We're Out of Time - Why You Don't Feel Good Enough | Self-Worth with Dr. Marisa Franco

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Psychologist and NY Times bestselling author Dr. Marisa Franco joins host Richard Taite to unpack the difference between self-worth and self-esteem — and why the people who need love the most are often the ones who reject it.Dr. Franco, a University of Maryland professor and author of Worth and Platonic, explains why confidence isn't the fix for low self-esteem, how childhood memories shape adult relationships, why trauma can live in the body, and a practical exercise anyone can use to start building genuine self-worth today.Topics covered: self-worth vs. self-esteem, secure attachment, childhood memory and trauma, somatic healing, honesty vs. confidence, and the surprising research on friendship and connection.Learn more about Dr. Marisa Franco at drmarisagfranco.com. Her new book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, is available now.New episodes of We're Out of Time every Tuesday. Follow and leave a review — it helps others find the show.

So when I was doing all of this research on self-esteem, I found something interesting. That the people with the lowest self-esteem are the most likely to reject compliments. If they're with a spouse that loves them too much, they're less intimate with them. When good things happen to them, they get sicker. And when people give them positive feedback, their blood pressure rises. Even when they say affirmations like, I love myself, they feel worse after. If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call one call placement. That's 8888-8-8-3-1-1581.

And if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time. One-call placement is affiliated with Carrera Treatment, Wellness, and Spa and One Method Treatment Centers. Before we start the conversation today, I want to deliver a personal message. Every day, families across America lose someone they love to an overdose. Many of those deaths are preventable when communities have the right education, resources, and support. That's why I've partnered with the CDC Foundation through their COPE, Community Overdose Prevention

Efforts Campaign, and committed to matching every donation dollar for dollar up to $25,000. I've spent my life helping people recover from addiction. But if we can get to the place of prevention first, this would help save so many more lives. I hope you'll join me in supporting the CDC Foundation's overdose prevention work at cdcfoundation.org slash cope. You can also visit the link below in the show notes to donate. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Today, on We're Out of Time, our guest is one of the country's leading experts on friendship,

attachment, and human connection. Dr. Marissa Franco is a psychologist, professor at the University of Maryland, international speaker, and New York Times bestselling author whose work has helped millions better understand why we connect the way we do. Her new book, Worth, challenges everything we think we know about. self-esteem and explains why real healing doesn't begin with confidence. It begins with honesty. Please welcome Dr. Marissa Franco. Your new book makes a pretty bold claim that confidence isn't what builds self-esteem, so what does? Honesty. Honesty about the parts of ourselves that aren't

okay. I think a lot of us have been taught when it comes to worth to fake it to you make it, push it down, don't let people see you sweat. But the problem is you can't heal parts of yourself you refuse to acknowledge. So worth is about creating a container to be honest for all that you feel, rather than trying to force yourself to become something different. You write that unworthiness is really an inability to accept love. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So when I was doing all of this research on self-esteem, I found something interesting, that the people with the lowest self-esteem are the most likely to reject compliments. If they're with a spouse that loves them too much, they're less intimate with them. When good things happen to them, they get sicker. And when people give them

positive feedback, their blood pressure rises. Even when they say affirmations, like I love myself, they feel worse after. And so I was sort of like, what is going on here? Why do people that feel unworthy reject the very things that might make them feel good about themselves? And I learned that our sense of self-worth is a theory of self. It's a theory of self and other. And so if we have low self-worth, we think people will reject us. And if we are given information to the contrary, it doesn't elevate our sense of self. It reveals how deeply entrenched our sense of self is. Because when people threaten your theory of how the world works, it creates a sense of incoherence, unpredictability, you feel defenseless as to what will happen next. Things feel chaotic.

