Why You Don't Feel Good Enough | Self-Worth with Dr. Marisa Franco
We're Out of Time
Psychologist Dr. Marisa Franco joins host Richard Taite to explore the psychological distinction between self-esteem and genuine self-worth.
Key takeaways
- Low self-esteem can cause people to reject compliments or intimacy because it threatens their established internal model of the world.
- True self-worth is built through honesty about one's flaws rather than 'faking' confidence or suppressing emotions.
Main topics
- Self-worth vs. Self-esteem
- Attachment Styles
Notable quotes
You can't heal parts of yourself you refuse to acknowledge.
Conclusion
The episode provides a profound look at moving from performance-based
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) 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. Speaker 2 (0:44) If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call One Call Placement. That's 888-831-1581. 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. Speaker 3 (1:05) 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. Speaker 2 (2:05) Today, on We're Speaker 3 (2:07) 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. 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? Speaker 4 (2:55) 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 till 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. Speaker 3 (3:20) You write that unworthiness is really an inability to accept love. What do you mean by that? Speaker 4 (3:26) 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 it's 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 work is we'd rather hold on to our theory of self and the world. then change it, even if doing so would make us better able to receive love and be loved. Speaker 3 (4:43) You know, 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. 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 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? Does the science support that? Speaker 4 (5:34) 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 all that's unprocessed in 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. Speaker 3 (7:04) You know what else I found? I found that until Speaker 2 (7:07) I started loving myself, Speaker 3 (7:09) 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. Speaker 4 (7:25) Yes. Right? Speaker 3 (7:26) And so that seems like that's part of it as well. Speaker 4 (7:29) 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? Speaker 3 (7:41) That's exactly right. What's the difference between self-worth and self-esteem? Speaker 4 (7:47) 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. Speaker 3 (8:06) 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. Speaker 4 (8:18) 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 ourself when we're feeling different emotions? And that's what helps them not take over. Do Speaker 3 (9:03) you know what I love about this conversation? You're not a clinical therapist, Speaker 4 (9:06) right? Well, I'm a counseling psychologist, but I'm a professor right now. Speaker 3 (9:11) That's exactly right. So you're an academic. And the beautiful part about that is it completely lines up with best practices in a one-on-one clinical setting. It's just perfect and validating. Speaker 4 (9:27) Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 3 (9:29) Attachment styles are everywhere these days. But you argue we've misunderstood what secure attachment really means. How so? Speaker 4 (9:38) Oh, man. Oh, 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 avoidant. 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