Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Why Changing Your Body Won’t Fix How You Feel About Yourself with Dr. Marisa Franco

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

So many women believe they’ll finally feel better about themselves when they lose the weight, change their body, or reach the goal. But changing the outside doesn’t always change how we feel on the inside.Psychologist and author Dr. Marisa G. Franco joins me to explore where our sense of self-worth actually comes from and how old experiences can continue shaping the way we see ourselves years later.We talk about body image as we age, menopause, insecurity, nervous system patterns, reparenting, vulnerability, and why learning to acknowledge the parts of ourselves we’d rather push away may be an important part of building genuine self-worth.In this episode:Self-worth vs. confidenceBody image and menopauseHow old memories shape the way we see ourselvesWhy insecurity can feel protectiveReparenting and Internal Family SystemsInterrupting negative thought spiralsVulnerability and deeper relationshipsLearning to value who you are now_RESOURCES MENTIONEDFREE Nervous System Questionnaire NEW! Book WorthBest Selling Book Platonic_MORE ON MARISA FRANCOInstagram: @drmarisagfrancoSubstack Newsletter: Attached by Dr. Marisa FrancoLinkedIn: Dr. Marisa G FrancoWebsite: https://drmarisagfranco.com/NEW! Book WorthBest Selling Book PlatonicFor more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep373Connect with Dr. Mindy:Join Reset AcademyWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Dr. Mindy on InstagramSubscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletterDisclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Hey, Dr. Mindy here and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. A few years ago, I noticed something really uncomfortable about my own relationships. I'd go through something really difficult, and I'd tell someone close to me, like a friend, my spouse, or another loved one, and they'd just jump right in to fixing it. You'll get over it. You're amazing. You know how to handle this moment. Don't even worry about this. And instead of feeling better, I actually noticed that I felt more alone.

Because what I actually needed in that moment wasn't to be cheered up. I needed to be heard. I didn't have language for that at the time. I just knew that being told how great I was in that particular moment felt like the opposite of comfort. Well, turns out there's research on this exact thing. Not everyone thrives with compliments specifically amongst a crisis. In fact, many don't thrive. when given advice in the heat of a moment.

Turns out that when people with low self-esteem receive compliments, positive feedback, even love, some of them get sicker in the months that follow. Their blood pressure goes up after praise. They pull away from a spouse who adores them too openly, not because they're broken, but because being told you're wonderful when some part of you doesn't deeply believe it actually doesn't feel safe. It feels like being handed something you're terrified of dropping. This changed how I think about self-esteem entirely because self-esteem, the version most of us were taught to chase how good you feel about yourself isn't actually the goal.

There are people walking around with sky-high self-esteemsteams who are also defensive, reactive, impossible to be close to. We all know some of these people. What we actually need specifically when we are feeling down is something completely different. We need the ability to sit with every part of ourselves, the parts that are beautiful and the parts that are messy and treat all of it as if it matters. This I know I am not alone in and is exactly why I have brought you Dr. Marissa Franco. Marissa is a psychologist and the author of the best-selling book Platonic, and now brings us her new book Worth, which lays out the science of self-worth and secure attachment, the real alternative to

a lifetime of chasing confidence that never quite sticks. In this conversation, we get into why positive feedback can backfire our on someone with low self-esteem, why women in particular perform their highlight reels for each other instead of showing the real thing and what it actually looks like to witness someone's pain instead of rushing to fix it. I promise you, if you have ever felt unheard by someone, trying their hardest to help you, I think this conversation is going to change the way you show up for the people you love and the way you show up for yourself. And I know it's absolutely going to change your overall self-esteem. Let's dive in, Dr. Marissa Franco. Well, first, let me just welcome you to my podcast. I'm

really excited to have you here, Marissa. So thank you for joining me. I know you're exhausted from doing a thousand of these for your book. So I appreciate you taking the time to be here. Thank you so much, Dr. Mindy. I am happy to be here. Awesome. So something in your book that really like stood out to me and I can't rectify it in my mind, it was this idea that if you have low self-esteem that positive people, positive messaging actually can make you sicker. Yeah, yeah. Explain that to me. Well, this is based on some surprising research that when positive events happen to people

with low self-esteem, they're more sick months later. And for men, they're more likely to visit the doctor. That when they gave a speech and got positive feedback, their blood pressure was higher compared to negative feedback, that they report that when they get compliments, they feel very misunderstood. And they tend to reject compliments. And even if a spouse likes them too much, they tend to be less intimate with that spouse. And so it was very confusing to me. Why does it seem like the very things that should improve your self-esteem if you have low self-esteem are actually only revealing how firmly entrenched your negative sense of self are? And in fact, these

positive things are quite threatening. And you can kind of think about unworthiness as an inability to accept love. So, okay, so how do you know, let's define self-esteem because I think a lot of people don't even know what that is. Yeah. So I understand why it's confusing because when I'm reading all this research on self-esteem, I find that it's typically assessed as how good you feel about yourself and people fill out this questionnaire, how worthy you feel, how much do you feel like a failure, questions like that. But when you read the research on people with high self-esteem, you see that there's two different types. One that's quite awful to other people. They are defensive, they are antagonistic, they are reactive, and the other type of high self-esteem that's kind, compassionate,

