you're not displaying the moments where you're your weakest, et cetera. Do you think that's playing into this?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Certainly. I think this, the idea of checking in with yourself and what you feel and what you actually think and understanding that, that is a time-intensive process. And in our culture of constant distraction, we are not doing that. When we have a feeling, we're going on social media to distract ourselves from it. I'm a college professor. I see this in my students all the time. We're not sitting with pain. We're not confronting our feelings, right? For me, at this point, mental health has been like physical. I spend time with my emotions every day. Interviewing someone that was secure, he said that he would scan his hand over the day to figure out where his energy lies. He was looking for feelings within himself that needed care, parts of himself that needed care, that needed support.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  And so this, I think the culture we're living in is much more about distraction, much more about comparison, much more about trying to be better and superior and optimize and get to the top. And then I'm sure you see it, John, you interview successful people all the time and I'm around them too. And we see that success does not equal happiness and that in fact, sometimes it will, the most successful people are on this hamster wheel forever where they feel like I have to do more and more and you never quite arrive. And so I just hope that the message that I want to give to people is nothing you achieve will make you worthier. The only thing that will make you worthier is if you turn towards yourself and have a felt experience of care right now, exactly as you are.

• 25:50John R. Miles?

  And one of the things I thought was really intriguing was rather than treating attachment styles as fixed identities, which is something that I've had a number of guests on the show do, you really frame them as adaptive responses to past experiences. And I was hoping you might be able to go into that a little bit more because I think it's really an important differentiation.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Because I don't believe in shaming anyone with an insecure attachment style. I really don't. And well, when we think about it from the lens of memories and memories predicting the future, right? You use these attachment styles because they have kept you safe in your most formative relationships. As an anxiously attached person, when you tried to push and put yourself out there and achieve and get someone's attention and cling, you ultimately got some nuggets of care from that, right? And that's become your template because it was effective for you. And also for avoidant people, the opposite has happened where you have tried to put yourself out there, you have tried to seek love, you have tried to seek acceptance and

• 26:56Speaker 01

  you've been rejected and shamed so many times that you had to give up. And that's what kept you safe. There's this psychologist who says, "When a parent doesn't love a part of us, we will alter our consciousness. We will shut off those parts of ourselves that our parent didn't love." And that's what the avoidantly attached person does. They shut off their own sense of vulnerability. And so these were adaptive. These were very adaptive and can continue to be adaptive in the context of some relationships. But the issue is that memories, like I said, memories don't just record the past, they predict the future. And sometimes that predictive model is off because we're no longer in that context anymore. And so the book is really about, full of exercises, because I think of worth as finally

• 27:39Speaker 01

  returning to the present and living in the present and not always predicting a future of harm and coming to the present where all that is imminent is possibility. You don't know that someone's going to harm you. You don't know that someone's going to shame you. You don't know someone's going to abandon you. All that you know is that there's possibility that exists. And living, I think, worthiness as living with that possibility and being able to act authentically despite the full gamut of possibility, whether it be harm, whether it be abandoned, or it be love and connection.

• 28:12John R. Miles?

  And since you were just talking about memories, I thought one of the most powerful phrases in the book was this concept of open memories. What exactly is an open memory and how does it continue shaping our self-worth as you were kind of just alluding to, decades after events occur?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Seeing that memories can really affect our sense of self-esteem or even determine our sense of self-esteem. I was reading into this research on how people would go back to something traumatic. Let's say their house burned down or they were robbed and talk or think about engage in that memory, remember that memory. And afterward, they report lower self-esteem. But here was the kicker. Only the people whose memories were quote unquote "open" would report lower self-esteem. What does that mean? Open memories feel like they're not behind us. It feels unresolved. We haven't made meaning of it. We don't like to think about it. Maybe we ruminate on it. It brings up heavy emotion for us. It makes us angry. It makes us sad, right?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  And those memories, there's this psychoanalyst, Philip Bronberg, he says, "We don't go to therapy to deal with the past, but what is still happening now, open memories, we're basically continuing to perceive reality in ways that match those memories." And there's a part of our brain called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which you don't need to remember, but it basically, when we go through something new, it will rummage through our past memories and make us re-experience in our bodies how something felt then now. So for example, my boss criticizes me. Why do I react so strongly? Why am I so defensive? Because literally my brain is like, this is just like your father who exploded on you. You're literally re-experiencing those same emotions.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  And so those are the open memories. But you can literally have the same memories of maybe theft, of somebody breaking into your house, of the fire burning down your house. And it won't affect your self-esteem if the memory is what's called closed, which means that it no longer triggers strong emotion, you have a sense of meaning out of it, why it happened, maybe you incorporate it into your life story. Our house did burn down, but then we banded together as a family in the future. Or we ended up in this different neighborhood where I went to the school and had my very best friends, right? It's not looked at as it shouldn't have happened, but that happened and it's part of my life and it's formative and it made me who I am and there's no more emotional reactivity around it. Those people have the same exact memories, but those memories don't affect their sense of self-worth.

