Secure-ish: Rethinking Self-Worth & Attachment with Dr. Marisa G. Franco (312)

0:01Marisa G. Franco: If we don't work on our worth, we could have all the beauties of this life. We could have the best connections. People can love us so much. We can reach our dreams in our career, but it's all going to slip off of us in terms of our actual felt embodied experience. It's not actually going to be internalized. It's like oil to water. And I think that's one of the most compelling reasons to work on our sense of self so that we can internalize more deeply all of the beautiful things that are happening all around us.

0:35Ann Kelley: Welcome to Therapist Uncensored. Building on decades of professional experience, this podcast tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more in an honest way that's helpful in healing humans. Your session begins now with Dr. Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott.

0:58Ann Kelley: Hey, you guys. While we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly. But it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even more hopeless. So relationships take work. It does for Sue and I. We can make it look easy. it's not. And one of the ways is because many of us, we differ. We differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation. And it's these differences that are held in our body, not our thoughts. And they influence how we talk, how we love, how we fight.

1:34Ann Kelley: So holding that belief, if he or she or they could just understand me, if they love me, they do something different, is not really true. And we're talking about relationships with your partner, your teenager, your mother-in-law. So Sue and I've created an online course that can help you understand yourself and those you love in a different way. This is not just for therapists, it's for everyone. Although the good news is if you're a therapist, you can get CEs along the way and all of you can use the visuals and the worksheets individually, or you could even use them in your own private practice.

2:08Ann Kelley: So while the course is based on our book, Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in an insecure world. It is definitely not a replication of the book. We talk directly to you. You learn how to understand more deeply your attachment, those you love, the neuroscience behind it, and how to build secure types of connections right now in your everyday relationships. Rather than changing one another, y 'all can shift together in very important ways. It's very powerful. We're getting great reviews. Check it out. It's at therapistuncensored.com slash BAS, therapistuncensored.com slash BAS. The BAS stands for Beyond Attachment Styles, the Science of Growing Secure Adult Relationships.

2:56Ann Kelley: And by the way, the cost of the course is about the amount of one individual therapy session. And yet you get hours and hours and hours of what we think is extremely valuable information. So check it out. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. I'm Ann Kelley. And our guest today is Dr. Marissa Franco. She is a professor at the University of Maryland and author of Platonic, which is a New York Times bestseller that did something that I don't think many others did at the time, and that she focused on friendship and took it seriously, not as a nice extra around the edges of real life or romantic love, but as a form of love with its own science, its own importance, its own attachment dynamics, and even the kind of grief that happens when we lose it.

3:43Ann Kelley: After writing that book, she noticed something the book couldn't reach. She kept meeting people had it, the friends, the partner, the meaningful work, and still couldn't feel any of it land. The love was there, but something in them wouldn't let it in. That's at the core of our discussion today and of her new book. It's called Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Her argument is that worth sits underneath all of it, that we can't take in what doesn't match what we already believe about ourselves. This is not a discussion about how to just improve your self-esteem. So today we dive into why good things bounce off, why some of us can't take a compliment and others can't take feedback without getting excessively defensive, and the memory behind it, and the memory science that says any of this can change.

4:39Ann Kelley: Not by talking yourself or someone else into feeling more positive or being less defensive. The pep talk or the confrontations, it's exactly what doesn't work. So in our discussion, we dive deeply into what is happening within us with these struggles and the science of what actually does have an impact. I love the dialogue and I think it's extremely rich. Let's jump in. Hi, Dr. Franco. Welcome to the show.

5:04Marisa G. Franco: Thanks so much for having me. So happy to be here.

5:06Ann Kelley: You know, your first book, I believe it was your first book, Platonic. Is that right?

5:10Marisa G. Franco: Yep. That was my first book.

5:12Ann Kelley: It really mattered to me. I think it's because you took friendship so seriously in a way that I feel like almost no one does. We have endless language in movies about romantic love, and you're connecting attachment to the importance of friendship. And so I was curious, and the science around it, why did you decide to write about platonic friendships in the first place?

5:37Marisa G. Franco: So in my young 20s, I really internalized the idea that romantic love was superior. And I went through a breakup and I felt so bad. So I started this wellness group with my friend, Heather. We met up to practice wellness with other friends. We meditated, went for walks, went on cupcake hops. And it was so transformative for me to just see people I loved regularly, that it made me question this idea that like romantic love makes me worthy. Romantic love is the only form of love that matters. This form of love is trivial. I was like, why doesn't this love matter? This feels like the best love I've had at that point.

6:16Marisa G. Franco: And so I felt like I had internalized these larger beliefs that a lot of us have. And I wanted to be part of leveling that hierarchy that we place on love by giving people tools to make friends.

6:30Ann Kelley: And people received that very positively. And so it felt like it was a message that people were really hungry to hear and to learn more about is the validation of how much more stability can be in our lifelong invested friendships for some.

6:46Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it was when Platonic came out too, 2022, it was right after the pandemic. So it was a good time to publish a book on friendship. But the reactions have been positive. And it's been from people that are single who are like, my friends are so important to me. And I feel like people think that, you know, single people are asked, when are you going to find your person? It's like people or people in relationships who were like, I just hang out with my spouse and I'm so lonely. And you gave me permission to actually acknowledge that and not feel like something was wrong with me.

7:18Marisa G. Franco: And I was just, yeah, like we've always needed an entire community to feel whole.

7:23Ann Kelley: and when you publish that book and it afterwards instead of writing a second book about friendship you kind of self-proclaimed in your new book worth I think it's coming out in September at this time it might already be out by the time people are listening but you said that there was something that you noticed there's something that you got wrong that invaded you to turn from the relational to the internal. Yeah. Tell me about that. What is it you feel like you noticed that was missing or was needed?

7:53Marisa G. Franco: Well, I felt like there are so many resources on becoming securely attached. And my book was one of them, like how to say the secure thing, how to do the secure thing. But I remember talking to one reader who was like, yeah, but it's really hard to actually internalize that like in your nervous system. And then saying the secure thing can kind of feel like a performance rather than an act of authenticity. And I took a step back and I was like, I see that secure attachment has become a status symbol. And the way it's being used is to shame people that are not secure, you know, the problematic avoidance, the needy, anxious people.

