443. How to build a secure attachment with yourself: The connection between self-worth and parenting with Dr. Marisa G. Franco

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (00:00):

Sometimes attachment theory is spoken about, all about as this is how I show up in my relationships, but what’s really beneath that is how you’re showing up internally, which is then affecting how you show up in your relationships.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:19):

When we talk about secure attachment, we usually think about our relationships with other people. How securely attached are we to our parents or our partners? How do we help our children develop secure attachment to us? But there’s another relationship underneath all of those that we don’t talk about nearly enough and is arguably the most important one of all. And that is our relationship we have with ourselves. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. Each week, I sit down with the leading experts in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine and child development to translate complex research into practical grounded insights that help you parent with more clarity and confidence. And today I’m joined by Dr. Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist, a New York Times bestselling author, and an expert on attachment and human connection. Her first book, Platonic: Explored the Science of Friendship, and her newest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment takes that work one step further by looking at what it actually takes to feel secure within ourselves.

(01:25):

This conversation just may challenge the way you think about security, because being securely attached to yourself doesn’t mean you never feel anxious, needy, angry, rejected, or insecure. In fact, Marissa argues that trying to push those parts of ourselves away in an effort to become more “secure” can have the exact opposite effect. Instead, we talk about what it means to become what Marissa calls secure-ish and why genuine security may have less to do with the emotions we experience and much more to do with how we respond to ourselves when those emotions show up. We also explore the fascinating connection between our memories, our attachment patterns, and our self-worth, including how experiences from our past can become a kind of blueprint that shapes what we expect from relationships today, and how research suggests that we may actually be able to go back and edit that blueprint. And of course, we bring all of this back to parenting because the way we relate to our own anger, sadness, anxiety, and insecurity inevitably influences how we respond when those same emotions show up in our children. So if you’ve ever understood secure attachment intellectually, but still found yourself falling into old patterns or wondered why knowing what you’re “supposed to do” doesn’t necessarily make it easier to actually do it, this conversation gets underneath the strategies and into the deeper work of building security from the inside out.

(03:01):

Hello, Marisa. Welcome to the show. I’m so excited to have you here today and nerd out about attachment with you.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (03:07):

Oh my gosh, same, same. I eat, breathe, sleep, attachment theory.

Dr. Sarah Bren (03:13):

Yay. We’re in good company. So to get started, maybe you could just orient the audience by talking a little bit about yourself and your work and how you got interested in attachment.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (03:26):

Yeah. So originally it was from the lens of friendship. I was really, I think in my young 20s, preoccupied with romantic relationships and eventually to grieve a romantic relationship, I started this wellness group with my friend and we met up to meditate, cook, do yoga, and it was life changing. And I was like, “Why did I treat this form of love as if it didn’t matter? This love is literally making me whole.” And I was getting my PhD at the time and reading all these books on friendship and I was like, “I want something that’s really research backed and has so much substance.” And eventually I was like, “Maybe I could be the one to write that.” And as I was reading all the research, I was like, “You know what? Here’s what I’m seeing in the research that how we’ve connected shapes who we are, whether we’re trusting, friendly, open, warm, all those depend on our previous experiences of connection or lack thereof.

(04:23):

And then who we are affects how we connect, whether we connect isn’t random. It’s based off of we have characteristics that people that have connected well in the past tend to have. They’re more affectionate, more vulnerable, tend to initiate, take risks in their connection.” I think my editor was kind of like, “I think that’s attachment theory.” So yes, I then brought that lens to platonic and have continued to explore attachment theory and also maybe some of the limitations in how I’ve seen it used with my new book on the science of self-worth.

