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

26:36I'm a college professor. I see this in my students all the time. We're not sitting with pain. We're not confronting our feelings, right? For me at this point, mental health has been like physical. I spend time with my emotions every day. Interviewing someone that was secure, he said that he would scan his hand over the day to figure out where his energy lies. He was looking for feelings within himself that needed care, parts of himself that needed care, that needed support. And so this, I think the culture we're living in is much more about distraction, much more about comparison, much more about trying to be better and superior and optimize and get to the top.

27:12And then I'm sure you see it, John, you interview successful people all the time and I'm around them too. And we see that success does not equal happiness. And that in fact, sometimes it will, the most successful people are on this hamster wheel forever, where they feel like I have to do more and more and you never quite arrive. And so I just hope that the message that I want to give to people is nothing you achieve will make you worthier. The only thing that will make you worthier is if you turn towards yourself and have a felt experience of care right now exactly as you are. And one of the things I thought was really intriguing was rather than treating attachment styles as fixed identities, which is something that I've had a number of guests on the show do, you really frame them as adaptive responses to past experiences.

28:01And I was hoping you might be able to go into that a little bit more because I think it's really an important differentiation. Because I don't believe in shaming anyone with an insecure attachment style. I really don't. And well, when we think about it from the lens of memories and memories predicting the future, right? You use these attachment styles because they have kept you safe in your most formative relationships. As an anxiously attached person, when you try to push and put yourself out there and achieve and get someone's attention and cling, you ultimately got some nuggets of care from that, right?

28:38And that's become your template because it was effective for you. And also for avoidant people, the opposite has happened where you have tried to put yourself out there. You have tried to seek love. You have tried to seek acceptance and you've been rejected and shamed so many times that you had to give up. And that's what kept you safe. There's this psychologist who says, when a parent doesn't love a part of us, we will alter our consciousness. We will shut off those parts of ourselves that our parent didn't love. And that's what the avoidantly attached person does. They shut off their own sense of vulnerability.

29:10And so these were adaptive. These were very adaptive and can continue to be adaptive in the context of some relationships. But the issue is that memories, like I said, memories don't just record the past, they predict the future. And sometimes that predictive model is off because we're no longer in that context anymore. And so the book is really about full of exercises is because I think of worth as finally returning to the present and living in the present and not always predicting a future of harm and coming to the present where all that is imminent is possibility. You don't know that someone's going to harm you.

29:46You don't know that someone's going to shame you. You don't know someone's going to abandon you. All that you know is that there's possibility that exists and living, I think worthiness as living with that possibility and being able to act authentically despite the full gamut of possibility, whether it be harm, whether it be abandonment, or it be love and connection. And since you were just talking about memories, I thought one of the most powerful phrases in the book was this concept of open memories. What exactly is an open memory and how does it continue shaping our self-worth as you were kind of just alluding to decades after events occur?

30:22seeing that memories can really affect our sense of self-esteem or even determine our sense of self-esteem i was reading into this research on how people would go back to something traumatic let's say their house burned down or they were robbed and talk or think about engage in that memory remember that memory and afterward they report lower self-esteem but here was the kicker only the people whose memories were quote unquote open would report lower self-esteem. What does that mean? Open memories feel like they're not behind us. It feels unresolved. We haven't made meaning of it. We don't like to think about it.

31:02Maybe we ruminate on it. It brings up heavy emotion for us. It makes us angry. It makes us sad, right? And those memories, there's a psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg. He says, we don't go to therapy to deal with the past, but what is still happening now. Open memories, we're basically continuing to perceive reality in ways that match those memories. And there's a part of our brain called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which you don't need to remember. But it basically, when we go through something new, it will rummage through our past memories and make us re-experience in our bodies how something felt then now.

31:37So for example, my boss criticizes me. Why do I react so strongly? Why am I so defensive? Because literally my brain is like, this is just like your father who exploded on you. You're literally re-experiencing those same emotions. And so those are the open memories. but you can literally have the same memories of maybe theft, of somebody breaking into your house, of the fire burning down your house. And it won't affect your self-esteem if the memory is what's called closed, which means that it no longer triggers strong emotion. You have a sense of meaning out of it, why it happened. Maybe you incorporate it into your life story.

32:15Our house did burn down, but then we banded together as a family in the future, or we ended up in this different neighborhood where I went to the school and had my very best friends, right? It's not looked at as it shouldn't have happened, but that happened and it's part of my life and it's formative and it made me who I am and there's no more emotional reactivity around it. Those people have the same exact memories, but those memories don't affect their sense of self-worth. I'll tell you, some of my past memories plagued me for years. And I think I did what a lot of people did because they were painful.