• 30:43John R. Miles?

  I'll tell you, some of my past memories plagued me for years. And I think I did what a lot of people did. Because they were painful, I kept putting them off because I didn't want to deal with it. And I thought, if I could just put it into a sub-structure where I park it there, it wouldn't come up. And for years it worked until something reminded me of it and then it came back tenfold.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 31:10John R. Miles?

  And I think that's what happens to a lot of us.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  I think so too. And honestly, John, it's not just you, it sounded like a conscious process for you to do that, but also our psyches can do that for us. Like I cite a study in the book that one-third of women who were sexually assaulted and even went to the hospital to gain care after that assault, when they were teenagers, one-third of them didn't remember that experience when they were full adults. So it's not just like sometimes we consciously are like, let me push this away because it's painful, but sometimes something so painful that our psyche's like, this is too much for you. I'm going to plug this away. But again, even those repressed memories can still hover over us and hover over our sense of self-worth.

• 31:50John R. Miles?

  Throughout the book, you talk about many different things. I was interested that in one portion of the book, you brought up Maslow. How do you think our desire to self-actualize?

• 32:05John R. Miles?

  Can get in the way of our worth. I think we're so

• 32:10John R. Miles?

  fixated sometimes on trying to become remarkable that in, in doing so, we end up in many ways doing ourselves a disservice. Do you feel that way at all?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Well, there is this psychologist, Marisa Woodman, who said, and I felt very called out by this. It's easier to try to be better than who you are than to be who you are. And I was like, dang.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  I felt that somewhere in my soul. And I mean, my friend called it like a sort of commodification of healing, where we're always like, I have to do more, I have to be better, I have to do this, I have to do that. And rather than how I'm at now is okay, where I'm at now is okay, where I'm at now is okay. There was like this quite powerful study in the book that I cited. And this was, I have a chapter in the book on psychedelics and how that leads to accepting life experiences more like I'm talking about. And this woman who had cancer, and when she had her own journey, she saw cancer at her dinner table and was like, it was meant to be here, it was meant to be part of my life. It's not something evil, it's not something, I don't know, toxic, it was just a part of my life.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  And I accept that, I grieve and I accept that. That was such a powerful story to me. And really showed very poignantly that like, the secret to being at peace and okay, and feeling steady and feeling stable and worthy is not never feeling suffering. In fact, it's like, we look for like, perfect relationships that never harm us. But those perfect relationships aren't real, because the human experience is defined by struggle. It's defined by people being flawed, people being imperfect. And so when someone seems so perfect, often it's because it's a fantasy, right? And how do we incorporate that and accept that within ourselves, accept that within other people, accept our past full of pain and see it as this is like, part of my human experience?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And it's the seeing it as, this is so bad and this should never have happened. And this makes me fundamentally unworthy and fundamentally deficient. Rather than like, this is just the part of the tapestry of all there is, that can really keep us stuck. I will say though, that like, we don't get there from trying to jump to that phase. We get there by being with ourselves in each of the phases. You might have something really harmful that happened, you might be very angry. You might be trying to bargain with this experience so that it didn't happen, right? You might be very resentful. And getting to a place of acceptance requires you to accept and look at and feel all of those feelings, rather than trying to push them away,

• 34:48Speaker 01

  to find that ultimate place of what is, it's okay, what has happened is okay. I can bear this version of reality.