So how our psyches were is would rather hold on to our theory of self and the world than change it even if doing so would make us better able to receive love and be loved. You know, when I was, when I had a five-year break in my non-compete period, I did not love myself at all, okay, at all. No self-care, no self-love, a little bit of self-esteem. esteem, but I was faking it, right? I felt like a fraud. And what I found was the second I started taking care of myself and making my, my well-being, the most important, everything shifted. And so what happened was it went from self-care to self-esteem and then graduated to self-love, right?

is that, does the science support that? I love that. You know, I have this issue with the research on self-esteem, which is simply defined as feeling good about yourself because many of us have been taught to hide when we don't feel good about ourselves. So how do we know if we have genuine self-esteem or we're simply hiding any thoughts to the contrary

from other people and even to ourselves? And I found in the research that people that have high self-esteem because they can't admit it when they are flawed, when they make mistakes without feeling too much shame, they actually are very mean to other people. You see that you see all that's unprocessed and how they treat others. They say they feel good about themselves, but they're demeaning towards others, they're acting superior, they're hostile towards others. And so how do we develop a sort of genuine sense of self? To me, I define self-worth in the book as treating your internal world like it matters, treating your feelings like they matter, validating your own emotions, turning towards

them, embracing them, telling yourself that it's okay, whatever you feel. You know, vulnerability doesn't mean you're weak or isn't anything to be ashamed of when you feel angry, hostile, anxious, all of that is okay to feel. And that is how you develop a sense of self-worth where your worth isn't contingent on you performing in a certain way. It's like whoever I am, I am worthy. But I like what you said because it's not just focused on the internal, treating my internal world like it matters, but also my external world, like going through the world, like what I need in the world is significant and something that I want to turn towards. You know what else I found? I found that until I started loving myself, I couldn't love

anybody else, but more importantly, no one else could love me. And the reason they couldn't love me was because I didn't let them know who I was. Yes. Right? And so that seems like that's part of it as well. Absolutely. There's a ceiling to which we can accept love if people don't know who we are, if we're not vulnerable, like affection and vulnerability go hand in hand. How can I trust that you love me when I don't let you truly know me? That's exactly right. What's the difference between self-worth and self-esteem? Self-esteem is generally this idea that we feel good about ourselves. Self-worth is truly valuing our own experience, our own internal world, truly valuing, treating every emotion that we have as if it matters,

coalesces into us feeling like we matter as a person. And self is, yeah, sorry. But your feelings aren't facts, right? You're just acknowledging them and saying, oh, that's great. Okay, thanks for sharing. And then it, right? Like a cloud. Yeah.

Well, that's a way to approach it. I think that's like sort of like mindfulness. what I'm advocating for in the book is being able to label, validate, feel your feelings. And I think ironically, that helps us make our feelings not turn into facts as to how we perceive the world. Often when we're pushing away and are suppressing our feelings, that's when they really tend to hijack us. And so the more that we can say, I feel anxious and that's okay, I feel angry and I see

that, I label that. And even doing that, it decreases activation of the amygdala in our brain, the part of our brains that are associated with threat. And so can we allow our feelings to happen? Can we validate them? Can we be supportive towards ourselves when we're feeling different emotions? And that's what helps them not take over. Do you know what I love about this conversation?

You're not a clinical therapist, right? Well, I'm a counseling psychologist, but I'm a professor right now. That's exactly right. So you're an academic. And the beautiful part about that is it completely lines up with best practices. is in a one-on-one clinical setting. It's just perfect and validating. Thank you.

Thank you. Attachment styles are everywhere these days. But you argue we've misunderstood what secure attachment really means. How so. Oh, man. This was honestly part of my own journey that I go into in the book, which is like, I wanted to be the perfectly secure girlfriend. And so when my boyfriend was acting out, literally,

stonewalling, shutting down, I was sort of like, what does he need for me to co-regulate him, for me to anchor him, trying to be so perfectly secure that I abandoned myself because I was so convinced that I needed to do all these practices and use all these tools. And now thinking of secure attachment, first of all, as about first checking in with yourself. And sometimes the secure thing to say is, I can't be around this. Anxiety. I can't, you know, I can't be your punching bag, you know, rather than trying to just be compassionate towards the other person.

It's checking in with yourself and understanding your own capacity. So I think the conversation of secure attachment has been so much about how do we relate to other people. But if we're relating to other people, if we're doing things with other people that don't actually align with how we're actually feeling, then in some ways we are losing. ourselves in this quest to be secure. I think the other way that we do that is I've seen in the conversation on attachment styles, we've started to shame people who are anxious or particularly people that are avoidant. And we shame that in ourselves. We're like, I'm secure, I'm secure.