8:31Marisa G. Franco: I'm not anxious. I'm secure. I'm secure. You know, and so in that way, I think we are reenacting on ourselves, our own insecurities, the same harm that made us insecure in the first place, this shame, this neglect of the parts of ourselves that are insecure. That's sort of like this sort of way that I've seen attachment style being used in the public. And so I realized that, well, a lot of secure resources focus on building secure relationships. What about building a secure relationship with yourself? And I know there's other people talking about that too, like you, Anne. But I really wanted to emphasize because I think that was something in platonic, I almost think worth is the prequel to platonic, that first connecting to yourself, and then you can better connect to others more authentically, more genuinely in a more grounded way.

9:19You know,

9:20Marisa G. Franco: for example, I talk about in worth how the goal isn't to be secure, but secure ish, so that we can always acknowledge the parts of ourselves that aren't without shame and embracing them.

9:30Ann Kelley: yeah you're right you're speaking Sue and I's language in such a lovely way which was so much fun to read your book on that and how we compartmentalize attachment we want to put everything in categories don't we I'm I'm this kind of an attachment and this is who I am and here's my identity and it's such a fixed model and so I really liked your pushing back on that and your idea of securus I think Sue and I call it secure relating but I think we have some real similar feelings and passion about that. And especially like this idea of secure being like, like you mentioned in your book, like feeling secure does not necessarily mean you're in a secure place.

10:08Ann Kelley: In fact, it can mean almost the opposite. If we like feel so confident and secure, there's so many parts of ourselves we may not be integrating.

10:18Marisa G. Franco: Exactly, exactly. I found that the most secure people were the ones that they could say when they were insecure. And then there was this other type of, quote unquote, high self-esteem in the research that could never admit when they felt insecure or vulnerable. And the stakes were everyone they ever loved. They were more hostile, more antagonistic towards others. These people that always had to be on top and superior, and it cost them their very relationships.

10:46Ann Kelley: Well, I wanted to unpack that with you because you, even in the title, you're talking about, I think you said the science of self-esteem and secure attachment. So of course, I love that where you drop down into some deep science about what self-esteem is. And the idea of self-esteem in our head is about like feeling good about ourselves. But you break it down that two people can have what we have in our culture described as high self-esteem, high feelings of all sorts of things. but act it out in very different ways. Could you talk about that?

11:20Marisa G. Franco: Yeah. So I'm trying to understand the research on self-esteem and I'm like, whoa, there's these two very different profiles of people that say they have high self-esteem. One research finds more defensive, more reactive, more hostile towards other people. I think they experience more what's called contingent self-esteem, which is I'm only worthy if, if I'm on top, if I'm superior, if I'm the CEO, you know, versus these other people with high self-esteem who were kind and compassionate and less reactive and more able to admit when they were wrong. And they had the best relationships of anyone. And I struggled with this.

12:01Marisa G. Franco: I was like, what is differentiated between them? So I talked to one of my colleagues, Beth, and she seems to have this sort of relational kind of high self-esteem. And I share with her this dilemma. And she's like, I'm trying to think about when I'm defensive and how I feel shame in that moment. And this illumination came to me that it's not that the people with the more relational kind of high self, the sort of true, I would say, kind of high self-esteem don't feel angry or hostile. It's that they can actually acknowledge when they do. And when we acknowledge those feelings, we're able to regulate them.

12:38Marisa G. Franco: You know, we can't heal what we don't acknowledge versus the other type of self-esteem cannot admit their vulnerabilities cannot admit their weaknesses, anyone who reminds them of it by giving any sort of feedback or doing anything they perceive as disrespectful, coming late, not giving them the attention they need, right? Then it triggers all of that shame that they haven't looked at and haven't processed, and they firebomb that shame onto the next person. So as I wrote worth, I was sort of like, how do I develop a definition of worth that is about the more true self-esteem? And so I define self-worth as treating your internal world as if it matters, treating your feelings, your experiences as if they matter, becoming a safe container within for everything that you're feeling.

13:24Ann Kelley: So two people being asked, how do you feel about yourself? And both reporting, I feel pretty confident, I feel pretty good about who I am, where we classically define that as high self-esteem. They both are reporting that, but you're saying you could see it really manifest differently. and yeah, I think the way I think about it is the integration of self. Like, did you say her name is Beth? You know, she's like, wow, how am I defensive? It would have been really easy to kind of stand apart and say they over there get really defensive, kind of implying she doesn't. And she's like, what gets activated in me and really keen in on the shame?

14:03Ann Kelley: And what's so interesting about that is, I guess we can all think about different people in our lives where they're better able to receive feedback or better times in our life and we can receive feedback. And then those that we get like walking on eggshell to give somebody a sense of feedback. And it's confusing because they at all intents and purposes look really confident. So you think you can give them, I'm not super happy that you're late, but what I hear you saying, it's popping against something that's unprocessed for the high self-esteem. How does that happen? How do you see that? Like, I feel like you do such a beautiful job describing it in the books.

14:42Ann Kelley: I really love your languaging. Like, so we have, you know, you have somebody like, you're questioning who my self-worth is. How can I feel good about myself if you're telling me I'm late or if you're telling me I disappointed you? So that activation in self starts to happen. And so I feel good about myself until something confronts this underlying experience. But we're not always aware of that, right? We just get defensive. We get activated.

15:11Marisa G. Franco: We can't need it out enough to see shame, feeling bad about myself, wanting to deflect from that shame, putting it back on you, right? That's happening so quickly. But this is really something I learned from writing the book because one person who is secure-ish that I interviewed more genuinely, he said that he would look back over his day, wave his hand over his day, and see where his emotional energy lied. And I was like, that is so beautiful. Not only are you aware of your feelings, you are looking for your pain. You are looking for those moments that most of us just move forward and push away.

15:50Marisa G. Franco: And that's one of the big takeaways I've taken from the book because I consider myself aware of my feelings, But I don't go looking for those moments, looking for those pings where I feel a negative emotion and kind of just push past it. And that has been a very transformative practice for me because I notice when I have a ping of emotion, ping of discomfort, ping of jealousy, and I try to push it away, it starts to sneak into the relationship. All of a sudden, I want to withdraw from this person. I don't even know why, right? But when I slow it down and I start acknowledging those quick feelings that are happening, now I know why I want to withdraw.

16:24Marisa G. Franco: Now I can do something with those emotions. Now I can maybe ask for something different in the relationship. And so that I think is so foreign to a lot of us. The idea of like seeking out your own pain, seeking out your negative emotion, even when it's just a flash moving through your life. But when we don't, that pain just continues and continues and continues. It continues to flash through us throughout our lives. Yeah.