they value themselves, and they value everybody else. And so I needed to develop a definition of this concept, which I call self-worth rather than self-esteem, that doesn't come at everyone else's expense. And here's what I realize is the difference between these two types of high self-esteem havers, the jerks and the nice ones. I talked to my colleague Beth about it, who seemed to have the more integrity, the type of high self-esteem that comes with more integrity. And she said, I'm trying to think about when I feel defensive. And it's usually because I feel ashamed. And in that moment, I had this flash of insight that, oh, if you acknowledge that you feel antagonistic or defensive or reactive, you are no longer

defensive or reactive, right? And that's the secret of these people that had this sort of healthy kind of high self-esteem, this relational kind. They were able to acknowledge their own emotions and feelings. And so I really defined self-worth for this book as being able to treat your internal world as if it matters, to treat your feelings, your preferences as if they matter and as if they're important. And that culminates in you having a sense of self where you feel like you matter. So there was a quote, this brings up, because this was really interesting, a little bit because I know some people in my life that this is the truth, that if we don't feel, know who we really are, if we don't have a good sense of who we really are, then we actually

don't have to feel all the emotions that come with that. Yeah. It's like ignorance is bliss. Yeah, or at least we think it is. You know, we often think if I push these emotions away, if I push my shame away, that it won't, it'll disappear. But in fact that we find that people that push emotions away are actually the most emotional in moments of time when all of those emotions surge within them. And that's why you see the sort of jerk with who says they feel good about themselves, why they're so reactive, why are they so defensive? Because there's all this shame they've tried to compartmentalize. And when you remind them of it, because it's all unprocessed, they become very antagonistic towards you. And so this is about being able to

turn towards our feelings, acknowledge that they're happening, validate our own feelings, create a sense of internal safety that becomes a high sense of self-worth. And self-esteem is different than confidence? Yeah. So the reason I struggle with self-esteem is that you feel good about yourself, because there's so many people that they would struggle to admit if they didn't, right? They have learned to never admit when they are wrong, to never admit when they're vulnerable, they're perfectionistic, they're, you know, they, again, they suppress all of their emotions. And so that definition of you feel good about yourself, it's not enough. It's not enough for me. And then confidence is often about how you present to the external world, which can mean you feel secure in yourself.

You feel you have a lot of safety within yourself. But it can also mean, you know, there's also the type of person who's compensating for their own insecurities by trying to go work a room and be impressive to everybody else, right? And so that's kind of why I landed on self-worth for the book as this internal sense of being able to be with all of your feelings and emotions and be exactly where you are. So then how does it work? Because so many people in our society are, their self-worth comes from their external world being a certain way. And what I think you're offering us is the opportunity to feel good about yourself even when the external world is not okay. That would be an example. It's not conditional. So unconditional happiness. is a path to self-esteem. Would that be accurate? Yeah, I think to a certain extent, absolutely. I don't,

but I also want to acknowledge that as human beings, you know, you were kind of talking about bodies and how it can feel so hard to feel good about your body in the society. And, you know, I have a chapter in the book on Stigma, and I talk about this book Entangled Life. And it's about fungi, but I'll kind of come back after I go on a little tangent. I love funky. You can talk about fungi anytime. There's a lot to learn from that. There's so much to learn from them. Yeah. So one of the things he says is that we think of ourselves as individuals, but we have microbes in our gut that we need to survive that are technically external to us, but are we need to serve. We're sort of dependent on the outside of environment to exist in our form as a human being to be alive, right?

Right. And so in that way, we are simply vulnerable to our outside environment. Like, that's by design to survive, right? And so for people that internalize negative images, negative ideas, negative ideas about their body because they've internalized them from society, right? That's not, that doesn't mean that something's wrong with you. That just means that you're a human being. I think this worth, this worth work that we do makes us less vulnerable to our environment. Or when we are vulnerable to our environment, we're able to sit with, tolerate, explore that so it doesn't hover over us in perpetuity as deeply as it might. Or, I mean, I think what self-worth does is it ultimately is what guides you to be in environments that treat you better, to curate your

environment. So it's more a more positive reflection because, again, you're treating your feelings like if you matter. This makes me feel bad all the time. I'm changing the media that I consume. And so there's a tango that's happening there. I don't necessarily think we get to a place where it's like, I'm totally invincible to my environment. But we do get to a place that's like, I'm a little less vulnerable and I'm willing to change my environment to take care of myself as needed. I got that. Okay. So let me run a scenario by you that has baffled me for years. When I first started teaching women how to lose weight, I noticed that when they lost weight and they achieved that number on the scale, their happiness,

their relationships, the way they looked at themselves didn't change. Yep. Yes. And it was shocking to me. I mean, this is years ago. And so then I started to tie it to when I would meet with a a patient, I would say, okay, tell me what's going to change in your life when you are that weight. Is it your relationship? Is it how you feel when you put your clothes on in the morning? Because I was trying to tie an emotional connection to this journey they were going on. Right. Why do we get a result with our health and we still in our life feel bad about ourselves?