I'm not anxious. I'm not avoided. It's sort of become a status symbol. And the irony is that when we try to neglect or shame parts of ourselves that are insecure, we are reenacting the same harm that made us insecure in the first place. Someone shamed us. Someone taught us that how we feel or who we are isn't okay. And so I talk about in the book that rather than being secure, maybe we should strive to be secure-ish. So there's always room for us to offer care for the parts of us that are insecure. That's actually genius. Thank you. I'm just, I'm not judging. I'm just reporting. Why do so many people reject the very things they say they want, healthy relationships, compliments, success, or even love?

So if we think about self-esteem, as we've kind of talked about it, as this theory of self that people will reject us or harm us, right? Where does that theory come from? It comes from our memories. We have experiences of rejection, abuse, harm, neglect that shape our sense of self so that we feel fundamentally unworthy. Researchers say memories are the database of self-esteem. But here's the thing. Memories aren't just made to record the past. They're also made to predict the future. So part of you thinks rejection is going to happen again. Harm is going to happen again. And your love is trying to pull me up to feel good about myself. So when that harm comes again, I am going to be further crushed than if I maintained a steady, lower, and poor sense of self.

It feels like manipulation when you really understand the psychology of the self. Where does our sense of worth actually come from? Are these beliefs mostly formed in childhood? Yes, I think a lot of our, like I said, when I said, like memories, when we're really young, we are sort of looking at the world as at the first time. And so we're taking in information very directly and it's shaping us and how we see things in the future. As we get older, we simply seek to confirm a lot of our models that already exist. And so that's why when we're young, the memories we form there can be particularly powerful. There's this psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg, and he says, people don't go to therapy to deal with what happened then, but what's still

happening now, we continue to live in the realities of our childhoods in that. If I had a parent that was very aggressive and angry, maybe when someone gives me feedback, even if it's gentle, my body literally relives that same feeling of someone attacking me or humiliating me. And so that's sort of like how our memories work. Even our body continues to experience what it was like back then now. Those people are so hard. They're the hardest people to deal with. Right. It's like the young kids today when you sit there and I mean, I just happened to me the other day where I was talking on a group on a Zoom with a bunch of employees. And this young girl,

I asked her a question and she didn't answer it directly. So I asked her another one. And again, she didn't answer it directly. And this went four or five times until I pinned her down, right? And there was nowhere else for her to go. And I did not raise my voice. I'm speaking like I'm speaking now. Hand to God.

and do you know what this girl said to me when i pender when i pender down stop screaming at me it's they're almost as bad as the people that um can't take responsibility for anything and are always right you want to sit he wants to sit on my lap come on hi lucca okay can we actually change the emotional impact of painful memories? You know, everything I've told you may feel like, dang, I'm kind of doomed. If it's my memories, I can't change the past. So I'm going to be doomed to low self-worth forever. And that's really not the message I'm giving in the book.

Because there's this theory called memory reconciliation theory, which is a lot of jargon, but it just means that because memories are made to predict the future and not record the past, they can update with new information each time we, we, revisit them. And so there's research where people go back to a negative memory that has really impacted their worth. And they picture themselves intervening in the memory as their adult self, giving them everything that they might have needed at the time, or they go back to the memory and they write down good things that came out of that experience. And what you see is that this is a powerful and transformative experience for people. They not only report higher self-esteem after,

but you also see differences in their brain, in the hippocampus, which is the part of their brain that records the memory. You say trauma can continue affecting us even when we don't consciously remember it. How? The part of our brain that has us consciously remember, it's called the hippocampus. The part of our brain that still records the emotion associated with an experience, even if we don't remember it consciously, is called the amygdala. Now, there's a really fascinating study where people were shown a blue slide and a loud noise

plate, blue slide, loud noise plate. Blue slide loud noise played. Now when the blue slide showed, even if the loud noise didn't play, you could see they were sweating. The researchers could pick up that they were sweating, right? If someone doesn't have a hippocampus, you ask them, hey, what color slide was associated with the noise? They don't know. Green, yellow, right? They can't remember.