• 34:54John R. Miles?

  I want to talk a little bit more about emotions, if that's okay, Marisa? Because you use Peter Levine's work to explain how emotions become trapped in the body.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:03John R. Miles?

  What changed for you personally, when you stopped viewing emotions as a problem to solve? And started viewing them as experiences to complete?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  They didn't haunt me. They didn't haunt and hijack me. They started to move through me like a wave. This has been a very long process of therapy, many years, I can't say that this happened in a moment. But when I stopped fighting with my emotions, and again, this is a continuous practice for me, I started to finally feel relief. And there's this way that I was really bent on being default okay, and default high functioning, and default competent, no matter what was going on with me. And I think that alienated me from myself, from the parts of myself that felt vulnerable, the parts of myself that felt weak.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  And those parts, they wouldn't go away, and it would come out as like, triggers. All of a sudden, I feel so bad in reaction to something, my mood has plummeted in a very quick moment, and I don't necessarily understand why. And I would feel hijacked by them, and I wouldn't act out, I wouldn't harm other people. But I would feel it in myself, like this sort of emotional volatility sometimes, or greater anxiety, or more obsessive thoughts and rumination, all of those things. Because I was trying to resist my emotions, because I was afraid of what those emotions meant about my sense of identity and who I am. How can I see myself as this strong, competent person if I feel weak, if I feel anxious, if I feel obsessive? But I realized through writing Worth, that feeling worthy is actually about not knowing who you are in a way.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Because you could only access all of your emotions if you don't know who you are. If you're like, I have to be this strong person, then that requires me to estrange myself from so much of what I actually feel. And there's this great psychologist, Robin Carhart-Harris, and he says that when we go through chaos, one way that we adapt is we make ourselves rigid, we make ourselves predictable, to feel like there's predictability amidst the chaos. So our rigid sense of identity is maybe not true to who we are as much as it is a coping mechanism. And so how do I soften my sense of identity? So I can look at the entire terrain and landscape of what I actually feel.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And so how do we allow ourselves to not know who we are and have that be okay? And have high regard for ourselves, no matter who we become? And just knowing that is already, and deeply internalizing that has already helped me so much. Because I went through an ankle sprain in October, it's still not healed. I'm a runner, I was getting into surfing, I was liking dancing. And I could be really miserable right now if I didn't think of myself as, I don't have to be who I was, right? I can be a different person now, and that's okay. The only thing true about life is evolution. And so I don't have to have a sense of self that I had before, or live up to a sense of self that I think is right to be acceptable and to be worthy. I just have to admit what I actually feel, where I'm actually at, where my body's at,

• 38:04Speaker 01

  where my emotions are at in each moment.

• 38:07John R. Miles?

  And I love that. As I explained earlier, I went through this long period of time myself, where I kept bearing those emotions. And I was in a long-term relationship where on top of that, I was emotionally abused for the vast majority of that relationship. And so trying to fit in and

• 38:32John R. Miles?

  actually become a completely different version of who I was, to fit in that relationship, to try to solve it, caused me to become just so detached from my own identity, to the point that I reached a point where I wasn't even recognizing the person in the memory in the mirror anymore. And I was becoming so distraught over it. But I think what a lot of us don't realize is, we didn't get to that point overnight. And so you can't think that you're going to be able to resurface these emotions that you've suppressed for so long immediately as well. Because at its height, I felt just complete numbness.

• 39:15John R. Miles?