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:00):

Yeah. I think that that bi-directional feedback loop point is really very key and kind of gets at one of the confusing parts about attachment theory because I find a lot of people are a little confused by it initially until they realize like, “Oh yes, who I am impacts what I do and what I do impacts who I am.” And you cannot disentangle those two things.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (05:27):

Yeah. It ends up also being, as someone who studies connection, quite sad because the people that need connection the most end up creating conditions for them to continue to be disconnected. And yeah, that was really, I think one of the beautiful things about writing this book on self-worth, which is how do we escape the cycle? How do we escape the cycle? And in Worth, I talk about this theory called self-verification theory, which is that we in a way look for people that verify our sense of self because if I feel bad about myself and you see me really positively, it’s kind of threatening because it’s like, you don’t really understand me. I’m going to let you down. This feels like so much pressure. And so it’s like sometimes the very things that we think might make us feel more secure can actually just highlight our insecurities and how firmly rooted they are. And so I wrote worth to give us a path forward to get out of that reinforcing cycle.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:24):

I think that’s so important because I talk a lot about attachment with parents and families in the context of the parent-child relationship, but at the end of the day, we have to go to the self. Obviously a parent can inform their child’s attachment health by the way that they approach the child, but not unless they first really kind of look at their own stuff.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (06:51):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:51):

And so I feel like your book Worth really gets to that piece of how do we shore up our own sense of worth, our sense of self, our relationship to ourself? And that’s actually going to give us the most potential to impact our parent child, the relationship we have with our child and our child’s attachment.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (07:15):

Exactly. Because I think if you as a parent are trying to make your kid feel more secure so that they have healthy relationships throughout their whole life, what you’re really trying to do is give them a secure relationship with themself because once they have that secure relationship with themselves, the downstream consequence is that it gets a lot easier to relate to other people. So I think sometimes attachment theory is spoken about, all about as this is how I show up in my relationships, but what’s really beneath that is how you’re showing up internally, which is then affecting how you show up in your relationships.

Dr. Sarah Bren (07:51):

Yes. You talk a lot about this idea of secure-ish. Can you explain a little bit about what that means and why that impacts this sense of self?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (08:07):

Yeah. So obviously we are nerds who love attachment theory, but I think recently in the zeitgeist, I’ve seen a lot of influencers who are like, “If you’re anxious about them responding to your text, you should just act like a secure person and not be anxious.” And what I think this is leading to sometimes is not only do I feel anxious, now I feel ashamed of being anxious. And it’s leading to us reenacting on ourselves the same criticism, shame, neglect that has made us insecure in the first place. And so I wrote worth to say it’s okay to be anxious. It’s okay to be avoidant. The first place we have to start from is the ability to tell the truth because we can only heal the parts of ourselves we’re willing to acknowledge. And I think sometimes when we see ourselves as completely secure, even though we know that attachment can change in different relationships different times in our lives, but sometimes when we feel the need to be so secure, when we feel anxious, when we feel threatened, we try to push that part away so that we can live up to this label or this identity. And in fact, that can make us more insecure. I argue and worth that we need to let our insecurities come to the surface so we can show them compassion and care, what they didn’t receive that ended up making them insecure in the first place. We give them the opposite of that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (09:31):

Yes. I think that’s also a really helpful distinction because I think a lot of people understandably confuse the idea of insecure attachment, like the patterns in which we anticipate and engage with others, that that’s the equivalent of an emotional experience. To feel insecure, to feel anxious, even to feel secure, those are emotional states. They’re not necessarily indicative of our attachment patterns in the same. I mean, they could inform them, like we were saying before, it becomes this bidirectional feedback loop. But I think what I’m hearing you say is it’s really important to remember that actually being a secure person also means there’s a flexibility and emotion and aliveness to that security, which means at times we are going to feel different feelings, sometimes anxious, sometimes we want to avoid, sometimes we feel super secure, sometimes we feel super insecure, but those emotional states don’t necessarily change our sense of self and our sense of our relation to other.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (10:48):

Yeah, absolutely. I think being secure is about being a safe container for everything you feel, even insecure. And I think the paradox of security is people that are most secure are able to admit and acknowledge when they feel insecure, probably the most easily. And I think ultimately the sense of security is less defined by the emotions that you feel and more by your response to the emotions you feel that anxious people tend to catastrophize. If I feel insecure, that means I’m too much. Something is wrong with me. How could I be this way? There’s so much shame. If I feel avoidant, I feel insecure, let me just push that away and distract and do something else and ignore that feeling versus a secure way of relating to your emotions as being, “Hey, it’s okay that I feel insecure. Let me feel this. What do I need?