This is a great question, and I want to verify what you're saying. There was a study on weight loss interventions, and four of five of them did not, the more people wafts weight, they didn't experience any higher self-esteem. So it's extremely common for us to reach our dreams or do the thing that we think would finally make us feel worthy and it kind of backfires. I say backfires because often people feel worse when they're like, now I no longer have this dream or this idea that when I lose weight, I'm going to feel fulfilled. And so there's this kind of despair that can come with that, that oh, it feels like there's no way out of my struggles with worth. And what I argue in the book, why it's not about reaching these external

markers is because, well, fundamentally we have to ask ourselves the question, why do we feel unworthy, right? Why exactly do we feel unworthy? And what I argue in worth is that it's actually about your memories. Researchers say memories are the database of self-esteem. And memories don't just record the past, but they predict the future. And so part of you think, that this rejection, this harm is going to happen again that has happened in your past. And in some ways, feeling unworthy is a way to protect yourself. Because if good things happen to you and they increase your sense of worth, then you get further crushed when that rejection happens again, right? And so the work of finding worth is to confront and explore some of your

past, to in a way change the past. And I can get into how we do that. So it no longer predicts a future of harm. And, you know, even even if we get all that we think we want in the present, if we still have an unprocessed pass that tells us, I'm going to be rejected, scorned, abandoned, stigmatized, see more negatively, then that's the reality that our brain keeps us in. Right. Yeah. And that makes sense to me because I've just watched so many women that their view of themselves is, was actually installed by other people. Yeah. And so, like, whether it was a parent, I have a membership group where we have these

very open conversations. And God, like, I'm just blown away at how many women will tell me what a parent said to them about their bodies. Exactly. And they carry that. That was maybe said to them at 10 years old and now they're 50 years old and they're budding up against how do I lose weight, but they're also budding up against those messages. So I am. curious how we start to change that, that memory of who we thought we were because other people told us we were that. Yeah. So I came across this theory. It took me a year of being like, how do we change this? What the heck? This is, feels like we're like sabotaging ourselves. And so I came across this theory called memory reconsolidation. And the theory indicates that when we

revisit a memory, we can change more so the emotions associated with the memory. And what that means is that we can in a way change the past or at least change the way that it lives inside of us. And so practically this looks like probably what a lot of people do in therapy or if people done like inner child work or reparenting work, if you go back to a memory and picture it having a better outcome or you picture yourself as an adult intervening and maybe saying to that parent, this child, you as a child are beautiful just as you are and you don't need to change your body to be loved and accepted by me. And I will always be here to love and accept you to say exactly what we need to tear the time. And if we can conjure that up as vividly as we

possibly can, because from a research perspective, remembering is reliving. The same parts of our brains are active when we remember something as when we actually live that thing, that we can actually, when people do this, it's a transformative experience that improves their sense of self-esteem. And not only that, you see changes in the part of your brain that records memories, which is called the hippocampus after people do these reconsolidating activities that I detail in the book. Yeah, and I'm thinking, how many times do you have to do it? You do it until it softens. Yeah, exactly. You might have to make it a repeated practice. And honestly, it's less about changing the memories again. It's more about changing the emotions that are unprocessed from the memories.

Right. And that's why. there's a study on therapy, for example, what predicts whether people's self-esteem improves by the end of therapy, and it's how much emotion they've expressed. And so all of us have these emotions that are caught in our previous memories, and they're stamping themselves onto the current reality, right? So if I was always rejected for my weight, even when I'm a different weight, if I haven't processed those memories, I'm still assuming that you see me negatively, that you look at my body and you judge me. a lot of women might struggle with feeling that they still look the same way they did when they were larger, even if they did lose weight, right? Because that's all a byproduct of your memories. So let me run an example. I have, my YouTube audience had several questions for this conversation.

And one of them, I thought, was a really interesting one. And it was when women go through menopause, their body changes. And so their self-esteem goes down because their old techniques. that used to work, don't work anymore. And they just start gaining weight and it feels very out of control. So could you do it in reverse and sort of go back to the memory when you were able to lose weight and try to bring that memory forward into this current moment? That is an interesting idea. Yeah, I think what you're saying, so there's a sort of competing theory of self-esteem. So I looked at interventions that have been successful at improving self-esteem.

The other one's called retrieval competition theory, which is the idea is that it's not necessarily what memories exist, but which ones are most salient to you, which ones that your brain goes to rather quickly, right? And I think when your body changes really rapidly, your comparison point is often you're thinking about when my body looked differently before menopause, before menopause, before menopause. But the way that you try to work with retrieval competition is that you make positive memories of a new body more salient to you, right? So what I would do is I would change my social media. I would maybe change what magazines I'm following so that I'm exposed to the normalization

of bodies that look like mine in transition, right? And so then my comparison point is no longer who I was before menopause. It is now I'm exposed to so many more memories that show the positivity of my body as it is now as it continues to function and do what I need to do in my day to day. So let's use this stay on the same example. I used to be able to stay fit. Yes. I go through menopause.