But their body will remember. They still start sweating when the blue slide plays. And so that's the way that our body remembers through the amygdala. And when we're young, when we're infants, our hippocampus, isn't fully developed, but our amygdala is. So we're still picking up on feelings of threat that can stay with us throughout our lives as we endure similar experiences to what we might have endured at that young age that still activate anxiety, still activate fear, still activate terror because the ways that the amygdala can record memory. This is called implicit memories,

which are memories we don't remember, but that still affect us now. And that is really what triggers are, right? When you're like, I'm reacting so strongly, I don't know, Why, it's because your brain is bringing up an old memory that you're re-experiencing. Isn't that Pavlov's dog? Yeah, I can certainly see a connection between those two things. I never thought about it, but now that you mention it, yeah, kind of, absolutely, where we have these kind of implicit triggers that continue to affect us. And we're not necessarily conscious of them either, which makes sense, right?

Because dogs aren't conscious and it's still affecting them. You want to know it's funny. It's the reason you don't, that you never put those two together is because it was too simple a concept and you're too smart. All right, let's move on. You also write that trauma often lives in the body, not just the mind. Why is that so important when it comes to healing? Well, it tells us that we need to heal our bodies by going into our bodies. Now, this is a part of the book I draw from Richard Levine, who does a lot of great work on somatic experiencing if people are familiar. And his idea was really like, why don't these wild animals, this kind of gazelle that gets caught in the

tiger's paw, why isn't it traumatized after? You don't see it fighting or fleeing out of nowhere like you see humans with PTSD. And what he noticed was that after the gazelle escapes the tiger, it will shake and shake and shake and shake. And his idea was that the gazelle in doing so was releasing the excess energy. And he really sees trauma as it's excess energy in our body that's trying to get out. And that's when we're triggered, it's like excess energy trying to get out, right? When we suddenly get aggressive, it's a way for that excess energy to get out. And interestingly, research finds, this is like more with rats, that when they get shocked repeatedly, when they can fight back, when they get fight another rat after or they can like push a button to stop it,

they experience less physical health problems. So it's like if you could fight or flee when that trauma occurred, then the p you're not going to be affected by the trauma as much. But, But the reality is a lot of us have experienced ongoing trauma in our childhoods. And that's a time when we couldn't fight or flee. And likely a lot of us might have dissociated, tried to escape, shut down. And that's actually related to increased trauma symptoms because that energy doesn't disappear. And so the ways that we get that energy to finally disappear is to get back into our bodies, feel that emotion, have that emotion move through us. And I share all of these research back exercises to work on these memories.

in the book as well. If someone listening realizes they've spent years feeling not good enough, what's a practical exercise they can start today? Well, really, I think about working our worth both as an activity to work on in the present and to go back to the past. And so, like I said, going back to negative memories and intervening as your current self could be really powerful. But in the present, we can really practice, I call it, feel,

feeling, healing, and doing, which is as emotions come up, acknowledge that they're happening. And so people that I interviewed that were secure in themselves, they kind of, one of them said, I would wave my hand over my day to see where my emotional energy lied. And it was fascinating to me because I was like, I'm a psychologist, but I don't look for my negative emotions, right? But he was sort of like, yeah, those emotions are part of me that I don't want to let leave, right? And so being able to access all of our emotions, label those emotions, in the moment and offer ourselves support when we're having a negative emotion.

That can say, I'm okay, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. And then do is, is there something that you need to do on behalf of that feeling, right? If you're always getting upset that this friend's showing up late to you, can you ask the friend, oh, hey, like timing's really important to me. Can you show up on time? And so that's what it looks like to really continuously treat our own internal world as if it matters, which culminates in a sense that we matter. We spend a lot of time on this show talking about addiction and recovery.

How does feeling unworthy make someone more vulnerable to addiction or make recovery harder? You have to feel worthy enough of healing and recovering and feel like you matter enough to do that. And that's going to take so much out of you that you have to see yourself as more than an addict. I interviewed this researcher in the UK and he was looking at men who were formally incarcerated and who engaged in recidivism versus who escaped the sort of cycle of returning to prison. And the difference was that they saw themselves as more than their crimes. They saw themselves as a more complex person, more expansive in their sense of self. And that is really key, that whatever you're struggling with, if you're struggling with addiction,

you're more than that. There's more to you than that. There's more value to you in that. And I think believing in your sense of worth allows you to engage in the behaviors that will ultimately move you more towards the life that you want. And feeling like you don't have a sense of worth makes it really hard for you to treat yourself well enough to heal from what you're struggling with. I'm, you know, not an expert on addiction in particular, but I know that there's a lot of