16:51Ann Kelley: in a really unrecognized way. The idea of stopping and going, where are my feelings all day long? To some listeners, I may go, oh my God, who has time for that? But the other idea is like, how can you not, right? And we've been so conditioned, I think, in our culture, if we feel something that the next step is to fix it, right? So I'm feeling something uncomfortable. And so therefore, I don't want to call that friend to go out because I just want to avoid them. Well, it would be a really easy answer. I'll just avoid them. It must be something about them. And so it would take a moment to go, I feel discomfort.

17:26Ann Kelley: Just think how much, I'm just all of a sudden thinking how much in the world I would gain, we all would gain if we could do that more often. Sit with that discomfort.

17:33Marisa G. Franco: Sit with that discomfort, wonder where it comes from and explore it. And you know, the other thing I see us doing, Anne, is we might notice a feeling, but now we label it with our sort of therapeutic tools. That's my anxious part speaking. That's my avoidant part speaking, and it becomes a sort of catastrophization of I shouldn't be feeling this way. This is a sign of my codependence, right? Or my lack of boundaries that like we've come to shame ourselves so much for not being healed enough. Whereas I think true healing is to simply be okay with whatever feeling is there rather than trying to disappear the feelings that are there or judge or evaluate them negatively.

18:14Marisa G. Franco: It's not about not feeling the emotion in the first place, healing is accepting the emotions as they are.

18:20Ann Kelley: Yeah, because otherwise I can see where this all wraps into worth. If I'm feeling it and then it starts to trigger, I'm wrong for feeling this. I should feel secure. And I think in our culture, there's so much you should feel secure. So if you're feeling insecure, there's some deficit in you.

18:35Marisa G. Franco: There's something wrong with you. Yes. Daddy issues, you know.

18:38Ann Kelley: Or as you point out, or maybe you were an externalizer and I'm feeling insecure. So now I'm really pissed at you for saying something that creates a feeling of insecurity in me. So it's like this binary, isn't it? Either you exist or I exist. Exactly.

18:55Marisa G. Franco: Oh my gosh. And it is a lot of work, but it's also a lot of work to go through life haunted by these emotions and having them, you know, create tears in your relationship and you don't even know why it's happening. And you know, that's a lot of energy too.

19:10Ann Kelley: So much more than we realize. It's so true. Some of it's so under the surface, right? We just have this either ongoing anxiety that we're aware of and we keep pushing down. Or if we're not aware of it, we have to really work in these relationships that always seem to be a pain in our ass.

19:29Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. No, so agreed. There's this psychologist, Marion Woodman, and she puts it so well. she says, it's easier to try to be better than who you are than it is to try to be who you are. And say that again. I love that. It is easier to try to be better than who you are than it is to try to be who you are.

19:49Ann Kelley: Wow. I just letting that sink in. It kind of brings me to some of the discussion that I wanted to dive into that is kind of related to that our identity in ourself, that we tend to have a story running in our background about who we are and that story leading so much of the show inside of us, right? Our narrative, we talk about a lot in the podcast about having our internal story, our internal narrative. And so in that way, if we feel this insecurity and we have that story that says we're not enough, there's so much of us working in the world rather than to try to feel better. We often are trying to keep our story consistent.

20:39Ann Kelley: Can you say more about that? Yeah.

20:41Marisa G. Franco: So this is how I made my leap from friendship to worth. There's this theory, self-verification theory, very fascinating theory that we sort of are drawn in some ways to people that reflect our sense of self back, which means if I feel sort of low about myself and you're complimenting me and you're loving me, I don't necessarily internalize that because it doesn't match my own sense of self. And in fact, I think I'm going to let you down. You're going to figure out who I really am. So it triggers all of this anxiety that makes it hard to be in a healthy relationship. And the research finds that, for example, people with low self-esteem who are in partnership with people that see them too positively, they experience less intimacy in those partnerships, or even that when positive things happen to you, you're sicker months later if you have low self-esteem because it doesn't match your sense of self.

21:36Marisa G. Franco: And so we have this desire for coherence where if we have a negative sense of self, that is a theory, a theory that the world will reject us and negative things will happen. And in some ways, when that theory is validated, of course it hurts, but it also provides us with validation of our lived experience in reality. It provides us with a sense of coherence. And when things happen that alter that theory or challenge that theory, it's sort of like chaos. What's going to happen next? I'm not prepared. I'm defenseless. The rejection is going to come back. The shoe is going to drop, right? And then I'm going to have this false sense of security.

22:15Marisa G. Franco: That's all the anxiety that tends to come up when we struggle with self-worth. And so because of that, it can be hard or difficult or threatening to be in positive relationship, to be in relationships where we are seen too positively if that's not necessarily how we see ourselves. And so I learned that this whole book, Worth, is really about what is the internal work we need to do on ourselves to be able to tolerate love from other people.

22:45Ann Kelley: And so if you're one of those ones listening, you are a therapist or a person who's positive and you see somebody hurting, it is an instinct to want to say, hey, but wait, look at all these positives. And what you're saying is that that actually can provide a real stress to the individual. It doesn't go in. It's not going to land, oh, I'm so glad that you are giving me contrary information. Whew, what a relief. you know it's it's much more you know we we're prediction machines right and it sounds like what we're doing is we're predicting who we are and what's going to happen in the future and there's a relief to that and so if you're telling me something positive and it's not consistent with my story of the world I can see why that would create more stress for me because now I'm

23:34Marisa G. Franco: like everything's unpredictable everything's unpredictable and also like I feel alienated because I don't feel that way about myself. And now I feel very alone in that because you're sort of telling me the opposite and I don't feel that way. You know, if this isn't something people are familiar with, which I think this could come up for all of us in some domain. But like, imagine if you, someone was like, Anne, I think you're really amazing at football and I can't wait to see you on the field. Like, let's go play next Saturday, right? Like, you'd probably, I don't know, maybe you are really good at football, I don't know.

24:07Marisa G. Franco: But in case you aren't, that would be very anxiety provoking. Oh my God, they're expecting me to be so good at football and even prove it next week on the field. I don't play football at all, right? Like you could see how when someone has a perception of you, doesn't match your sense of self, it actually is quite threatening, even if that is a positive perception.