I can't stay. I'm gaining weight. I'm starting to feel horrible about myself. Yeah. And I'm losing that sense of confidence. And it's an emotional state. So the first thing you would do is say I address that you have this sadness. I look at it as grieving.

this body that you no longer seem to be able to access. But then you could go and see other people at your age that are loving their bodies, that are in a healthy relationship with their body. And you could take an old emotional state that you used to have at 35 and map it to 55 because you're seeing it through the eyes of somebody else. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly.

You're exposing yourself to a much different. impression of your body, right? Because, you know, I talk about in the chapter on stigma for the book, does again get a sound like a tangent, right? But, you know, whether you're Christian or not, many of us are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, and they knew that it wasn't, it was shameful to, like, be naked. So they put the, you know, they put the bush to cover themselves. But there's this philosopher who talks about how they never had to be taught that being naked was shameful. And so what we learn about shame from that seminal story is that shame, is inherent to things. Like it's not culturally determined. It's just inherent. And that I think a lot of

women learn shame is inherent to certain types of bodies. Shame is inherent to aging and looking older, right? But fundamentally, shame is not inherent to anything. Shame is socially constructed, right? There's different cultures look at different bodies in different ways. Some cultures value bigger bodies, right? Some cultures respect elders a lot more. And so at first I want, you know, I hope that these women recognize that there's nothing inherently shameful about your different body. There's nothing inherently inferior about it. There's nothing inherently less attractive about it. It's simply that you've been exposed to a lifetime's worth of messages indicating as such, and it's time to expose ourselves to new messages about the type of body that we live in.

So well said. Thank you. I've spent a lot of time trying to unwind the patriarchal view of a female body from women's brains. I did a YouTube video recently where I quoted a statistic that was saying that only, it was like, less than 5% of women will actually meet the media's ideal of what a healthy, attractive women should look like. So only 5% of us actually meet that. But yet 100% of us are measuring. ourselves against a visual of what only 5% of us will achieve. Exactly. And here's the thing that after I wrote that chapter, I was like,

the things that we have been taught to be ashamed of, that we're ashamed of them because they threaten a social order that needs to be threatened. Yeah, who, bingo, bingo. Right? Like, who, you know, who is being ashamed in like our capitalistic patriarchal set? People that are poor, people that are disabled, people that don't match this existing system. But maybe it's that the system has to change rather than the people in it all need to ascribe to some sort of unreachable standard of perfection. And so if you're violating the norm, like, more power to you because you're helping to create a new norm where everybody can feel more included. Right. That is so beautiful. That's so well said. So, and what I'm hearing is if we bring it back

to this menopausal woman, is that perhaps the key to keeping yourself esteem high, high through this experience is honoring that your body changed. Yes. And feeling the sadness that it doesn't look or feel or function the way it used to function. Exactly. And here's like what I learned from studying people with high self-worth is that their sense of self is much more fluid.

There's this researcher who says, why do we develop a rigid sense of self? Where I have to look a certain way to feel worthy or I have to be the self-made. men or I have to, you know, I have to see myself in a way and I can't change that sense of my identity. I'm always attached to it. I'm always comparing myself to it. And he says, when we experience something unpredictable or chaotic that makes us feel bad, we become predictable. We make our identity predictable, right? So it's like, oh, like, I just, I felt so bad about my body and then I worked really hard to exercise all the time. And now so many of my, much of my identity is staked in having a certain type of body, right? And so, but what, you know, what he argues is

that, you know, when we actually healing is not staying in that rigid sense of identity, but having high regard for ourselves as our identity changes, because we are really, truly recreated in each moment. And, you know, when we, when we say, like, you know, I'll give myself an example. I had a sprained ankle. I'm a very active person. I could be like, why can I run the same way before and keep comparing myself to that? Or I can ask myself, what's my actual lived experience right now? Which is like, here's what I can do. with this ankle, right? Here's, I don't always have to compare myself. I can let my identity be more fluid over time. I don't have to be who I was. That's part of life is that change. And so to welcome that

and to be able to have high regard for you wherever you end up, that your own value is not contingent on any particular thing, but in you revealing yourself as you are to yourself at any particular stage, like, who am I now? Let me get to know myself in this body, right? What does this body do for me? Yeah. Right? Like that's more what self-worth looks like over the long term. So curiosity. Yeah, exactly. Being curious, yeah, which is I think is important, especially as you go through menopause. It's the only, it's the only parting line that you, that will keep you saying is, wow, what's happening now? Yeah. So, okay, on the flip side, what I see a lot in my YouTube comments are women that can't release the weight. and no matter what they do.

And what I know from just my own knowledge and working with patients and interviewing people like you is that it's a protective mechanism. It's like there's like an underlying I'm not lovable. And so if I keep the extra weight, I confirm to myself that I'm not lovable.