negative feelings that are at the root and escaped through the active addiction, right? And so what does it look like to face and confront some of those negative feelings so they're not constantly pulling you to escape through a substance? And so part of that is, I think, very related, Richard, to the things that we've talked about already. Why are you feeling so negatively? There's memories from your past that are repeating themselves and showing up in how you're feeling right now. And so it's not just that you're feeling bad in a moment. You're feeling bad because of a culmination of moments that haven't been processed, that continue to shape how you see reality now. And so going back to the past and facing some of that pain and feeling some of those

feelings and confronting it and also reconcilitating it and transforming it is really what the book is all about. So I hope that it can really be helpful for people. You may not be an expert in addiction, but that was the best answer I've heard in a long time. Oh, thank you. One thing that really surprised me is you say people don't need more confidence. They need more honesty. Explain that. Well, we cannot regulate what we don't acknowledge. And often when we're pushed to sort of be confident, we're pushed to put aside the parts of ourselves that are still in pain. And I'm instead advocating for an approach that's about telling the truth and admitting who you are. And you're no better or less of a person based off how you feel, right?

There's a difference. One of the podcast interviews that I was on, she said, there's a difference between self-worth and worth, which means that we are all inherently worthy. Self-worth is whether you actually feel that way. And so being able to actually feel that way, I think, is really what I'm trying to guide people through the book. There's this man and woman. They're married.

They've got a good marriage. he leaves town for the weekend on business. She goes to the bar with a girlfriend, gets a little drunk. Two beautiful men, the most beautiful men she's ever seen, come up and start hitting on her. She's always wanted to have a threesome.

Always. Okay, it was on her bucket list, and she gets to cross this off the bucket list, and so she does it. And when she gets home, she feels so bad. She goes in the shower, and she scrubs,

and she's crying and she can't believe she did it. And because I've got a crystal ball, I know how it ends. She loved him more than she ever did, which made him love her more than he ever did. They were so in love that, and their marriage was so good after this, they actually fell asleep in their 80s, holding hands and passed together in the night. Wow.

It was magnificent. Let me ask you a question. Do you want to know she cheated? I would want to know. I was hoping she wouldn't say that. I was hoping she'd be the only woman in the world that I've ever asked this question to and that she would have been like, hell no.

Why? Because every single guy I've ever asked. asked that question to is said, hell no. Wow. Every woman I've ever asked is said, yeah, I want to know. Yeah. So you're going to take the next 40 years of life in absolute bliss where you found your person and this is the person that you want to call to tell everything to.

You want to spend, you love the way she smells, you love the way she nurtures, you love her boundaries, you love how she loves herself. You love everything about her. And you want to know? That's what you want to ruin? Yeah. Well, I don't know if I think it will be inevitably ruined. I think if you're able to face hardships in a way that is illuminating, open, vulnerable,

then you can potentially repair from them. Why risk it? Why risk it? It was perfect. Because it was perfect. I think if I, well, at least for me, I don't know. there's other people that are probably good at hiding and lying that if I am hiding something, I struggle.

No, no, you're the guy. You're the guy in this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you want to know? Or if it was turned around. Yeah.

Same thing. Why do you want to know? You're not the one carrying it. Yeah. Why do you want to know? I would assume, and again, maybe it's possible that someone can really hold on to their lies and not share it. But I would assume that someone being able to hold onto that kind of secret, it would

affect our ability to connect with each other. in our dynamic. I know you have your crystal ball and you said everything turns out okay, but I just have, I have trouble fully accepting the crystal ball because, yeah, like, holding onto a big secret like that, like, how do you stay fully present in the love that you, you just look at them and you think of that secret? It's just like not, not purely, you're not purely present with the person anymore. I imagine, this is how it would be for me. But again, I don't know. Some people may be able to do it. That was the only answer. If you're going to tell me, yes, you want to know, that's the only answer that's exciting.

Okay, I'm glad I found it. And I did not see that coming. I'm glad I found it. You're right that we don't need to know exactly who we are. Why can letting go of a fixed identity make us healthier and more secure? Well, let's think about having a low sense of worth, the ways we've talked about it already. Having a low sense of self-worth is about knowing exactly who you are. are and how people will treat you. People are going to reject me. People are going to harm me.