24:27Ann Kelley: Oh, because it can affirm all sorts of, if I'm coming from an insecure history that I I could see it's like, oh my gosh, now I also have to think of the fact that you don't know me, or maybe you know me, and now I'm going to disappoint you. And now I should be, I'm thinking I should be good at football, right? So now it's really going to hit me that I'm not good at football. So I even suck at that, right? That's such a great example to bring it out of left field, yeah. Left field, literally. No pun intended, but it was a pretty good one. It was pretty good. Yeah, so I haven't thought about that.

25:04Ann Kelley: If you're like, wow, you're trying to tell me I'm great at something, it's not landing. And so I could feel with that example, I felt into it, the disconnection. And if I'm feeling disconnected, if I'm feeling not good enough to be accepted, and then I feel that disconnect, I could feel it just, just that example, I could physically feel the lower, the hit on me of the disconnect. And then how much energy it would take to go, but wait, that's, I don't know where you got that information, right? I would have to have, and you're like, well, give it a try. I can just tell you're going to be good, right?

25:40Ann Kelley: Exactly. No, but you haven't tried. How could you know, right? And I can see myself through years of like, as a therapist wanting to help somebody in this way by giving them disconfirming information. And it's why it doesn't stick. And people get so confused about why they can't accept compliments.

26:00Marisa G. Franco: Yeah, it's literally an identity crisis for people. Oh my gosh, you don't know who I am, right? Like I'm so misunderstood. That's what can come up for people when you lob the compliments at them.

26:11Ann Kelley: Wow.

26:21Ann Kelley: You know, what I love about being a therapist is being with my clients and doing the work of therapy together. The thing I like the least is the business side of running a practice. I suck at it. For years, I paid someone to do billing for me and when she moved on, oh my God, my billing suffered. I would actually forget to bill for weeks. Sue had been using simple practice for years. She kept trying to convince me to shift. She seemed rarely to have business stress, so I have no idea why I was so stubborn. I finally did shift around five years ago and it has been a game changer for me. So that is one reason why we are excited to have Simple Practice as a sponsor is they made such a difference for us.

27:02Ann Kelley: We're extremely confident that they can make the difference for you too. So Simple Practice is an all-in-one EHR that is HIPAA compliant, HITRA certified and built really specifically for therapists and wellness providers. It brings scheduling, billing, insurance, client communication all into one place. Clients can go straight into the portal and book appointments if you like that. They can fill out intake forms, sign consent documents, pay online. It really cuts back on the back and forth. They even have secure telehealth with AI-powered progress notes and with scheduling reminders really cuts down on no-shows.

27:39Ann Kelley: One of my favorite things I have to say is the automated billing. I have everyone set up in the calendar. At the end of the day, everything just goes through. No extra steps on my part and no catch up later. Love it. And if you're just starting out or growing your practice, they also have credentialing services that helps you get paneled independently, takes all the headache out of insurance enrollment, gives you full autonomy of your contracts. So if you're ready to simplify the business side of your practice, now is a great time to try simple practice and support therapists uncensored while you do.

28:14Ann Kelley: So start with a seven-day free trial and get 50 % off your first three months. You just go to simplepractice.com to claim the offer. Again, that's simplepractice.com. All right, let's jump back in.

28:36Ann Kelley: So tell me more about when you're working with this kind of identity disconnection, like, oh my gosh, I can't take the love in because it's disaffirming. What I think I hear you saying is I have a deeply felt sense of the story of who I am. And I'm going to look for information that affirms that. And I'm going to rule out information that's contrary to my deep belief. And that's an embodied experience. So it likely affects even the relationships I choose, et cetera. I'm going through the world trying to pick things that are familiar to me that affirms my original story. Is that what you're saying?

29:14Marisa G. Franco: That's exactly what I'm saying. Tragically.

29:18Ann Kelley: Yeah. Yeah. I could so relate to that. And I guess that also would land with somebody with high self-esteem but not integrated sense of self in the same way, right? You're giving me a compliment. or how does that, how do you imagine that lands with somebody with high self-esteem, but not integrating the negative parts of themselves?

29:40Marisa G. Franco: It would be the opposite that when you say anything that's negative about me, I can't, I can't sit with it. I can't, I can't try it on. I can't taste it. I can't roll it around in my mouth to see where it's accurate or not. It's the sort of reflexive, no, I didn't do that. I'm not wrong. I'm right. Right. It's so interesting that you would say, because I've never, never put that to me, you know, the person that has high self-esteem, low self-worth, unintegrated. But it's the opposite, where you're reflectively rejecting any negative feedback, even if it's potentially true, quote unquote negative, you know, people sharing flaws, limitations, ways that you haven't shown up.

30:16Marisa G. Franco: And that's one of the ways it can be really disruptive towards your relationships, because you would struggle to take accountability, because all of us are screwing up somewhere in our relationships.

30:25Ann Kelley: So this idea of looking at ourselves, whether we're one that can't take in positive or one that can't take in negative, both of those are elements of these parts of ourselves that are responding to some deep parts of our early stories. Is that what you would say? Like there's a reason we're doing that. We're not just born obnoxious people or insecure people. No. Right? So there's this deep compassion about why both of those defenses, one, it's easier to have compassion for than the other. I like how you kind of described the good twin and the bad twin. It's kind of what we're hitting on here, right?

31:08Marisa G. Franco: Yes. You put it so well. And I just, you know, I should have been consulting with you throughout writing this book because of the way I love the words you're using, like integration and that both of these are sort of opposite ends of the same exact coin. like the same pain of I can't receive the like my filter is rigid, basically in different ways. And for the person that has high self-esteem, low self-worth, they have learned that if there's anything negative, if they make any mistake, if they're flawed at all, they are fundamentally bad and ashamed. They should be ashamed of themselves as a person.

31:46Marisa G. Franco: And so there's this constant striving to be good, to present positively, that often leads to alienation with how do you actually feel because you're so preoccupied with how you're coming off to everyone else. And so, and it's that part, because I wrote this book not thinking that I had struggles with self-worth at the start of it. I feel pretty good about myself. But when I learned and I thought about it as like the ability to acknowledge pain and shortcomings without shaming myself, the ability to experience the full gamut of my internal world without it being threatening to me and to be anchored in doing that.