And so the weight not coming off isn't because you didn't do a long enough fast or you didn't count your macros or work out right. It's this inner feeling of not feeling lovable. How do we help that woman? Yeah. Well, I can speak to self-esteem in general rather than the intersections with weight as much here. But, you know, I will say that there's a theory called self-verification theory, which is the idea that we look for people to verify our sense of self-back to us. even if that sense of self is negative, right? So I kind of touched on this with some of the research before that if you feel bad about yourself and you can interact with someone that sees you very positively or negatively,

research finds you choose that person who sees you more negatively because if people see you more positively, you're like, I'm going to let them down. They're going to figure out who I really am. At least this person is prepared for me to be anxious and to lack confidence, right? And so there's this way that often when we're seeing more positively, than we see ourselves, it's quite threatening because it's, at the end of the day, you're going to reject me. And then you're going to pull me in to feel better about myself so that I only fall further when this happens. And because of that, because of how our brains work, because our brains

simply want to confirm the reality that we've experienced prior, it can be really hard to get out of that and to really finally feel lovable or really finally feel worthy. And that's also, I imagine for women who lose weight as well, but still, they don't even see that their body has changed, right? Because they have those memories of what it's always looked like in the past. So again, I love this idea that you're acknowledging all the feelings that come with this. So for that woman, would it be helpful to say, I'm acknowledged that I don't feel lovable? And if I lose weight and I become attractive, now I'm going to have to take. test that theory out in the dating world or I'm going to have to see, am I lovable or am I not

lovable? Yeah. But if I hold on to this weight, then I have an excuse that, and this is all subconscious. So people listening to this, please, you know, this is not, this is, these are the kind of things I hear in consultations with women. Yeah. It's like, I'm going to have to now face that there's another reason I'm not lovable. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. People feel very, like I think if you struggle with self-work, you're basically very risk-averse. So you don't want to put yourself out there. You don't want to initiate. You don't want to be vulnerable. You almost don't want to put yourself in a place to have someone perceive you positively. Because you assume that if you put yourself in that place, they're going to see you more negatively anyway, right? It's just too vulnerable because you're convinced that it's going to go negatively.

And so what I see, that's why people with self-esteem issues often struggle in relationships, because in relationships you have to initiate, you have to be vulnerable, you have to express affection, you have to put yourself out there. You have to see if the other person's going to like you back or not, right? That when you have low self-esteem, you're so convinced that they're going to not, it's not it's not even worth it to try anymore. Right. Yeah, I see that so clearly.

Another thing in the book that just flashed out at me was this idea that insecurity is, how the nervous system protects itself. Yes, absolutely. Explain that because my audience, again, we've been talking a lot about nervous system regulation right now, and I think it's a key part of metabolic health. So insecurity being the nervous system reaction, talk about that. Yeah, so let's say I'm getting criticized at work.

And what happens when I go through an experience in the present? is there's a part of your brain, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, that basically rummages through your past memories to recreate a past experience in the present. So if you're getting criticized at work by a boss, you always got yelled at maybe by your father. You're literally re-experiencing what it was like to get yelled at as a kid in this experience with your boss if you have unprocessed memories around it. Right. And so in that way, you're, you know, there's a psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg. He says that we don't go to therapy to deal with what happened in the past, but what is still happening now and we are convinced will continue to happen,

right? And so that is partially the reason why if I'm insecure, if I think you're going to reject me, right? And I'm experiencing any sort of ambiguity in a relationship, like, oh, maybe you took longer to respond than before. My nervous system is convinced that that is going to happen again, that you're just going to reject me, right? Wouldn't it be adaptive for me to pull away first? Wouldn't it be adaptive for me to not assume that you like me so that when you reject me, I'm not going to feel prepared for it, right? And so there's, there's this way that our nervous system, our insecurities are trying to protect us from a reality that we are convinced will happen. And even that our bodies make us re-experience as happening, whether or not it's actually happening.

I mean, this is why I love conversations like this. I'm like, we are so complex. We're so complicated. And when I think about women and walk the path of them trying to fall in love with their body, whether they're overcoming an autoimmune condition or they're trying to lose weight or they're dealing with menopause symptoms, it's like I started my journey in my career as eat these foods, do this fast, detox this way. And I've now come to this place that these are the kind of conversations that we have to address first before you even start to make the food changes because then you're going to know yourself in the process of making the food changes. And you're going to understand yourself at a deeper level. So we just have so many women that

specifically are trying to love their body from the outside in. And it's scary to go in and actually see what's in there. So it's really, I hope everybody listening is catching this. My new conversation that I'm having with my following is about nervous system regulation. I think it is probably one of the most important health tools we can exhibit. And I've come up with a questionnaire, so those of you listening, you can go into the notes and take the questionnaire. But here is my question for you, because it was a statement in your book that shot out at me too, which is you cannot regulate what you don't. acknowledge. Yes, yes, exactly. Okay, explain that to me. Yeah, yeah. So in the book, I talk about

these, you know, like I said, these people that have high self-esteem or high self-worth because they're trying to ignore the parts of it. And this was me too. I mean, I think a lot of high-achieving people, women can relate to this, that, you know, you feel good about yourself, but the parts of you yourself that you don't feel good, you're not really looking at or you're not really welcoming or you're not really embracing, you're just trying to push away. And so for me, like, parts of myself that felt shame, dependent, needy, if a lot of me felt good, I could kind of just ignore them, try my best to ignore them. But then finding that and moments, I could really be hit by these parts of me. It feels like they can take over and my, you know, your self-worth, if you're trying

