Marisa Franco: Why Secure-ish Beats Perfectly Secure

Lee C. Camp (0:02)

I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

Marisa Franco (0:10)

Secure Attachment, often how it's spoken about, is how we treat each other. But really, it starts with how we treat ourselves, attuning to ourselves, expressing what's true for us.

Lee C. Camp (0:21)

Psychologist and professor, Dr. Marisa Franco, talking about a foundational psychological model, which has garnered a lot of public attention recently. Attachment Theory.

The framework has been around in one form or another since the 1950s. And the very basic premise is that our early relationships with our parents, our caregivers, builds an internal template for how we expect others to treat us. These templates show up in our friendships and intimate relationships and guide our behavior for better or for worse for years to come. That behavior, so the theory goes, usually expresses itself in some configuration of secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment. We could spend an entire hour discussing how these attachment styles work. But for the sake of this interview, all you really need to know is that secure attachment is where we're all told we should live. Well regulated, emotionally mature, and with a healthy and rightfully ordered sense of respect for ourselves.

Marisa wrote at length on attachment theory in her first book, entitled Platonic, which itself became a New York Times bestseller. And following that successful publication, Marisa became one of America's leading public voices on friendship and belonging. Maybe feeling like she had the whole attachment thing down, I would suspect. That is until her romantic partner began behaving a little out of character.

Marisa Franco (1:48)

He sort of just started shutting down, not being very responsive, giving me one word answers.

And I thought, I'm going to be the secure girlfriend and bring him back. I'm going to anchor the both of us. I'm going to be calm. I'm going to give him the space he needs. All the strategies that I had learned from being a psychologist who studied attachment style.

Lee C. Camp (2:07)

So Marisa, the attachment expert, played the role of a securely attached partner. She didn't take it personally and buy it at her time until one day it gave way.

Marisa Franco (2:20)

There's just this moment when we're on this hike, and I'm trying to engage, and he's giving me his grunts in response, and I just break down, and I'm like, I can't be a shock absorber for your moods anymore. I can't do it.

I realized in that moment, I felt all of this pressure to become secure, and that's been part of the zeitgeist. Secure attachment has become a status symbol, so much so that I was ignoring the parts of myself that were feeling quite anxious. In a way, reenacting the same harm that creates an anxious attachment in the first place, where you neglect that part of you, you shame that part of you, you try to present differently than how you actually feel. And so, in the book I talk about, that maybe we shouldn't even become secure, but perhaps secure-ish, so there's always room for us to acknowledge and to care for the parts of ourselves that aren't.

Lee C. Camp (3:09)

This crucial shift began to interest Marisa more and more, from striving for the ideal of the always regulated, securely attached, ideally attuned partner, to learning how to become secure-ish. So what if secure attachment wasn't so much about never feeling insecure or dysregulated, but instead fosters a relationship with ourselves and others in which we can accept and express our inner lives without derailing one another in the process?

Marisa Franco (3:41)

I really developed this definition, Lee, because I was studying self-esteem and I found in the research on high self-esteem, that there are two different types of people who share that they have high self-esteem.

One of them tries to be better than superior to other people, shames other people, antagonistic towards others, has the worst relationships, even worse than people with low self-esteem.

The other kind of high self-esteem is compassionate, caring, loves themselves and loves others, puts themselves on an equal playing field with everyone else, doesn't have anything to prove, it's just really about being who they are. And so when I faced this dilemma, it was sort of like, how do I develop a definition of secure-ish, a definition of worth that doesn't come at everyone else's expense?

Lee C. Camp (4:25)

Lucky for us, that definition of self-worth and secure-ish attachment became the focus of Marisa's new book, Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. So today, we discuss strategies that Marisa has developed for self-regulation, relational health and secure-ish attachment.