Why Nothing You Achieve Will Ever Make You Feel Worthy | Marisa G. Franco – EP 821

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles welcomes psychologist Dr. Marisa G. Franco to discuss her new book 'Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment.' The

Key takeaways

People with low self-worth often feel anxious when praised or treated positively because it contradicts their core belief about themselves.
Positive affirmations and compliments can worsen feelings of unworthiness in those with deep-seated insecurities.

Main topics

Self-worth vs. self-esteem
The science of attachment and identity

Notable quotes

If you see them too positively, they're like, 'You're going to figure out who I really am.'

Compliments can raise blood pressure. Positive affirmations can make people feel worse.

Conclusion

True worth is not earned through achievement or external validation, but

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What if people with low esteem actually prefer to be seen negatively? It sounds completely backwards, but Dr. Marisa Franco found research showing that when someone has a deeply rooted belief that they're unworthy, being seen too positively can actually create anxiety. Because if you see them differently than they see themselves, they may start thinking, you're going to figure out who I really am. and it gets even stranger. Research suggests that for people struggling with self-esteem, compliments can raise their blood pressure, positive affirmations can make them feel worse, and even positive experiences can have negative effects. So why does this happen? Because sometimes the problem isn't happening around us. It's the story we've learned to believe about ourselves. Take a listen. Speaker 2 (0:58) People with low self-esteem prefer to interact with someone who sees them more negatively. Because if you see them too positively, they're like, you're going to figure out who I really am. There's all this anxiety. I don't trust you. I don't believe you. If we struggle with our worth, we can have the greatest love of our lives. We can have the successful career, but all of it slides off of us because it doesn't resonate with our sense of self. And thus we can't actually internalize it. Hey, it's Speaker 3 (1:24) your friend, John, and Speaker 2 (1:26) welcome to Passion Struck. Speaker 3 (1:27) I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 3 (2:05) Welcome back to Passion Struck. This is episode 821, and we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past several conversations, we've looked at adaptation from very different angles. Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about how much our situations shape who we become. Dr. Marty Seligman took us deeper into agency, the belief that our actions can make a difference. And yesterday, Cole Brower showed us what adaptation looks like when you're 27,000 miles from home, alone at sea, and there's no one else who can take the helm. But there's another dimension to adaptation that's deeply personal. How do we adapt without losing ourselves? Because sometimes the challenge isn't changing our circumstances. It's changing the way we relate to ourselves. My guest today is Dr. Marissa Franco, a psychologist, a researcher, and the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic. She's back on Passion Struck with a remarkable new book called Worth, the new science of self-esteem and secure attachment. And this conversation goes much deeper than simply asking how to feel better about yourself. Marisa explores why our earliest experiences can shape the way we see ourselves, how our memories can continue influencing us decades later, and why some of the behaviors we think make us more secure can actually pull us farther away from ourselves. One of the ideas I found particularly powerful is her argument that healing isn't about becoming perfect. It's about becoming more honest with what you're actually experiencing. and learning to stop abandoning the parts of yourself that you've decided aren't acceptable. That connects with some of the themes I've been exploring in my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, but from a different direction. Because The Mattering Effect asks what happens when our environments communicate that we're invisible, replaceable, or insignificant. Worth asks a different question. What happens when the disconnection inside us, when we don't believe the good things happening around us, are actually meant for someone like us? And I think those two questions belong in the same conversation. I'm really glad you're here for this one. Let's dive in. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, Speaker 2 (4:43) let Speaker 3 (4:44) that journey begin. Speaker 3 (4:51) I'm absolutely thrilled today to welcome back Marissa Franco to PassionStruck. Marissa, it is so great to see you again. Speaker 2 (4:58) Likewise, John. So great to be back. Speaker 3 (5:00) I am so excited. You have a brand new book coming out and your first book, Platonic, was a New York Times bestseller, an amazing book, one of my favorite books over the past five years. This new book, Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, is... deeper, in my opinion, than I thought platonic was in all the right ways. So congratulations. Thank Speaker 2 (5:24) you. Thank you so much. But Speaker 3 (5:26) for the listener, if you want to catch up on our previous discussion, Marissa first joined me in episode 207. And if you can believe it right now, we're about ready to release episode 778. Podcast has had a lot of interviews since then. But when we spoke about Platonic Marissa, the central problem you and I were talking about was loneliness, which now everyone seems to have on the tip of their tongue. But as I was explaining earlier, in Worth, the problem feels deeper. You write about people who are loved, successful, surrounded by others, yet they still feel like they're not worthy of connection. Speaker 2 (6:06) What Speaker 3 (6:06) changed in your thinking between the two books? Speaker 2 (6:09) I guess when I was writing Photonic, it was really all about what can you do? How can you treat people to feel like you have fulfilling connections? Then I was coming across this theory, the theory that got away, self-verification theory, which is this idea that we look for people that verify our sense of self. So fascinating research that people with low self-esteem prefer to interact with someone who sees them more negatively. Because if you see... them too positively, they're like, you're going to figure out who I really am. There's all this anxiety. I don't trust you. I don't believe you. And other research that their blood pressure goes up when they get compliments, that when they affirm themselves, say, I am loved, they feel worse, that when positive things happen to them, they're sicker months later. And so there's this way that if we struggle with our worth, we can have the greatest love of our lives. We can have the successful career, but all of it slides off of us because it doesn't. resonate with our sense of self and thus we can't actually internalize it. And I thought that was so counterintuitive because if someone told you how to feel worthy, they'd probably say, gain