to compartmentalize parts of yourself, you can find it swings suddenly and madly. It jerks wildly, right? And now realizing that actual self-worth is about embracing everything you are, embracing the parts of yourself that feel ashamed, embracing the parts of yourself that feel too much, too needy, too dependent, and welcoming them back. And this is the paradox of self-esteem or self-worth. The people that feel truly worthy are the ones that can acknowledge when they don't because they have high regard for themselves, even in their moments of lowness, in their moments of pain. And so practically speaking, in my own therapy, this has looked like, you know, I was working with my therapist, we kind of use this idea of the divine, of a divine force, a divine light, energy, whatever that means to your listeners could be light, love, God, whatever that means. And I was struggling, when I was struggling with a part of myself that felt shameful, needy, dependent. My therapist asked me to give that part up to the divine. And I, and what I did, what I heard was like, this part of you is, perfect to. This part of you is perfect too. And that was so powerful for me, Dr. Mindy. I was so used to trying to change and do better. And, you know, and that's what I've learned about insecurity. Insecure, the problem is not that you're insecure. The problem is that you're ashamed of your insecurities. And the more that you can accept your insecurities, the no, they no longer haunt

and hijack you. And so that's what I'm welcoming people to do in this journey of worth. So if somebody to use the polyvigal language, if somebody's stuck in a free state where, and this happens with overeating, where now they're numbing themselves with food, you can't get yourself out of that free state until you acknowledge even the dark side of what you're feeling about yourself in that and why you're numbing it. Yes, slow down, slow down and learn to feel and tolerate those feelings. And, you know, I have like a three-step framework I do in my speaking events, which is to first feel, like when you notice yourself about to go all out and eat a lot, perhaps, what are you feeling that's driving you there? Can you label that? Can you pause? Can you tolerate that? Can you allow that emotion to be there? And then heal, what do you need to hear? And it's, maybe it's, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. I'm safe. I'm okay. I'm okay. I love you. I love you. I love you. And then do. Is there something that you need to change in your environment to help you work through this feeling or this emotion, right? And maybe if you have problems with binging, that's giving yourself less access to the kind of foods that you'll binge, right? But it is, we can't keep trying to escape ourselves and assuming that that's the pathway to feel better. We have to confront these hard, thorny parts of ourselves. And I do this now,

every day, an everyday practice of what am I feeling in my body? What do I need to hear? How can I feel that? How can I breathe with that part of me? How can I show that part of me more care? Yeah. It's interesting. I just saw a study this morning on chronic pain and self-talk. And they notice that if you talk kindly to your body, if you actually went into a conversation and the study was actually done with you verbally talk to your body. Like instead of, cursing the chronic pain. You embrace it and you say, what are you trying to tell me? Thank you for giving me a signal that those people moved through and healed from the chronic pain quicker than people who didn't talk to themselves. Exactly. Yes. I think like when you think,

what I'm saying, these are memories, right? Yeah. This could be a memory of when you were five years old that is triggering you now. Imagine telling a five-year-old, you suck. You should be ashamed of yourself. I'm going to ignore you. Right? Like, but we're, doing that all the time internally. And so it's time to instead provide ourselves with the care we never received, to be able to say, it's okay. However you feel is okay. I'm right here with you. Right. And how do we help the woman who maybe is hearing this for the first time? And the thought of really looking at shame or really looking at what holds us back from loving our body is opening up, can of worms of maybe sexual abuse or of, you know, 50 years of criticizing themselves. Like,

where's the door in? Because I really want to be sensitive that some people may actually be in tears right now listening to this conversation because it's a crack is what I've found when we have this depth of conversation. There's just like a crack that opens and somebody goes, oh, God, that's it. Yeah. But then they'll put this podcast down. and then they'll shut down, they'll seal the crack up because it's too painful to look at. It's too painful, yeah. Absolutely, you know, I'm glad that you're thinking about those listeners, and it's understandable because, like, what I'm kind of saying here is that when you feel a feeling, you kind of feel the history of all of your feelings.

All of it. Yeah. It's like when I'm sad now, I'm experiencing all the unprocessed sadness. Like, why is it so hard for me to grieve if I've had all of these losses in the past that I haven't grieved? And so it just makes sense why it would feel really overwhelming and really scary because it's like, I'm not just reacting to whatever conflict I got in in the moment, but what this has meant to me my entire life. And so I understand why that's hard. I teach classes on why we're so lonely and we do lessons on being more compassionate to ourselves. And I always have a student who's like, I am, they almost experience internal anger at the idea of being compassionate. for themselves. Like it's like threatening to be compassionate for them. I don't deserve this. I'm going to be weak. If you're giving me compassion, then you're seeing me as someone who needs compassion.