Any information to the contrary, kind of like delete or am threatened by, right? And so having a fixed sense of self, it can lead to us abandoning ourselves because we're no longer living in the present. We're no longer taking in reality as it is, but instead holding onto that fixed sense of self. And the truth is, as human beings, we're more beings, we're more processes than we are identities, right? So each moment, I can have a new felt experience. You know, there's this psychologist, Eric Fromm, he says, do you drink soda or do you drink the label, right? Like each moment I can be like, today I don't like the soda that I liked before. And it's only if we're living in the present that we can truly realize who we are.

I'll give you an example. My first book was on making friends. I'm a friend expert. I get sent to flyer for factor meals. And I'm like, I'm a friend expert. I don't want to buy individually wrapped meals. Like that's not aligned with my identity. And so I use my identity to tell me who I am, rather than.

than using my actual experience, would I like this, what I enjoy it? Do I like cooking all the time, right? To tell me what I would like. And so when we allow ourselves to not be rigid in who we are, ironically, we start to know ourselves more fully because we allow emotions and feelings to manifest that might have otherwise violated our sense of who we are. Do you talk about friendships in a way to where you can compare it to either, therapy or medication and the value of that because we're communal beings. I just had Danny Siegel on not recently, and I believe I asked him the same question. I have this memory of a study that was indicated that someone who has a group of friends

versus someone that is lonely and going to therapy once a week. The person that has the group of friends is going to have better outcomes. and it just makes so much sense to me, right? Because therapy is only an hour. And having connection is something continuous and regular in your life. And I think part of the value of therapy is to be able to be your most authentic self with someone, to tell the truth of who you are. And I think in true quality friendships, we get to tell the truth as well. And so that's not to say there's not value to therapy if you have great friends or vice versa,

but that is to say there's really something irreplaceable about being in connection and being in community. And there's so much research to support this that, for example, when you look at people that are very lonely versus not lonely at all, people that are very lonely are 17 times more likely to attempt suicide than people that aren't lonely at all. And so connection. It's so funny. That's so funny. They needed to study for that. Yeah, right? I guess it's kind of obvious just how much lack of connection can really affect. us and affect our mental health and well-being. So it's critical. It's critical. And I think my first book, Platonic, was about how to build healthy relationships with others. And my second book,

Worth, is about how you can build healthy relationships with yourself. And interestingly, Abraham Maslow, he's the guy who created the hierarchy of needs and this whole idea of self-actualization. And in his later journals, he was like, there's actually a stage past self-actualization. When you feel so yourself and so authentic, you are so deeply connected with others. because you don't have those same walls and barriers, and you reach a state of self-transcendant, where now you are so, you feel so in unity with larger causes and with your larger community. And so this, this idea that, like, the work on the self is a vehicle to be in deep and true community with other people.

You have two beautiful people, gorgeous man, gorgeous woman, and they absolutely love each other. They talk all the time. They go for coffee. but they're not sleeping together. Okay? Can these people ever like be friends to the point where they're not going to end up sleeping together? Yeah. I, well, in Platonic, my first book, I talked about the difference between romantic love and sexual interest.

And those are actually two different things. And we see this in particular from like asexual people. who can experience romantic love, even if they don't want to have sex with people. In that, romantic love is, I'm excited about you, I'm thrilled by you, I want to spend all my time with you, I'm passionate about you. Maybe I feel more jealous, more insecure about you. But sexual attraction is, I want to have sex with you. And a lot of people report experiencing some semblance of romantic love in the context of their friendships. I think if you ask women in particular to describe their best friends, it often sounds very romantic. She's my soulmate. I'm

would do anything for her. She's the most beautiful person I've ever met. And so understanding those two things as distinct, I think, allows us to love our friends more deeply because we're not so afraid that that will mean I want to have sex with them just because of how much I love them and to just have more clarity around the ways that we might see and think and feel about people in our lives. I think there's just not enough room or narrative in our society to see those things as to see. I think particularly for men who tend to really be socialized to only want to be friends with women who they have some sort of deeper attraction to. But I think it's something that should certainly be more normalized that, hey, we can be really connected. And this can be such a