compliments, do those affirmations, find a successful job. But in fact, when you feel unworthy, sometimes all of those things can reveal how deeply entrenched your struggles with your sense of self are. Speaker 3 (7:24) Yeah, so you and I both are really big in this topic of worth. I'm interested in your definition of it. Speaker 2 (7:33) It took me a while to understand what worth is because when I read the research on self-esteem, there are people that report having high self-esteem. They say, I feel good about themselves. I feel worthy as a person. I don't feel like a failure. But when I look deeper into the research, there's two different types of people with high self-esteem. One type, in the book I call it the bad twin versus the good twin. Let's call it the bad twin for now. They are hostile towards others, antagonistic, defensive, reactive, have poor relationships than anybody, even people with low self-esteem, versus the other type, the good twin. They have the most smooth relationships, live in good harmony with other people, have compassion for themselves and others, have better relationships than anybody. And so I thought to myself, I can't just define worth as feeling good about yourself because then I can leave. Mistakes are everyone we ever love. If we can become this bad twin that says they feel good about themselves, but harms other people. And so I had to really understand what's the difference between this sort of very egotistical sense of high self-esteem versus the more. I grounded, a genuinely grounded sense of high self-esteem. And as I read, I talked to this colleague of mine, Beth, and I was like, isn't it wild? These bad twins are so reactive and mean, but they say they feel good about themselves. I don't know, raising my eyebrows. And Beth took a moment to identify with the quote unquote bad twins and says, well, I'm trying to think about myself when I feel defensive, when I feel reactive, usually I'm feeling so much shame. And that clicked for me because I realized that. It's not that the good twins or any of us for that matter, never feel defensive or hostile, or we want to be aggressive towards other people. But in that moment, what Beth did is she acknowledged those feelings and you can only regulate what you acknowledge. And so these quote unquote bad twins, they're compartmentalizing all these negative feelings about themselves. They're trying to push away, avoid, deny any shame that's within so that when you offer them feedback, when you do something that irritates them, all of that feeling that they've pushed away comes out at you. And so that's why I define worth as being able to feel everything that you feel from a grounded place of treating every feeling within you like. It matters. And in the research on securely attached kids, there's these two terms that come up for how parents treat these securely attached kids with sensitivity, which means they recognize their kids' feelings, recognize when their kid's in distress, angry, and also responsiveness, which means they respond to those feelings in a way that helps the kid regulate them and understand that. And I think worth is doing that within ourselves. Speaker 3 (10:13) I have really been trying to look at early childhood as a core subject that I'm researching in Much More Death. You probably don't know this, but I put out a children's book earlier in the year because I think in many ways, there are two periods that I call of wet cement that a child's identity is formed. One is the ages of three to eight. And then I think you have another opportunity where, and that. aspect, they're like a sponge, but they're not old enough to understand the deeper questions to ask. And then I think there's another period between the ages of nine to 14, before that cement gets locked in place where they're asking the deeper questions, searching for more knowledge. And if you don't intervene in those two places, then you get into this point where self-worth is shaped. And now you're having to break the concrete to fix a lot of what's happened during those two periods if it's not reinforced. Does that resonate with you? Speaker 2 (11:13) It does resonate with me because when I tried to understand these people with low self-esteem and why are they rejecting all of the signs of love and acceptance, what I've came across was this idea of worth as a theory of self. That if you feel unworthy, it's that everyone will reject you and harm you. And if you feel worthy, it's the sense that you will be accepted and positive things will happen to you. And how that theory really forms is through your memories. Memories are the database of self-esteem, researchers say. And so you can see how if your memories at that young age, particularly, you had these memories of rejection, abuse, neglect, then our memories don't just record the past, but they predict the future. So part of you thinks that's going to happen again. And that's why insecurity is so adaptive. If you're living in a world where that's going to happen again, it's adaptive to not feel too good about yourself because then you just plummet and crash when that does happen again. And so I think in this young childhood period, it's a really central period of life because our memories are not predicting the future. We are instead creating those core memories that will then guide us in the rest of our lives in terms of how we feel about ourselves and how we interpret the world around us as. a confirmation bias for what we already know based off of our early life. Speaker 3 (12:29) I have found, and then I'll promise I'll get off this topic, that if I summarize this into two camps that I think a lot of us grew up in, one is the individual who grows up in a household where they are seen, but they're told not to be heard. So they grow up learning that if they speak, that is going to bring them pain. And so they isolate themselves and learn to remain invisible. And then I think you have this other camp, which is more prevalent in modern day, where in order to be seen, you have to perform because that's how you get recognized. You're seen by your sports accolades. You're seen by how you perform on a stage. If you're in a play, you're seen by the grades you get. And if you're not achieving those things, then you get the opposite reaction. Have you run across that as well? Speaker 2 (13:26) I think Carl Rogers, he's a popular therapist. He calls it contingencies of worth. And it's this idea that to be worthy, you have to do something. You have to achieve something. And I think in practice, that can look very subtle. It can look like, for example, my niece, she tried to get the star in the school play. And she was like, then will you come see me? And knowing this research on contingencies of worth, that if I say to her that seeing her in this play is contingent on her having the star part, right? What am I indicating to her? So instead I had to tell her, no matter what position you get in the play, no matter what role you get in the play, I'm going to see you and I'm going to be proud of you, right? And so I think related to the sort of second one where I have to constantly prove myself to be worthy, internalizing those contingencies of worth, that your worth is contingent on something.