And I don't ever want to be someone who comes off as weak, right? And so it might be, it might be too hard to get to that place of like, what do I need to hear? How can I be comparing to myself? And maybe we just start with acknowledging a feeling in a moment, right? Just start with what am I feeling, what does that feel like in my body? How would I label it? You don't even have to change it. But starting this practice of tuning inward, when I feel something, what is that I'm feeling? Is the tightness in my chest? Is a tightness in my throat? And just spend some time with that sensation. Spend some time with that sensation. I think that's opening the crack of the door. And often in the research round, there's something called titrating, where you focus on your body

when you feel very safe, what does that feel like in your body? And then you move to the discomfort. And then you move back to safety and you move back to the discomfort. And so what do you feel like when you're in really safe and then switching to the discomfort emotion? And of course, you know, some of these exercises I write in the book, if it's, if it feels better to do with a therapist, I absolutely suggest that. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know in the book you have a bit on internal family systems. And I can tell you, I decided about, four years ago to dive into myself and get to understand what was causing the thoughts and who I was and heal traumas. And IFS was really helpful. And one of the things that was helpful for me was to

go back and think about reparenting my little girl. And, you know, my whole brand is like a girl. And so parts of that for me was really important that I had to go back and actually, I like in the morning when I do my morning time, I think about her sitting next to me. And I've had so many conversations with her. And I feel like I have this relationship with her that I'm now mothering her. Yes. Could we do that? Again, we're going, could we pull some version of ourselves that we don't want to look at and actually start to love and nurture like a mother would? Yeah, exactly, exactly. you know, in the book, because when I, you know, why I wrote about internal family systems in the book is because here's the thing about healing from your past. Let's say your pain comes from a difficult childhood, right? Or a parent that was very dysregulated and would take their emotions out on you or put you down or constantly be critical. And then you tried to tell someone and get help. And then it got worse. And people were like, you make a big deal out of nothing. Like you don't respect your parents or whatever they said. then part of you thinks that if you go back and access the original memory of pain,

it's only going to get worse, right? And so it's almost like a part of you is blocking you from being able to access the memory that you need to heal. And so sometimes our memories can kind of be layered in that way. And that's why I really like internal family systems because you get to know the part of you that's blocking, the part of you that's like, hey. Not all of you. Not all of you.

It's a part of you. Exactly. It's a part of you and you can say, let me explore the part of me that's resistant to going back into this memory. Let me explore the part of me that's so critical of my own pain that has a hard time having compassion, right? And you listen to how that part of you is trying to keep you safe because it's trying to criticize you to prepare you for before someone else does, right? And you allow, you spend time with that and you make that part of you heard so that you can get access to the deeper pain that that part of you is guarding. So complicated. Dr. Mindy, this healing work is so intense. Yeah, it's so complicated. And it's not for the faint at heart, but what I find is so interesting is that the results people want live in going into the depths of what is motivating them or not motivating them. And here's why I think people should do it, because if you feel unworthy or you struggle

with sense of self, you can have it all. You can have the body you want. You could have the relationship. You could have the success you want. It's going to slip off of you. It's going to slip off your sense of self. And to actually be able to internalize all the beauties of life, you have to work on your sense of self so it no longer filters those beauties out.

Yeah. Yeah. I hope everybody heard that. That was so well said. Like everything you want is on the other side of that. Exactly. And so I think that's beautiful. A question from my YouTube audience on this.

this topic was, and I think this one I see a lot, is what are practical steps to stop the daily mood and self-worth that gets attached to the scale or external beauty standards? This is like in the day, I maybe got on the scale that morning, I didn't like the number, I look in the mirror, I say something critical to myself, and then I go to Instagram and I see everybody else is beautiful, and now my day sucks. feeling worse and worse and worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a in the moment kind of thing? Yeah. There is. I mean, we, I think you've been alluding to this discussion on something called implicit memory. Implicit memory are things, memories that affect us, but we don't know that's happening, right?

When you're reacting very strongly, right? You're getting triggered. You, all of a sudden, you hate the other person or you hate yourself. You're, you're, you know, you're getting enraged out of nowhere. That's often because the memory got triggered, right? It's, it's what's hysterical, is historical as as Freud said. And so how do you work with these implicit memories, which I would say the trigger of the scale in the moment is perhaps an implicit memory of all the times in your life where your worth has been attached to how your body looks? And how you work with implicit memories, you use a glitch of your brain where basically we only have a limited working memory.

That's our ability to think of things in the moment. And so when you focus on a trigger and you simultaneously multitask, you focus on the trigger simultaneously focus on something else, it's almost too much for your brain. So your brain begins to degrade the trigger. It doesn't have enough bandwidth to fully access the trigger and the vividness of the trigger and the emotions associated with that. So this can sound a bit wonky or wacky, but this is why if people are familiar with EMDR, where you're focusing on a trigger and you're watching a ball move back and forth or tapping different parts of your body, right, that those could be really effective of simultaneously focusing on how bad you're feeling.

and doing something else. And so you can tap different parts of your body and tell yourself, you know, tapping involves statements like, I belong or I'm worthy or whatever you believe. Yeah, I've had Jessica Orkner has been on here several times. She's so beautiful at describing it. Yeah, exactly. Or even playing Tetris, there's research on that while people focus on a trigger or if I think what's very accessible is like counting one plus two, two plus three, three plus four, while focused on that trigger sensation, and you'll surprisingly find that, oh, I feel a little less heated or charged after you do that, after you focus on how bad or unworthy you feel, and you simultaneously focus on something else. And then you note how you feel afterward. Wow. I hope everybody heard that. And these are the kind of things that are in your book. Do you have like exercises like this? Yes. I have the best research back to exercises I could find for improving our sense of self-worth. Because that was gold, what you just gave us, right? Because I've noticed if I let one negative, if something triggers me and there's a negative thought and it doesn't get addressed, then it leads to another negative thought, which leads to another. And then next thing you know, you're down a rabbit hole and you're like, how did I get here?