32:26Marisa G. Franco: I was like, there's work I have to do because I do feel like I want to present as achieving. I want to present positively. I want to present secure, regulated, whatever it is. So I found, I got, I tumbled into the research as like, wow, I, you know, and now, you know, and this has been my therapist who actually dedicated this book to, because it, she was a woman that I really felt like I could tell the truth to. Like, it just felt like what was most important was not me getting it right or me healing or me getting better. None of that. It was just about where am I am, right? Where am I at right now?

33:04Marisa G. Franco: And curiosity about that, not trying to change it, not trying to fix it, but let me just be curious about what's coming up for you now. Yeah.

33:12Ann Kelley: That's not an easy state to find, isn't it? That you call it secure-ish with ourselves. And I love that because what you're going is, wait, I thought I felt secure, but I can see these pockets.

33:24Marisa G. Franco: Awesome.

33:25Ann Kelley: Yeah. I totally relate to you. And just see these pockets where it feels like, oh my gosh, these areas are a lot harder. And our culture affects us a lot, right? Like we should be accomplishing and having to kind of deal with that more activated self. And like you said earlier, even recognizing that we're activated is sometimes super difficult to do. Yeah.

33:50Marisa G. Franco: And I can like tell you how this understanding of worth has manifested. It's for me, it's a lot, being a lot more loving to people when they show their flaws. You know, my niece, she went for the lead role in the school play. And she's like, will you come and see me? She lives in New York. If I get that role. And I said, I'm going to come see you whatever role you get. I'm going to be proud of you no matter what you do. You know, you don't have to be the lead for me to be excited to see you and proud of you. And similarly, I had another friend and he missed a job interview and he was really being hard on himself.

34:23Marisa G. Franco: And I sort of said like, wow, like that's a really human experience to get really overwhelmed and forget something. And I have been there too. And realizing that, you know, being a steward of self-worth for self and for others is about allowing people to make mistakes and be imperfect and say, that's okay. Like, let's figure it out. You know, where do we go from here? What came up for you? You know, me too. Which is really foreign in our culture, I think. Oh, I agree. So foreign.

34:51Ann Kelley: It really is. And I think back to your focus on friendships, like sometimes it's so much easier in our friendships to really, really trust that somebody is going to completely accept us, you know, for who we are and we can be very forthcoming. And there's something about that kind of bond that can really allow us to tell our deepest, darkest secrets and come out and how much that builds security for us. But you were also saying like there are people that they can have all the connections in the world, but they can't take the love in. They have all these connections, but you can still feel that that unsettleness exists.

35:32Marisa G. Franco: And that's it. If we don't work on our worth, we could have all the beauties of this life. We could have the best connections. People can love us so much. We can reach our dreams in our career, but it's all going to slip off of us in terms of our actual felt embodied experience. It's not actually going to be internalized. It's like oil to water. And I think that's one of the most compelling reasons to work on our sense of self so that we can internalize more deeply all of the beautiful things that are happening all around us.

36:06Ann Kelley: And that's not easy to do. And that's how worth the turn to what to do, I thought was really powerful in your book, because it's so much easier said than done. You can't just talk somebody into, you should just love all parts of yourself, right? Just love yourself.

36:25Marisa G. Franco: Just love yourself.

36:25Ann Kelley: And so many self-help books. It's like giving you this pep talk about how you should feel about yourself. And so you're armed with this motivation and it doesn't quite work, right? And so, but we keep trying and trying because we're searching for something. And the way that you integrated this idea of attachment as well as memory reconsolidation. So I wanted to turn our discussion into what do we do with that? We're going to recognize I can't take positives or I can't take criticisms or there's parts of me that I'm walking. I feel like I really know myself and all of a sudden I'm screaming at my kid.

37:07Ann Kelley: And so there's a disconfirming piece of information that's just standing out. And I go, what am I doing? Why am I doing that? And I get more mad at myself, but somehow that doesn't make me change. So walk us through what you discovered that is some of the most impactful in this process.

37:27Marisa G. Franco: Oh my gosh. And I spent a year trying to figure out this conundrum of like, oh my god what's going on why are we not taking in all the things that should make us feel better

37:36Ann Kelley: about ourselves this doesn't make any sense stop being self-critical i want you to stop that and

37:41Marisa G. Franco: yet we can't right we can't like exactly so i finally finally came across so what we talked about was worth as a theory of self the theory that people will reject us if it's low and bad things will happen. But where does that theory come from? Researchers put it, memories are the database of self-esteem. It comes from your memories. So you have experienced rejection, bullying, harm, neglect, even abuse. And the thing about memories, as researchers put it, they don't just record the past, they predict the future. So you can see why insecurity is adaptive If you think you're ultimately going to be rejected again and you suddenly let yourself be more secure, now you're just going to be further crushed when that rejection happens.

38:35Marisa G. Franco: And so the question is then, how do we change the past so it doesn't predict a future of harm and we can feel liberated to develop a more positive sense of ourselves?

38:49Ann Kelley: That's a lot. It's so powerful. Yeah, let's break it down because what you're saying is like, here's this confirming theory that we have of ourselves and that for us to shift that, first we have to recognize it, but for us to shift that, there's a threatening element and it's about memory. But it's not just remembering why we are so self-critical of ourselves. I love taking the self-critical because so many can relate to that. We're so self-critical and we can't stop it. and we tell ourselves, but there's a memory that's activated this kind of pressure to be self-critical. And so part of what's happening is we can't, and that self-criticalness is protecting us from this predicted future that if I don't do it right, I'm going to get rejected.

39:40Ann Kelley: So if I keep criticizing myself, then I'm working on this, I'm protecting myself from the future rejection.

39:48Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. It's adaptive. It's adaptive. So to stop doing it leaves me, if I just stopped

39:55Ann Kelley: doing it without dealing with the memories, without dealing with the activation, then what I'm doing is taking away that protective strategy with nothing in its place.

40:03Marisa G. Franco: I am defenseless. I'm defenseless. That's why love yourself doesn't hit because it's like you are literally trying to make me defenseless. And also related to your point, the love yourself advice it can promote lack of integration because what about the part of me that doesn't love myself now I'm just trying to push that away and I feel embarrassed and I feel anxious right when we're pushing parts of ourselves away that's when they're not integrated and they tend to cause harm both to us and to our relationships so yeah that's why it's I mean I've come to such a place of um you know in my own work what this has looked like in my therapy work my I was dealing with a part of me that felt so needy and ashamed.