  What worked for me was, I had to let the first emotion surface. And from there, it started to unearth other things and started this restorative process. Does that ring true for you in any way?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  First of all, I am full of empathy. Thank you so much for sharing that, John. I think that is, gives people so much permission. I think especially us as people who are so mired in this stuff. I feel like it's so humanizing to be like, we have struggled to, maybe as a result of that is where we've come in our careers and, and trying to understand and make sense of these things. And so I just, I think it's so powerful that you share that and you share your own process. And I feel so touched to hear it. So thank you so much for sharing that. And related to your question, and I wanted to just point out something in what you shared too. Because I think when I wrote Platonic, Platonic was really about being in relationship and being in connection with other people. And I think the two books really balance each other out.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Because from what you're saying, we see that actually self-growth and self-worth might lead some relationships to fracture. And if we are trying to protect all of our relationships from fracturing, we might lose our sense of self in that path. And so it's for me, being able to accept that this loss of relationship is actually a sign of my own self-growth, rather than a sign of a failure, right? And so I think that's just a powerful message from your experience and from my own. I've shed some important relationships in my own quest for worth, and that's okay. And that's even a sign of your own growth. And this, related to your point, I think it's an excellent one, which is that you don't go from, I'm numbed out to I'm healed.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  And in fact, when you try to coerce that process, which I have done, I called like, trying to heal my emotional wounds, like when people pull the dog against the street on its hind legs. That's how I was like, trying to relate to my psyche, get better already. But now I definitely see that getting better is about being where you are in the pain. Getting better is about allowing your own resistance to be there and being curious about it, rather than trying to override it. Getting better is about working with that part of you that needs more time and understanding what it needs to feel more safe in you. And I share a lot of exercises to do this in the book, if this is seeming a little bit of abstract to folks. But it's a process, and it's okay if it starts with, I'm going to just acknowledge one feeling.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  That's necessary, that's actually much more healing than being like, I'm going to drink the water hose of healing all at once, and then you're drowning in it.

• 41:48John R. Miles?

  Since you've brought that up, maybe you could share a couple of examples from the book of how people can start this process of rebuilding self-worth?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  So the kind of primary theory that drives the book is called memory reconsolidation, right? If we identify the core issues as our memories and the unprocessed emotions that are truly associated with that memories. Part of that sounds like we're doomed, because our memories already happened. So I guess I'm just going to feel unworthy forever. But that's actually not the case. Because when I said, memories are made to predict the future and not record the past, what that means is, according to the science, every time we revisit a memory, we actually change the way it sits in our brains. And so there's really powerful studies where people went back to a negative memory and fully visualized it as if they were reliving it.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And then they pictured themselves now intervening and giving themselves exactly the care that they needed at that moment. And then afterwards, they report not only high self-esteem, but when they do this, these sorts of activities, or like going back and recognizing the good or the positives that came out of those experiences for them. When they do that kind of activity, and you look at their hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that records these memories, differences at the neural level. And so the book, I give, I walk people through memory reconsolidation step by step, along with many different exercises that help us to change these memories, even if we're numb, even if we need to start there, even if these are memories that we don't actually remember, what can we actually do about them?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  And so all of the sort of strategies that we can use to change the past.

• 43:29John R. Miles?

  Marisa, I want to talk about your chapter seven. I think we're in a world today where we are so confronted by the other and how that other makes us feel. And in this chapter, you explore racism, sexism, homophobia, marginalization, social exclusion. And it reminded me of a recent conversation that I had with Claude Steele. And we were talking about a concept he calls churn. But I think those things you're describing here really are what caused churn for so many of us, because I think what ends up happening is repeated exposure to stigmatizing

• 44:09John R. Miles?

  experiences starts creating emotional memories that override our sense of self-worth. And I was describing for me, a version of this that's different than this, but it still felt the same way. How do those external judgments for so many of us become self-perceptions that become so difficult for us to eradicate?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  This is a great question. It was interesting, because before I wrote this chapter on memories of stigma and how those affect us, I thought of feeling stigmatized as feeling bad about yourself. But I learned through writing the chapter that actually, when we internalize stigma, we become to ourselves something to evaluate, rather than something to be. We are no longer being, we are living in a state of evaluation of self. Like, oh, my God, my body is so big. How are other people are perceiving it? Or I include an example from, it was this very popular book from a black, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man, where he talks about being a black man, eating watermelon in public, and then being like, how am I being perceived? This hyper-consciousness of like, how people that stigmatize you perceive you. And that's