Yeah. It's like being able to interrupt and do something and to treat your pain as a request for your attention and care, right? It's a request for you to go inward and give yourself some care. And there's this great disability activist who says, like, we treat illness as temporary in our society when it's not for some people. And for many of us who have been struggling with self-worth our entire lives, illness is not temporary. But that means we also treat care as temporary. That it's something we give ourselves in these special moments rather than something we need to continuously give ourselves throughout a day even to turn towards ourselves and offer ourselves care. Yeah.

What do you think as women we can do to support each other in a more authentic approach to our lives? Because I think, unfortunately, as I'm thinking through this whole conversation, I'm like, as women, we always show our highlight reels. Especially in a patriarchal culture that is like not, doesn't want us to show anything else. But we do it, we do it to each other. Yeah. And is there something, as somebody leaves this kind of. conversation, where does authenticity free when you are living and expressing these are all the parts of me and some of them are beautiful and some of them are ugly? What does that do to your friendships?

How does that liberate people around you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so much research on vulnerability that I went into in my first book, Platonic, that people like us more when we intimately self-disclosed, not less, that, you know, there's actually a study called the beautiful mess effect that looked at when people disclose insecurities about their body, they see it more negatively. But when other people hear them, when they think of that in someone else, they see it more positively. So we... Fascinating. Yeah. So people see us a lot more positively than we think when we disclose our insecurities because they see us as honest, authentic. They see themselves as liked and trustworthy because we disclosed it to them. And so that, reminding myself of that helps

me be more vulnerable, that, oh, I think people will judge me, but that doesn't tend to play out as much. But when we're on the receiving end, Dr. Mindy, something I've learned, friends would often share their insecurities. And I might go into, oh, of course not. You're beautiful. You're amazing. Right. Right. And that does not work, right? Because I just told you how it can be so threatening to see yourself positively when you see yourself negatively. It's like, oh, you're trying to manipulate me into seeing myself better. So then ultimately when I get rejected, I'm just going to feel worse, right? And so we need to start witnessing each other instead of trying to change each other. And so for me, it's being able to say to my friends, oh, okay, like all of us feel insecure sometimes.

Like, it makes sense that you would feel that way in that situation. Tell me more about what that's like for you or tell me more about where those feelings are coming from and expressing curiosity and being alongside people as they express their vulnerability rather than trying to get them to fundamentally change a part of themselves that they don't feel good about. Because again, the problem is not that the insecurity exists. The problem is the shame around it. And so when we say, I don't see this as shameful, let's explore it. I'm curious about it. I'm right here with you. It's valid. Then we are helping them with the shame. Yeah. That was so well said. One of the things I realized in my own journey inward over the last couple of years has been that when I'm going

through something and I say it to a close friend or to my spouse, what ends up happening is I feel unheard when they're like, oh, you'll get over that. Yeah, but you're amazing. You're this. And they try, and it's like, no, I need you to hear my pain right now. And where the relationships I feel the most connected to is when they're like, thank you. I thank you for just letting me be vulnerable. Exactly. And we don't live in a society where vulnerability is really applauded. No. So yeah, that was really beautifully said. Thank you. So thank you for that. So the name of this podcast is Live Like a Girl. And I recently named it because I'm really trying to take back this idea that living like a girl is a beautiful thing. It's not a derogatory statement. When you hear that

statement, what does it mean to you? What does it stir up in your mind? I think it stirs up like freedom, creativity, being authentic, living in the moment, going for what you want, deprioritizing external perception or expectation and prioritizing your own needs or desires in each moment, perhaps being a little quirky, a little bit weird. I think we need to look back to who we were as children to figure out who we really are before we internalized everything. So I see it, you know, there are Abraham Maslow, he's a psychologist who created that hierarchy of needs if people are familiar with.

it, but he says that healing is about achieving a second naivete, that now we feel that we can go back to not expecting harm again, not predicting the worst. And in a way, we're naive, but we feel, instead of bracing and making ourselves smaller, we feel that we can tolerate it if things go wrong. We can trust ourselves in that. It's really true. Like, I know we all have different childhoods, but my early years, I was just authentically me. And then some, Somewhere along the line, the world tells you to be different. So I think that's really beautiful. Where do people find your book?

Worth the New Science of Self-Eesteem and Secure Attachment is available wherever books are sold. You can get it. Signed copy if you order it from Law City Books in D.C. Nice. I'm available on Instagram at Dr. Marissa G. Franco. That's D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. And if you go on my website, Dr. MarissaG-Franco.com, you can reach out for speaking events on Svelworth or get a list of practices.

to improve self-worth. Amazing. Well, thank you for what you do, and I hope you recover from your book launch. Thank you, Dr. Mindy, you get it. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. I totally get it. So I hope you're going to go into some self-love once this book is released into the world. But thank you for this.

This was really beautiful. My pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about. it so please leave us a review share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.