32:46I kept putting them off because I didn't want to deal with it. I thought if I could just put it into a sub structure where I park it there, it wouldn't come up. And for years it worked until something reminded me of it. And then it came back tenfold. Yep. Yep. And I think that's what happens to a lot of us. I think so too. And honestly, John, it's not just you, it sounded like a conscious process for you to do that, but also our psyches can do that for us. I cite a study in the book that one third of women who were sexually assaulted and even went to the hospital to gain care after that assault when they were teenagers, one third of them didn't remember that experience when they were full adults.

33:29It's not just like sometimes we consciously are like, let me push this away because it's painful, but sometimes something so painful that our psyche is like, this is too much for you. I'm going to plug this away. But again, even those repressed memories can still hover over us and hover over our sense of self-worth. And throughout the book, you talk about many different things. I was interested that in one portion of the book, you brought up Maslow. How do you think our desire to self-actualize can get in the way of our worth? I think we're so affituated sometimes on trying to become remarkable that in doing so, we end up in many ways doing ourself a disservice.

34:17Do you feel that way at all? Well, there is this psychologist, Marian Woodman, who said, and I felt very called out by this, it's easier to try to be better than who you are than to be who you are. and I was like dang I felt that somewhere in my soul and I mean my friend called it like a sort of commodification of healing where we're always like I have to do more I have to be better I have to do this I have to do that and rather than how I'm at now is okay where I'm at now is okay where I'm at now is okay there was like this quite powerful study in the book that I cited and this was I have a chapter in the book on psychedelics and how that leads to accepting life experiences more like I'm talking about.

34:58And this woman who had cancer and when she had her own journey, she saw cancer at her dinner table and was like, it was meant to be here. It was meant to be part of my life. It's not something evil. It's not something, I don't know, toxic. It was just a part of my life. And I accept that. I grieve and I accept that. That was such a powerful story to me and really showed very poignantly that like the secret to being at peace and okay and feeling steady and feeling stable and worthy is not never feeling suffering. In fact, it's like we look for like perfect relationships that never harm us, but those perfect relationships aren't real because the human experience is defined by struggle.

35:41It's defined by people being flawed, people being imperfect. And so when someone seems so perfect, often it's because it's a fantasy, right? And how do we incorporate that and accept that within ourselves, accept that within other people, accept our past full of pain and see it as this is like part of my human experience. And it's the seeing it as this is so bad and this should never have happened. And this makes me fundamentally unworthy and fundamentally deficient rather than like, this is just the part of the tapestry of all there is that can really keep us stuck. I will say though, that like, we don't get there from trying to jump to that phase.

36:18We get there by being with ourselves in each of the phases. you might have something really harmful that happened. You might be very angry. You might be trying to bargain with this experience so that it didn't happen, right? You might be very resentful and getting to a place of acceptance requires you to accept and look at and feel all of those feelings rather than trying to push them away to find that ultimate place of what is, it's okay. What has happened is okay. I can bear this version of reality. I want to talk a little bit more about emotions, if that's okay, Marissa, because you use Peter Levine's work to explain how emotions become trapped in the body.

36:58What changed for you personally when you stopped viewing emotions as a problem to solve and started viewing them as experiences to complete? They didn't haunt me. They didn't haunt and hijack me. They started to move through me like a wave. This has been a very long process of therapy, many years. I can't say that this happened in a moment, but when I stopped fighting with my emotions, and again, this is a continuous practice for me, I started to finally feel relief. And there's this way that I was really bent on being default okay and default high functioning and default confident, no matter what was going on with me.

37:40And I think that alienated me from myself, from the parts of myself that felt vulnerable, the parts of myself that felt weak. And those parts, they wouldn't go away. And it would come out as triggers. All of a sudden, I feel so bad in reaction to something. My mood has plummeted in a very quick moment. And I don't necessarily understand why. And I would feel hijacked by them. And I wouldn't act out. I wouldn't harm other people. But I would feel it in myself, like this sort of emotional volatility sometimes, or greater anxiety, or more obsessive thoughts and rumination, all of those things, because I I was trying to resist my emotions because I was afraid of what those emotions meant about my sense of identity and who I am.

38:21How can I see myself as this strong, competent person if I feel weak, if I feel anxious, if I feel obsessive? But I realized through writing Worth that feeling worthy is actually about not knowing who you are in a way because you can only access all of your emotions if you don't know who you are. If you're like, I have to be the strong person, then that requires me to estrange myself from so much of what I actually feel. And there's this great psychologist, Robin Carhart Harris, and he says that when we go through chaos, one way that we adapt is we make ourselves rigid. We make ourselves predictable to feel like there's predictability amidst the chaos.