valuable, beautiful relationship, even if sex isn't part of it. If there's one message you hope people carry with them after listening today, what is it? Hmm. Well, I guess I'll share maybe a story from my own life, which was that I was working in therapy on this part of me that I felt like was really sensitive and dependent on people and insecure. And I was really struggling with that part of me. And in my own therapy, we kind of work with like higher power or divine, whatever you want to call it. And so my therapist said, like, okay, what happens when you offer that part of you up to

the higher power, the divine? And I closed my eyes and I did it. And when I did, the message I got was that part of you is perfect too. That part of you is perfect too. And it blew my mind because I was so used to getting frustrated, feeling ashamed of these parts of me. But I think finding a self-worth, that's really key, that, hey, even the part of you that you struggle with, it's perfect too. It's beautiful too. It's okay that that's a part of you. And the reason that we don't heal isn't because those insecure parts of us exist. It's because we shame them for existing. So every part of you is okay exactly as it is. Would you do me a favor and tell me what you're most

proud of about your new book, Worth? Well, I think when you understand how Worth works, how it traps us, how we're still living in the reality of the past, how we're still tortured by it. And it feels so hard to break free of. It feels like we're going to be stuck here forever. And sometimes it feels like the only way forward is to pretend we're okay and start acting like we're regulated, even when we're not. And I just remember someone came to me after my first book, Platonic, it was like, you provided me all these tools to act secure. But like, I don't actually feel it in my nervous system. I haven't actually internalized it to that depth.

And worth was my attempt to say, what does it look like to develop a sense of worth that's not a performance that actually reflects our nervous system? What does it look like to fundamentally change the way that we feel at such a deep level? So an act of worth is a reflection and a radiance of what we feel internally. Is that possible? And in worth, I feel like all the research I did brought me to. to a place to show people that it's really possible, that even if you felt so bad about yourself for several decades, that there is a way forward and here's exactly how you can do it. If you're talking to someone whose worth is dependent upon their stature in life,

what do you do with that? It's, you know, it kind of reminds me of this psychologist, Marion Woodman, and she said it's easier to try to be better than who you are than it is to try to be who you are. So many of us have learned that our worth is contingent on appearance, performance, status. It's kind of like the great American, it feels like the great American lie. What I would do to that is I would start exploring the part of me that feels like I need to perform in order to succeed. Right. Not, I think the way, if you ignore that part of you, it continues to like kind of master the show and keep compelling you to do more and do more and do more. But asking that part of you, why do you feel this way? Where does this compulsion come from? What are you afraid of happening? So what happens if it wasn't, I need things and I need stuff and because that's all horseshit anyway, okay? What if it was about, you know, I just want to leave my family.

in a good position before I'm gone. Well, that's kind of beautiful. That sounds like a very, that doesn't sound like an issue. It doesn't sound like you're worth this contingent on that. It sounds like more just a positive wish you have for people you love. Yeah, but it is. It's, it's because if you can't get to that point, then you're a failure. And so it's almost like a perfectionism, right?

Which is great for excelling in things. but the worst thing in the world for your overall happiness. So you said you would be a failure. Tell me more about why that would make you a failure. If you wanted to leave your family and make certain that your family was safe in the world while you were gone and you didn't achieve that before you were gone, then you died a failure.

in this fictional person's world. And what sort of emotions come up when you think about that fear of not leaving your family in that place? Panic until you involve God. Because you can't be in fear and faith at the same time. It's not possible. So once you go to God and you just tell them the truth, I'm sorry. I know I'm a disappointment because I don't have any faith.

And, you know, I'm too afraid. Can you help me with that? That's when it goes away. And do you feel that in your body, this sort of combination of panic and then the force of God coming in and changing it? Yes. Every time. Wow. It feels like a warm blanket.

Wow. Where can my viewers find you? So my book, The New Science of Self-Esteam and Secure Attachment, should be available wherever books are sold. you can get a signed copy if you buy it from Law City Books. I am 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 on my website, Dr. Marissa G-Franco.com. You can reach out for speaking and get events on self-worth at work,

or you can sign up for a list of practices to work on your self-work. Thanks for coming. Pleasure was all ours. You're such a blessing. See you next Tuesday. Bye. We're out of time. Please subscribe on YouTube, click the thumbs up, and leave a comment. Please subscribe on Apple Podcast and Spotify, and leave a rating and a review.

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