• 45:17Speaker 01

  what internalized homophobia is. I all of a sudden see myself as this gross or disgusting thing, right? And I think in our society, we have this perception of shame as an inherent characteristic of certain qualities, not realizing that actually, identities that are stigmatized because they violate the social order. But maybe the social order is not perfect, right? Maybe the social order needs to be expanded, and it's not the fault of the people that are stigmatized. For example, we stigmatize people living in poverty, because we have this sort of neoliberal government that's about, you should be supporting yourself. We're not going to give you these sort of social programs that other countries might have. And we first have to start to de-stigmatize ourselves by realizing that these identities we've been

• 46:00Speaker 01

  learned are negative, are not inherently. And I even cite this philosopher who talks about Adam and Eve realizing they're naked, and then they should feel ashamed, and then they should put, they didn't have to learn that being nakedness is something to be ashamed of, right? And so we almost pretend like shame is inherent, rather than shame is something that's culturally created. And so I think we first have to start there, because a lot of people with stigmatized identities haven't even gotten as far as to question that they should be mistreated, or that they aren't less than, right? But in the chapter, I talk about how, because we're so bombarded with these negative images of ourselves, if we have a more stigmatized identity, it's a losing battle to constantly be trying to

• 46:41Speaker 01

  reconsolidate these negative memories. And instead, what I argue is an alternative theory called retrieval competition theory, which is that if you have a lot of positive memories related to an event, or related to an identity, and they become more accessible and salient for you than the negative ones. And so if you have a certain stigma, you have to find alternative memories, experiences where people perceive your identity more positively in the media you consume, in the groups of people you affiliate with, like, our society is many different sub-societies. And so you have to find yourself in a subsystem wherein you are feeling valued, just as you are, and continue to expose yourself as a counterweight

• 47:23Speaker 01

  to these negative images of positive memories, positive associations related to that identity.

• 47:28John R. Miles?

  I've been trying to explore this in more depth. And I had Rick Hansen on to help do this, because we were trying to look at the neurology that this impacts too, and how this becomes a nervous system issue for people that it's impacting. And it was really a pretty profound discussion. So I'm so glad you did a whole chapter on that. And I'm also glad that you ended with a chapter on psychedelic assisted therapies, because I had a really interesting experience myself. I did not use psychedelic assisted therapies myself, but I was at this retreat with about 100 other veterans, most of them special operators.

• 48:10John R. Miles?

  And I'd say about 95% of the people who were there, nothing else was working. And so they had used psychedelic assisted therapies, whether that was ayahuasca, whether it was psilocybin, MDMA, some had used ketamine. But those who were working through these treatments now that are in phase two, phase three, where nothing else had worked, were showing life-saving, life-altering changes. It was like miracles. People who were on the verge of suicide, and this was the last resort, suddenly regained their entire life. And it was so powerful

• 48:52John R. Miles?

  to see this, not in one person, but I'm talking tens of people, like 20, 30, 40 people telling the same thing. So to me, seeing these go through the process is bringing a therapy out that so many people today need, because we have to start reducing these growing elements of suicide rates that are happening, not just in veterans, but they're happening in adolescents, and they're happening in young adults, and they're happening throughout society.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  I feel so touched hearing that. That sounds like such a powerful, beautiful experience to watch. I too am really hopeful for psychedelics as being a healing mechanism, just based off the research that I read, that they're X amount of times more effective than antidepressants, for example, for people to heal from their mental health issues. From the lens of memory reconsolidation, some of the, I talked to this woman, and she, when she was like a teenager, she had this friend she called every day. And eventually, that friend was like, why are you calling me? I'm not your friend. And then from forever, from then on, every time she would hang out with someone, she would assume that they don't really feel like her friend. That memory really haunted her. And she even made a new friend that she really

• 50:04Speaker 01

  liked. And she was like, you're gonna have to initiate with me, because I secretly think you don't like me because of this experience that I've had. So it scares me to initiate. And I tried to do, in the moment, I tried to be like, if you had to go back to that memory, what would you say to yourself? And she was like, I don't know. She was very hesitant. It was very hard for her to think of that memory differently, or to provide herself with support. And the prison that I could see that she was in, was that she was still herself. She was still affected by these memories. And they were still shaping her sense of reality. So it was really hard for her, as herself, to go back to that memory and see it differently. It's almost like she had to be a different person to gain that new perspective. And that's what psychedelics do. They soften the seed of themselves in