39:00So our rigid sense of identity is maybe not true to who we are as much as it is a coping mechanism. And so how do I soften my sense of identity so I can look at the entire terrain and landscape of what I actually feel? And so how do we allow ourselves to not know who we are and have that be okay and have high regard for ourselves no matter who we become? And just knowing that is already and deeply internalizing that has already helped me so much because I went through an ankle sprain in October. It's still not healed. I'm a runner. I was getting into surfing. I was liking dancing. And I could be really miserable right now if I didn't think of myself as I don't have to be who I was, right?

39:42I can be a different person now and that's okay. hey, the only thing true about life is evolution. And so I don't have to have the sense of self that I had before or live up to a sense of self that I think is right to be acceptable and to be worthy. I just have to admit what I actually feel, where I'm actually at, where my body's at, where my emotions are at in each moment. And I love that. As I explained earlier, I went through this long period of time myself where I kept burying those emotions. And I was in a long-term relationship where on top of that, I was emotionally abused for the vast majority of that relationship.

40:20And so trying to fit in and actually become a completely different version of who I was to fit in that relationship to try to solve it caused me to become just so just detached from my own identity to the point that I reached a point where I wasn't even recognizing the person in the memory in the mirror anymore. And I was becoming so distraught over it. But I think what a lot of us don't realize is we didn't get to that point overnight. And so you can't think that you're going to be able to resurface these emotions that you've suppressed for so long immediately as well. Because at its height, I felt just complete numbness.

41:09what worked for me was I had to let the first emotion surface. And from there, it started to unearth other things and started this restorative process. Does that ring true for you in any way? First of all, I am full of empathy. Thank you so much for sharing that, John. I think that gives people so much permission. I think especially us as people who are so mired in this stuff. I feel like it's so humanizing to be like, we have struggled to, maybe as a result of that is where we've come in our careers and trying to understand and make sense of these things. And so I just, I think it's so powerful that you share that and you share your own process.

41:50And I feel so touched to hear it. So thank you so much for sharing that. And related to your question, and I wanted to just point out something in what you shared too, because I think when I wrote Platonic, Platonic was really about being in relationship and being in connection with other people. And I think the two books really balance each other out because from what you're saying, we see that actually self-growth and self-worth might lead some relationships to fracture. And if we are trying to protect all of our relationships from fracturing, we might lose our sense of self in that path. And so it's for me being able to accept that this loss of relationship is actually a sign of my own self-growth rather than a sign of a failure, right?

42:32And so I think that's just a powerful message from your experience and from my own. I've shed some important relationships in my own quest for worth and that's okay. And that's even a sign of your own growth. And this related to your point, I think it's an excellent one, which is that you don't go from I'm numbed out to I'm healed. And in fact, when you try to coerce that process, which I have done, I called trying to heal my emotional wounds. Like when people pull the dog against the street on its hind legs, that's how I was like trying to relate to my psyche. Get better already. But now I definitely see that getting better is about being where you are in the pain.

43:10Getting better is about allowing your own resistance to be there and being curious about it rather than trying to override it. Getting better is about working with that part of you that needs more time and understanding what it needs to feel more safe in you. And I share a lot of exercises to do this in the book if this is seeming a little bit of abstract to folks. But it's a process and it's okay if it starts with, I'm going to just acknowledge one feeling. That's necessary. That's actually much more healing than being like, I'm going to drink the water hose of healing all at once and then you're drowning in it.

43:42Since you've brought that up, maybe you could share a couple of examples from the book of how people can start this process of rebuilding self-worth. So the kind of primary theory that drives the book is called memory reconsolidation, right? If we identified the core issues as our memories and the unprocessed emotions that are truly associated with that memories, part of that sounds like we're doomed because our memories already happened. So I guess I'm just going to feel unworthy forever. But that's actually not the case. Because when I said memories are made to predict the future, not record the past, what that means is according to the science, every time we revisit a memory, we actually change the way it sits in our brains.

44:24And so there's really powerful studies where people went back to a negative memory and fully visualized it as if they were reliving it. And then they pictured themselves now intervening and giving themselves exactly the care that they needed at that moment. And then afterwards, they report not only high self-esteem, but when they do these sorts of activities or like going back and recognizing the good or the positives that came out of those experiences for them, when they do that kind of activity and you look at their hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that records these memories, differences at the neural level.