40:48Marisa G. Franco: And my therapist, we use like the divine, a divine force, higher power, whatever, however folks can relate to that. But, you know, my therapist said to like, leave it up to the divine, like let it up to the divine. And I, when I did, what I got was that part of you that feels ashamed and insecure and needy, it's perfect too. It's perfect too. and that was transformative for me what do you mean i just love and see as perfect the part of me that i struggle with but that's what integration looks like it's i love that you're here you belong here thank you so much for keeping me safe and now that we understand if we can understand the science of memory we can really see that that's what the parts of ourselves that we struggle with the most, that's what they're doing for us.

41:36Ann Kelley: That's such a wonderful example. So let's keep going then with those examples, like diving into this, what we understand about memory, right? Because I could go to therapy and I could talk about the places in which somebody judged me, or my parent was judgy, or I was fearful. And I could tell you all about it. And I can have an understanding that that may be why I'm self-critical. And so now I'm armed with that, but it doesn't change me from being self-critical. So the part about dealing with the different parts of memory, right? That's what I feel like you did such a great job really outlining about how our memories are both, I think it was your example of like the memory is the video and the emotions are the music.

42:25Ann Kelley: And I thought, I just sat with that. That was your quote. Is that right?

42:28Marisa G. Franco: Yeah. Yeah.

42:29Ann Kelley: Oh my God. I love that because it really helps you understand memory, right? You have the memory of what happened. I can tell you why this happened and what makes this so hard. And yet if I'm not doing it with the music, I'm not the emotion, right? If you watched a movie without any music, you'd be going, okay. And we know that we use music to like, so if we think about the emotions being the music, that we have to pair those, right? Like we have to be able to shift that memory or to shift the experience of the effect of that memory. We need the emotions connected to that.

43:08Marisa G. Franco: Yeah. And there was an interesting study that one of the biggest predictors of whether people improved their self-worth by the end of therapy was how much emotion they expressed throughout the course of therapy. But to sort of take a step back and frame this conversation, we are alluding to memory reconsolidation, which is a jargony term to break it down. It's really this idea that because memories are made to predict the future and not record the past, we can actually update them each time we revisit them. So in a way, you can change the way the past sits inside of you. And people that have done like inner child work, for example, wherein you think about a negative memory that still troubles you, that still affects you and how you see yourself, and you visualize it using all of your senses as vividly as possible, and you picture your adult self intervening and telling your younger self perhaps what they needed to hear.

44:10Marisa G. Franco: You're loved. You're not alone. You have always been special. And after that happens, and I really go into detail on these exercises in the book, people not only report higher self-esteem, but they also, you see neural changes in their brain in the hippocampus, which, you know, re-records the memory, when they're able to do that. And so Worth, the second part of Worth is really about all of the ways we can, what's called reconsolidate, which is sort of revisit and change our past, the emotional valence of our past, I should say, specifically, because you'll still be aware of what happened, so that it no longer predicts the future of pain.

44:51And what you were saying, Anne, was really related to implicit memory,

44:56Marisa G. Franco: which is sometimes we don't remember it happened, but it still affects us and it still affects our worth because the amygdala is capturing the emotion, the fear, the terror we felt back then that we might feel again now, even though we're not conscious that our brain is remembering. Yeah.

45:14Ann Kelley: That one research finding that you outlined, I thought was really helpful in the book about, you know poor rats and how we study them but that the pairing of a shock with a color is there and yet if we take the memory of it out and they don't have this conscious memory and they see the color they're still their amygdala still holds it the amygdala will still respond with a jump even though they aren't having this memory of the color and same with, you know, and the other way is also around. And that is if you're having a physical memory, I think actually that was on people, wasn't it? Now that I'm thinking about it.

45:54Ann Kelley: That's on people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a rat study.

45:56Marisa G. Franco: We gave the rats a break. Yeah, we gave the rats a break.

45:59Ann Kelley: It was on people. So those individuals that then the amygdala was held back, the reactive, they might have the memory that that blue created something, but their body doesn't instinctually respond.

46:14Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. Yeah. So you see a blue slide, you hear a noise, you see a blue slide, you hear a noise, you see a blue slide, you hear a noise. Eventually you see the blue slide, you start sweating. You're ready for that noise to come. But if you don't have a hippocampus, if your hippocampus is damaged, I could ask you what color slide was it? Green, red? What was associated with the noise? You'd be like, I don't know, but I'd show you the blue slide and you'd still start sweating because your amygdala still remembers.

46:40Ann Kelley: Right. And then, yeah, and like the interesting thing is, so that's like, how do we tell? Like, so you have some exercises in the book for those parts of our memory that we can remember, right? And how like the memory that you did, that you had the reorganization, you know, with the higher powers, like, oh, wait, you're having a re-experiencing of that memory paired with something positive in the present, which then allows that memory to get reconsolidated, but with less of the amygdala trigger and more of the acceptance.

47:16Marisa G. Franco: Yep. It's kind of like creating a new recipe where the negativity is just a component mixed in with some positivity. And there's so many different ways to do that.

47:27Ann Kelley: Well, and another thing is like, so we're talking about the explicit memory, and you mentioned the implicit, that's the hardest rate. And how do we know that what's happening to us is actually an implicit? And what we, of course we mean by implicit is something that's in our body, in our amygdala, but we don't have a conscious aware of it. How do we know that we've got implicit action going on or unprocessed implicit activation?

47:52Marisa G. Franco: Because you're triggered. You are reacting more strongly than other people and you realize it. And, you know, Freud said, what's hysterical is historical. We historical, I use that word hysterical, but I know it meant like women's fear of not having a penis. So asterisk on that statement, but this sort of idea, yeah, take the idea, right? That if you are reacting very strongly, that's a sign that there's a memory that you're unaware of that's coming up. And literally there's a part of your brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that says, you know, maybe my father always yelled at me and was always in a rage.

48:31Marisa G. Franco: Now, when my boss gives me feedback, that part of my brain says, how do I interpret this? Let me rummage through my memories and literally reactivate in my body the same experience that I had back then now. So there's this psychoanalyst, Philip Bromberg, and he says, we don't go to therapy to deal with what happened then. We go to therapy to deal with what's still happening now. The pain of our traumas, both big T and little t, is not that they happened in the past and now we're sort of just figuring out how to make sense of them in our lives. It's that they are still happening, that all of these moments since we are reacting, our body's reacting as if we are still in a situation that was perhaps dangerous to us, where we feared for our lives.