• 50:47Speaker 01

  the brains, that fault mode network. And so in doing so, they allow us to perceive things outside of our typical lens of how things are perceived. And they also allow repressed emotions, that our sense of self might have repressed from a sense of safety, to actually come up while also deactivating the amygdala. So the amygdala is part of brain associated with threat. So these experiences are far less threatening. And so from a memory reconsolidation lens, it's really powerful to actually go back to a negative memory as almost like a third party, as almost like someone who would have been watching the memory that's not you. And then obviously, there's really deep potential to develop and make new meaning of the memory, and for that experience to be really transformative for people.

• 51:30John R. Miles?

  Thank you so much for sharing that. And for listeners who want to understand this in more depth, I happened to do an interview a number of years ago with Dr. David Yaden, who's at Johns Hopkins, who is spending his full time there researching psychedelics and this very topic. So I would encourage you to go and listen to that episode. Well, Marisa, it has been such a joy having you back on the show. Where can listeners learn more about you, this new book, and everything that you're doing, your keynote speaking, everything else?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  John, first, I want to say thank you. You are an excellent interviewer. I could tell how deeply you read this book. And I know you have your own book as worth. So it's really exciting to be in communication with each other's work. And it's really exciting for me to have an interviewer that kind of really understands the depths to which I'm writing. So I just want to say I really appreciate you. And if people want to find me, well, first, you can get Worth, The New Science of Self- esteem and Secure Attachment, wherever books are sold, on my website, drmarisagfranco.com. That's D R M A R I S A G F R A N C O. You can sign up for a checklist of practices that will help improve your worth. You can reach out to me for my speaking engagements on Self-Worth, The Key to Resilience in Times

• 52:45Speaker 01

  of Change in the Workplace. Or you can follow me on Instagram, @DrMarissaGfranco. I share tips on building relationships with yourself and others.

• 52:53John R. Miles?

  Well, Marisa, such an honor to have you back on the show. And congratulations on this amazing book. As you can tell, I thoroughly read it and enjoyed it.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure.

• 53:06John R. Miles?

  I hope that conversation with Marisa Franco gave you a new way to think about self-esteem, healing, and the relationship that you have with yourself. One of the ideas that I'm taking away is that growth isn't always about adding something to who we are. Sometimes it's about being willing to see what's already there. And that's an important part of adaptation. Because if we don't understand the stories, assumptions, and emotional patterns shaping our decisions, we can end up adapting to a reality that isn't actually there anymore. And that brings us to our next conversation. Because on the next episode, we're taking the adaptive human in a very different direction, into the world of markets,

• 53:50John R. Miles?

  investing, and decision-making. I'm rejoined by Professor Alex Edmonds, author of the new book, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. And the question he tackles is fascinating. Why do smart people make irrational decisions? Why did Isaac Newton lose a fortune in the South Sea Bubble? Why do investors chase the crowd during bubbles and panic during crashes? And why can something as seemingly irrelevant as a sunny day, or the outcome of a soccer match, actually influence financial markets? Alex argues that markets aren't driven by numbers alone. They're driven by

• 54:35John R. Miles?

  human psychology. And I think that makes this a perfect next step in our series. Because we've been exploring how humans adapt to the world around us. Next, we're going to look at what happens when millions of human minds interact and collectively create madness in the marketplace. That's our next conversation on Passion Struck.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  So something which is front page, and flashy, and more quantitative, it might get a stronger reaction. Something which might lead to underreaction is off the front page. So if something tends to be more qualitative, it might be more hidden. And it's not just hidden to me, it's hidden to you, it's hidden to other investors, because naturally, we like to plump for something which is flashy and visible.

• 55:20John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, the better we understand the forces shaping us, the more intentionally we can choose how we respond to them. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.