44:59And so the book, I walk people through memory reconsolidation step by step, along with many different exercises that help us to change these memories, even if we're numb, even if we need to start there, even if these are memories that we don't actually remember, what can we actually do about them? And so all of the sort of strategies that we can use to change the past. Marissa, I want to talk about your chapter seven. I think we're in a world today where we are so confronted by the other and how that other makes us feel. And in this chapter, you explore racism, sexism, homophobia, marginalization, social exclusion.

45:42And it reminded me of a recent conversation that I had with Claude Steele. And we were talking about a concept he calls churn. But I think those things you're describing here really are what cause churn for so many of us, because I think what ends up happening is repeated exposure to stigmatizing experiences starts creating emotional memories that override our sense of self-worth. And I was describing for me a version of this that's different than this, but it still felt the same way. How do those external judgments for so many of us become self-perceptions that become so difficult for us to eradicate?

46:27This is a great question. It was interesting because before I wrote this chapter on memories of stigma and how those affect us, I thought of feeling stigmatized as feeling bad about yourself. But I learned through writing the chapter that actually when we internalize stigma, we become to ourselves something to evaluate rather than something to be. We are no longer being, we are living in a state of evaluation of self. like, oh my God, my body's so big. How are other people are perceiving it? Or I include an example from, it was this very popular book from a black, The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man, where he talks about being a black man, eating watermelon in public, and then being like, how am I being perceived?

47:07This hyper consciousness of like how people that stigmatize you perceive you. And that's what internalized homophobia is. I all of a sudden see myself as this gross or disgusting thing, right? And I think in our society, we have this perception of shame as an inherent characteristic of certain qualities, not realizing that actually identities that are stigmatized because they violate the social order, but maybe the social order is not perfect, right? Maybe the social order needs to be expanded and it's not the fault of the people that are stigmatized. For example, we stigmatize people living in poverty because we have this sort of neoliberal government that's about, you should be supporting yourself.

47:45We're not going to give you these sort of social programs that other countries might have. And we first have to start to destigmatize ourselves by realizing that these identities we've been learned are negative, are not inherently. And I even cite this philosopher who talks about Adam and Eve realizing they're naked and then they should feel ashamed. And then they should put, they didn't have to learn that being nakedness is something to be ashamed of. Right. And so we almost pretend like shame is inherent rather than shame is something that's culturally created. And so I think we first have to start there because a lot of people with stigmatized identities haven't even gotten as far as to question that they should be mistreated or that they aren't less than, right?

48:23But in the chapter, I talk about how because we're so bombarded with these negative images of ourselves, if we have a more stigmatized identity, it's a losing battle to constantly be trying to reconsolidate these negative memories. And instead, what I argue is an alternative theory called retrieval competition theory, which is that if you have a lot of positive memories related to an event or related to an identity, and they become more accessible and salient for you than the negative ones. And so if you have a certain stigma, you have to find alternative memories, experiences where people perceive your identity more positively in the media you consume, in the groups of people you affiliate with.

49:06Like our society is many different sub-societies. And And so you have to find yourself in a subsystem wherein you are feeling valued just as you are and continue to expose yourself as a counterweight to these negative images of positive memories, positive associations related to that identity. I've been trying to explore this in more depth. And I had Rick Hansen on to help do this because we were trying to look at the neurology that this impacts too and how this becomes a nervous system issue for people that it's impacting. And it was really a pretty profound discussion. So I'm so glad you did a whole chapter on that.

49:44And I'm also glad that you ended with a chapter on psychedelic assisted therapies because I had a really interesting experience myself. I did not use psychedelic assisted therapies myself, but I was at this retreat with about a hundred other veterans, most of them special operators. and I'd say about 95 % of the people who were there, nothing else was working. And so they had used psychedelic assisted therapies, whether that was ayahuasca, whether it was psilocybin, MDMA, some had used ketamine. But those who were working through these treatments now that are in phase two, phase three, where nothing else had worked, were showing life-saving, life-altering changes.

50:34It was like miracles. People who were on the verge of suicide, and this was the last resort, suddenly regained their entire life. And it was so powerful to see this, not in one person, but I'm talking tens of people, like 20, 30, 40 people telling the same thing. So to me, seeing these go through the process is bringing a therapy out that so many people today need because we have to start reducing these growing elements of suicide rates that are happening not just in veterans, but they're happening in adolescents and they're happening in young adults and they're happening throughout society. I feel so touched hearing that.

