Unabridged Interview: Marisa Franco

Lee C. Camp (0:02)

Hello, friends, Lee C. Camp here listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our unabridged interview with Dr. Marisa Franco.

I was delighted that Marisa returned to be with us. We interviewed her a while back on her first book entitled Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends, which was a New York Times bestseller. I love that conversation with Marisa in which she was talking about the attachment styles that we learn early in our lives from our parents, from our caregivers can then be translated, the set of template for us in the way that we interact with other people through the rest of our lives and how the awareness of that can help us learn to practice friendship in new and helpful ways. A lovely conversation. I was delighted for her to come back and discuss her most recent book entitled Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. She develops this idea of learning to be secure-ish, that rather than a perfectionistic pursuit of being perfectly attuned and always emotionally balanced and so forth, is that we accept and recognize that most of us always are going to have our internal turmoil that we have to deal with, and we can make progress with that, but the goal is never to be perfect with that. And that rather than focusing first and foremost on how we are attaching or relating to other people around us, that we turn the attention first to what's going on inside of ourselves, and we discuss the ways one can best attend to the things going on inside oneself, that then can open us up to other forms of more fruitful connecting with the people around us.

And then she, one thing that you'll hear us discuss that I find just remarkable, and that is that if you're talking to someone, let me put it in first person, if I'm someone who's dealing with very low self-esteem or self-hatred, and someone tries to affirm me, that rather than all of a sudden me feeling like I have worth, what instead may happen is that I may feel greater distance from that person, because I feel as if, no, they don't really know me, because I know that I'm, I know, we'll put that in scare quotes, I am such a horrible human being. And so in other words, there's a more helpful approach to people who are grappling with their own lows, or their own sense of a lack of worth, and it's simply trying to get them to cheer up and think positively about themselves, may actually do a lot more harm than good. So a remarkable conversation. I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Marisa Franco.

Marisa Franco (2:36)

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Marisa Franco (2:43)

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Lee C. Camp (3:02)

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SPEAKER_5 (3:06)

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SPEAKER_3 (3:36)

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Lee C. Camp (4:07)

Marisa Franco, welcome back to No Small Endeavor.

Marisa Franco (4:10)

Thank you so much for having me back.

Lee C. Camp (4:12)

It's great to have you back. I very much enjoyed our conversation, what a year or two ago on your book, Platonic and found it lovely and helpful. And so grateful to have you back.

You began with a rather vulnerable confession, I suppose, in your new book saying that, okay, I knew all this psychology, I knew all this stuff about attachment theory. And I was, maybe you don't use these words, but you basically kind of say, I was kind of putting on this secure attachment in a relationship in which maybe I shouldn't have, with a relationship that was doing me harm or at least certainly not flourishing. But I don't know, unpack that a bit for us as we start.