Secure-ish: Rethinking Self-Worth & Attachment with Dr. Marisa G. Franco (312)

Marisa G. Franco (0:02)

If we don't work on our worth, we could have all the beauties of this life. We could have the best connections. People can love us so much. We can reach our dreams in our career, but it's all going to slip off of us in terms of our actual felt embodied experience. It's not actually going to be internalized. It's like oil to water. And I think that's one of the most compelling reasons to work on our sense of self so that we can internalize more deeply all of the beautiful things that are happening all around us.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

Welcome to Therapist Uncensored. Building on decades of professional experience, this podcast tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more in an honest way that's helpful in healing humans. Your session begins now with Dr. Ann Kelley and Sue Marriott.

Ann Kelley (0:58)

Hey, you guys. While we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly. But it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even more hopeless. So relationships take work. It does for Sue and I. We can make it look easy. It's not. And one of the ways is because many of us, we differ. We differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation, and it's these differences that are held in our body, not our thoughts. And they influence how we talk, how we love, how we fight. So holding that belief, if he or she or they could just understand me, if they love me, they do something different, is not really true. And we're talking about relationships with your partner, your teenager, your mother-in-law.

So Sue and I have created an online course that can help you understand yourself and those you love in a different way. This is not just for therapists, it's for everyone. Although the good news is if you're a therapist, you can get CEs along the way, and all of you can use the visuals and the worksheets individually, or you can even use them in your own private practice. So while the course is based on our book, Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, it is definitely not a replication of the book. We talk directly to you. You learn how to understand more deeply your attachment, those you love, the neuroscience behind it, and how to build secure types of connections right now in your everyday relationships. Rather than changing one another, y'all can shift together in very important ways. It's very powerful. We're getting great reviews. Check it out. It's at therapistuncensored.com/bas.

The BAS stands for Beyond Attachment Styles, The Science of Growing Secure Adult Relationships. And by the way, the cost of the course is about the amount of one individual therapy session. And yet you get hours and hours and hours of what we think is extremely valuable information. So check it out.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. I'm Ann Kelley and our guest today is Dr. Marisa Franco. She is a professor at the University of Maryland and author of Platonic, which is a New York Times bestseller that did something that I don't think many others did at the time. And that she focused on friendship and took it seriously, not as a nice extra around the edges of real life or romantic love, but as a form of love with its own science, its own importance, its own attachment dynamics, and even the kind of grief that happens when we lose it.

After writing that book, she noticed something the book couldn't reach. She kept meaning people had it, the friends, the partner, the meaningful work, and still couldn't feel any of it land. The love was there, but something in them wouldn't let it in. That's at the core of our discussion today. And of her new book, it's called Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Her argument is that worth sits underneath all of it. That we can't take in what doesn't match what we already believe about ourselves. This is not a discussion about how to just improve your self-esteem. So today we dive into why good things bounce off, why some of us can't take a compliment and others can't take feedback without getting excessively defensive.

And the memory behind it. And the memory science that says any of this can change.

Not by talking yourself or someone else into feeling more positive or being less defensive. The pep talk or the confrontations, it's exactly what doesn't work. So in our discussion, we dive deeply into what is happening within us with these struggles and the science of what actually does have an impact. I love the dialogue and I think it's extremely rich. Let's jump in. Hi Dr. Franco, welcome to the show.