51:17That sounds like such a powerful, beautiful experience to watch. I too am really hopeful for psychedelics as being a healing mechanism, just based off the research that I read that there are X amount of times more effective than antidepressants, for example, for people to heal from their mental health issues. From the lens of memory reconsolidation, some of the, I talked to this woman and she, when she was like a teenager, she had this friend she called every day. And eventually that friend was like, why are you calling me? I'm not your friend. And then from forever, from then on, every time she would hang out with someone, she would assume that they don't really feel like her friend.

51:55That memory really haunted her. And she even made a new friend that she really liked. And she was like, you're going to have to initiate with me because I secretly think you don't like me because of this experience that I've had. So it scares me to initiate. And I tried to do in the moment, I tried to be like, if you have to go back to that memory, what would you say to yourself? And she was like, I don't know. She was very hesitant. It was very hard for her to think of that memory differently or to provide herself with support. And the prison that I could see that she was in was that she was still herself.

52:24She was still affected by these memories and they were still shaping her sense of reality. So it was really hard for her as herself to go back to that memory and see it differently. It's almost like she had to be a different person to gain that new perspective. And that's what psychedelics do. They soften the seed of themselves in the brains, the default mode network. And so in doing so, they allow us to perceive things outside of our typical lens of how things are perceived. And they also allow repressed emotions that our sense of self might've repressed from a sense of safety to actually come up while also deactivating the amygdala.

52:59So the amygdala is part of brain associated with threat. So these experiences are far less threatening. And so from a memory reconsolidation lens, it's really powerful to actually go back to a negative memory as almost like a third party, as almost like someone who would have been watching the memory that's not you. And then obviously there's really deep potential to develop and make new meaning of the memory and for that experience to be really transformative for people. Thank you so much for sharing that. And for listeners who want to understand this in more depth, I happened to do an interview a number of years ago with Dr.

53:33David Yadin, who's at Johns Hopkins, who is spending his full time there researching psychedelics and this very topic. So I would encourage you to go and listen to that episode. Well, Marissa, it has been such a joy having you back on the show. Where can listeners learn more about you, this new book and everything that you're doing, your keynote speaking, everything else? John, first I want to say thank you. You were an excellent interviewer. I could tell how deeply you read this book and I know you have your own book as birth. So it's really exciting to be in communication with each other's work.

54:08And it's really exciting for me to have an interviewer that kind of really understands the depths to which I'm writing. So I just want to say, I really appreciate you. And if people want to find me, Well, first you can get Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, wherever books are sold. On my website, drmarissagfranco.com, that's D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. You can sign up for a checklist of practices that will help improve your worth. You can reach out to me for my speaking engagements on self-worth, the key to resilience in times of change in the workplace. Or you can follow me on Instagram at drmarissagfranco.

54:44I share tips on building relationships with yourself and others. Well, Marissa, such an honor to have you back on the show and congratulations on this amazing book. As you can tell, I thoroughly read it and enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. I hope that conversation with Marissa Franco gave you a new way to think about self-esteem, healing, and the relationship that you have with yourself. One of the ideas that I'm taking away is that growth isn't always about adding something to who we are. Sometimes it's about being willing to see what's already there. And that's an important part of adaptation.

55:22Because if we don't understand the stories, assumptions, and emotional patterns shaping our decisions, we can end up adapting to a reality that isn't actually there anymore. And that brings us to our next conversation. because on the next episode, we're taking the adaptive human in a very different direction into the world of markets, investing, and decision-making. I'm rejoined by Professor Alex Edmonds, author of the new book, The Madness of Markets, Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. And the question he tackles is fascinating. Why do smart people make irrational decisions?

56:05Why did Isaac Newton lose a fortune in the South Sea bubble? Why do investors chase the crowd during bubbles and panic during crashes? And why can something as seemingly irrelevant as a sunny day or the outcome of a soccer match actually influence financial markets? Alex argues that markets aren't driven by numbers alone. They're driven by human psychology. And I think that makes this a perfect next step in our series, because we've been exploring how humans adapt to the world around us. Next, we're going to look at what happens when millions of human minds interact and collectively create madness in the marketplace.

56:46That's our next conversation on PassionStruck. So something which is front page and flashy and more quantitative, it might get a stronger reaction. Something which might lead to underreaction is off the front page. So if something tends to be more qualitative, it might be more hidden. And it's not just hidden to me, it's hidden to you, it's hidden to other investors, because naturally we like to plump for something which is flashy and visible. Until then, remember, the better we understand the forces shaping us, the more intentionally we can choose how we respond to them. I'm John Miles and as always stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.