49:18Marisa G. Franco: And that's the tragedy of the trauma is that it didn't shape us in that moment. It has shaped us every moment since. But I, you know, I hope that people can know that there's a way forward and it doesn't have to shape you like that forever. And, you know, here's what we can do, you know, so that we're no longer continuing to live in that pain.

49:39Ann Kelley: Well, and it brings in that part you said earlier about the curiosity, right? Like if you can, if we are so activated by our shame of who we should be and what fits our theory of who we are, we can't really have curiosity, right? So this idea of hitting curiosity, like why is it I react so strongly? And if we're full of so much shame, we're going to answer that question because we suck. Because I suck. Or they suck, depending on which evil twin is acting, which part of your twin is acting out. But like we suck or they suck. And so that curiosity, why is it that I always feel like everybody disappoints me?

50:20Ann Kelley: or why is it that I'm constantly self-critical and gosh that could be where then we get more self-critical because we're always self-critical that's so painful when that happens but you're saying that this idea that what's happening is incongruent with the present that it likely isn't and that your body is responding to an implicit that there is something you can do about that. And it isn't talk yourself out of it or shame yourself out of it. It's going into it and like being in it and that, that some strategies that you bring out in the book and the reconsolidation, there's so much to talk about because I really love how you integrated IFS, right?

51:04Ann Kelley: Like there may be part of us that's really good accepting criticism, but certain parts about parenting, I can't accept any, you know, so it's not all or nothing, right?

51:14Marisa G. Franco: Exactly. And the other thing is, I think when you understand implicit memory, I think there's this human need to kind of know your story and to know why am I like this? Why do I feel so bad about myself? Why do I get so angry in these moments? Why do I get so insecure in these moments? And it can feel like if you don't have a story that something's just wrong with you. I'm just effective, right? But if you understand implicit memory, you know that if the only memory you have, the only evidence of it is that you're activated now, then that's enough. That's legitimate. And that's true. Right? And that means you've been through something real, whether or not you can remember the actual experience that happened.

52:04Marisa G. Franco: That that's valid. That's legitimate. Your pain is legitimate. It's not coming out of nowhere. where there's a reason for it, whether or not you remember it. And it's not just because you're broken.

52:15Ann Kelley: And the ability to kind of think, oh, I can go back there. Sometimes that can be challenged because people are like, I had great parents and I don't know why you want to poke around in the back, you know, like, and so our defense, even in and of itself of the, of the journey to look can be a difficult one. But this idea of that, wait, what is activating you? And let's go there. We can start, and some of the exercises starts just with the activation and the intensity of that activation, and then some repairing with that activation without having the exact memory. Is there an example you want to give?

52:52Marisa G. Franco: Well, I can talk about one that is quite simple and that I like to use based on the science of memory. So there's this theory called working memory theory, which is this idea that our working memory, the sort of memory we're trying to use to understand something in the moment, like I use the sort of red stoplight to mean I should stop, I'm applying that information in some way, that it's sort of limited. And we can't hold too much information in our working memory at once. But this glitch is really useful for us, because it means that if we focus on the triggered sensation, that sort of body-based residue of the memory, and something else simultaneously, that that's too much for our working memory.

53:33Marisa G. Franco: And what it does is it actually degrades the memory. It doesn't come up as fully. And then when you try to re-access the sensation, it's less potent. And so that is the science behind things like EMDR or tapping, things people might be familiar with. But there's even research, you can apply this very simply when I'm triggered, you can focus on that sensation and play Tetris. And there's research that finds that even doing that afterwards, people report that their symptoms are less intense, their memory is less intense. And, you know, some people like will count off, I'll also count off by, you know, fours, starting with two, six, 10, right?

54:11Marisa G. Franco: And focus on the sensation at the same time. And I find this is sort of, it feels like magic, that afterward I'm all of a sudden a lot more calm and a lot less affected in the memory. The sensation has a lot less charge.

54:26Ann Kelley: That's really impactful. And that things like that can really, really move in the research to make something, your association and that memory shift. That's the memory reconsolidation. You're having the implicit activation and you're pairing it with something in the present that your body is saying, you're okay. This is actually not life or death.

54:45Marisa G. Franco: Right. I'm just putting my Tetris pegs in there.

54:51Ann Kelley: so we talked a lot about it I know we're going to run out of time but I really want to tap on this because I really appreciated you going into it in the book because a lot of times when we think about activation we think about the hyperactivation we think about emotionality we think of the sudden outburst but you also really did a wonderful job talking about detachment about the shutting down and that can deeply happen in our body at such a young age where this idea of connecting to our emotions doesn't happen so it's a it's a lot we've been maybe shamed about having emotions or they've been too threatening or so many different reasons why our early memory may be let's cut that off and so you described detachment as a triggered place and talked about how to get more in touch with that.

55:44Ann Kelley: Would you dive into that a little bit?

55:46Marisa G. Franco: Absolutely. It's fascinating. I was reading this meta-analysis, which combined all the existing research on PTSD and what predicts who has the most severe versions of it. And you can think about things like lack of social support or how dangerous it was. And, you know, all of those are our predictors. But the biggest predictor was whether you dissociated at the time of the trauma, whether you sort of shut down, cut off at the time. And this is really a lot, drawing a lot from Peter Levine's work, who's, you know, created the whole somatic experiencing framework. What he sort of hypothesized is that trauma is really, you can think of it as like excess energy in the body, right?

56:28Marisa G. Franco: You're keyed up, there's a lot of energy in the body. Rat studies show us that when these rats, at least, were able to fight with another rat when they're being buzz, buzz, shock, shock, or when they're able to like push a button to make it stop, even if they receive the same amount of shocks as rats that couldn't, that they experience less health issues because that fighting or that fleeing releases some of that energy that is bound up in the trauma. But the dissociation, the shutdown, it leads the energy to be stuck inside of you. And that's what the trigger is. That's why you are having flashbacks, nightmares, suddenly so anxious, is suddenly so angry.

57:09Marisa G. Franco: It's all of that energy trying to get out, but really not being successful about getting out. And so the idea is that we need to be able to find safe ways to return to that energy, that body-based sensation that's still coming up in us and release it. And Levine talks about the tiger trying to eat a gazelle, holding it in its paw, and then the gazelle gets away. And if you follow the gazelle, you don't see sort of like animal-based trauma symptoms like the gazelle's now freezing out of nowhere or lashing out on its fellow gazelles because after the gazelle starts shaking like it's been electrocuted and he sort of hypothesized that that is a way to release in that moment so that these wild animals don't actually get traumatized.

58:00Marisa G. Franco: But us humans in our big prefrontal cortex, it can shut down that sort of animal-based reaction to kind of just shake and release all of the stuff that's caught in our bodies. And so I provide like some exercises based on Levine's work that involve returning to those sensations, you know, accessing safety while you return to that sensation, feeling that sensation as it moves through your body, you'll literally feel the energy start to move. And this can take a long time. It can take many times. For many of us that have dissociated, it's happened in our childhood because we couldn't fight or flee.

58:34And so it's an accumulation perhaps of many negative memories and it becomes a real practice

58:40Marisa G. Franco: to go back to those sensations, spend some time with them so that they can move through you.

58:46Ann Kelley: And I think also, I imagine you have to recognize that there are emotions under the detachment, right? Like it's really easy. I sometimes see couples where somebody's like, I'm just not emotional. She wants something like, like describes themselves as their character of non-emotion. And of course we differ in this, it's a continuum. But if there's a detachment from emotions and you're just, you know, that your spouse or yourself or your friend, it's like, I can't seem to find a connection with your emotions. That to trust, I think is what you're saying that there is probably something caught in the dissociative part can really, really be a huge impact on your physical manifestation and your connection.

59:31Marisa G. Franco: Yeah. Cause that's what you find from these non-emotional people is there's moments where they'll become hyper emotional. They'll suddenly get very angry, very angry out of nowhere. And it's sort of like, who are you? This is so inconsistent with what I've known of you. And that's all of that emotion you've detached from that in a moment is hitting you all at once.

59:53Ann Kelley: So what we're working on here and suggesting is that people really think about how to get in touch with themselves, with their emotions, the good, the bad, the ugly, and integrate them and to be able to get in tune and tolerated. And our culture is so much about if I feel something, I should go fix it. But we're not saying fix your negative emotion. We're saying be in it, experience it, work through it.

1:00:18Marisa G. Franco: Experience it. Be an anchored place as you experience these heavy emotions.

1:00:25Ann Kelley: And the very end you tap on, and I guess that comes back to the self-esteem, to this identity self, right, is that now you're changing your story. I'm not a non-emotional person. I'm actually somebody who's cut off because of good reasons. We're telling this more upgraded narrative that can be really positive instead of being, you know, it could be, oh, this is who I am, my good, my bad, my ugly, and being able to integrate it. But we have to be able to suspend the story.

1:00:54Marisa G. Franco: suspend the story that's hard it's very hard you know i this is what i learned about these people that feel self-worth is that they in a in almost in a sense don't know who they are and are willing to allow that because if you think about this person who has low self-esteem right they know who they are too much you try to love them no no no no you try to you know get them a gift oh i don't deserve it right you try to tell them how great they are no no no that's me right they have such a known sense of themselves, such a rigid story. So much so that, you know, this is from psychologist Eric Fromm, who I love.

1:01:32Marisa G. Franco: He says that identities can often alienate us from ourselves because I might, for example, see myself as an unemotional person. What happens when I experience an emotion? I am now pushing that away so quickly because it doesn't match the story of who I am. And so finding security is almost about allowing yourself to experience yourself from the bottom up that, oh, it's not that I am this kind of person, this, you know, self-made woman. And then anyone else who tries to support me, you know, they don't count or I explain why, you know, and then when I need help, I'm just sort of pushing that away.

1:02:06Marisa G. Franco: Instead, it's what am I actually feeling and experiencing? And that can be evolving and it can be new because I'm a process. I'm not an end point. And in new circumstances, new feelings can come up. And I'm not so attached to the sense of identity that I am just going to pretend that that's not happening. And so, you know, little ways I've applied this is my first books on friendship. I'm a friend expert. I got sent factor meals. These are single person meals for me to eat at home. This isn't for a friend expert. I should be eating with other people. I throw away the flyer. But the truth, Anne is I don't really like to cook and sometimes I eat meals alone.

1:02:45Marisa G. Franco: And so I don't have to use my identity to tell me about whether I'd like this. I could actually ask myself, how do I feel about this? So it's really about giving ourselves a lot more flexibility and uncertainty in our sense of identity and allowing that to be really okay because it actually provides us with a lot more space to know the ways that we evolve, the ways that we feel in each given moment.

1:03:11Ann Kelley: Well, I think that is a perfect moment to draw to a close because I think you've given our listeners so much to think about and so many resources in your book as well. I really do love that you gave active ways of engaging with different parts of yourself and with different parts of your emotions and some active parts of trying to hit these memories in a way that can be reconsolidated in a different way. and we also have interviewed Bruce Eckert who is part of the Memory Reconsolidation but I did not realize how old that interview is so I was really happy to get you on because it's I think proving to be some of the most powerful work out there

1:03:55Marisa G. Franco: Absolutely, people need to know about it

1:03:58Ann Kelley: So how can people find you if they want to know more?

1:04:03Marisa G. Franco: Okay, so my second book Worth the New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment comes out September 15th, might have passed already. And you can get autographed copies if you order it from Lost City Books in DC. On my Instagram, DrMarissaGFranco, that's D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. I share tips on building relationships with others and with yourself. And on my website, DrMarissaGFranco.com, you can reach out for speaking events on self-worth at work for true belonging or dealing with times of uncertainty. Or you can get a list of practices to work on your own self-worth.

1:04:39Ann Kelley: That's wonderful. And for those of you out there listening while driving, all of that will be available in our show notes. So take a look there and you could find the links to her book, her upcoming book. I think if we can get a link to that, I bet we could. And any of the contact information that you have shared with us will be in our show notes. Thank you so much, Ann. This is wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was really, really fun to talk with you.

1:05:05Marisa G. Franco: So fun to talk to someone kindred in this stuff.

1:05:08Ann Kelley: All right. Thank you so much. Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. Take a moment to rate and review this and to share this far and wide to people that could really gain from all the expertise that Dr. Franco shared with us today. All right. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you around the bend.

1:05:37Ann Kelley: Therapist Uncensored is hosted by Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott. This podcast is edited by Jack Anderson.