(11:40):

What do I need for myself? What do I need for my environment?” I just find worth in the book as treating your internal world as if it matters, treating every feeling you have as if it matters because it’s a part of you. And in it being a part of you, it’s something to cherish because that’s required to know who you truly are.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:01):

Yes. I mean, yes, that makes so much sense to me. And I think that that’s a really. As you were talking with these sort of sample ways to speak to yourself, I can’t help but hear how a parent might speak to a child when they’re in distress if they want to create a secure relationship. There’s so many parallels to how. Because this is a relational concept, right? Our relationship to ourselves, how we speak to ourselves, how secure we feel being all of ourselves is directly parallel to how we do that with our children.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (12:38):

Absolutely. Yeah. Because if when I feel upset or sad, I try to shut it down and tell myself that’s bad. When my kid feels upset or sad, it’s going to trigger that same thing in me. It’s almost like our emotional world or our relationship with our emotions gets superimposed onto the rules we put on our children’s emotions. And that’s why it’s so key, I think, for parents to be able to have compassion for themselves and welcome their own internal experience and have it be okay. Whatever you feel is okay. And I think with parents, there’s just so much pressure to be perfect, never have any negative feelings towards your kid, love motherhood. But I think instead security is about sometimes I resent this. Sometimes I’m upset. Sometimes I’m angry. Sometimes I’m mad at my kid. And that’s okay because we can only regulate the emotions that we are willing to acknowledge in ourselves.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:38):

Yes. I feel like I’m talking to a kindred spirit. I’m like, everything you say I’m like, yes, yes. But if parents are listening and they’re like, okay, you’ve sold me. Being more flexible, more open to my internal experience, curious about them makes sense. I get why that would help me feel more secure. How do I do that?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (14:05):

Yeah. So I have really two different approaches in worth. One is in the present and one is to deal with the past. In the present, I interviewed someone who was securish and they said something so beautiful that they would wave their hand over their day to see where their emotional energy lies, to see which small things are indeed smaller, which small things are big for them. And that was revelatory for me because I am really used to paying attention to my feelings when they’re obvious, but to seek out my own discomfort so that I could then offer myself care in the place of that, that took on a whole new level of mindfulness and awareness for me and welcoming feelings that I don’t want to be feeling, that I wish weren’t there. So as an example, Sarah, I had this friendship I was pursuing and really loved this person, wanted to be connected to them and I felt like it was one-sided and she had to cancel our hang that we finally got on the calendar because she had an injury that she was recovering from.

(15:06):

Now, of course, I just want to feel compassion. You have an injury. Of course, cancel, take care of yourself. But what I felt was kind of rejected, and I wouldn’t have even noticed that if I wasn’t engaged in this practice of trying to pay more attention to my feelings, but to notice that I felt rejected because of the trajectory of this friendship, I was able to sit with that and tolerate it and label it as such and then tell myself I’m loved, tell myself I’m safe, tell myself what I needed to hear to feel okay. And then when I said, “Of course, take care of yourself. If you need anything, let me know.” I could say those words in a way that felt truly aligned, not as if I had to abandon or push myself away to get there. There’s this way that I could see throughout the course of that experience, the way that we were better able to be in harmony with other people when we’re connected to ourselves. Because if I had disconnected from those feelings of rejection, even if I wish they weren’t there, the truth is that they were. And that means if I’m trying to disconnect to them to say all the right things, eventually those negative feelings are going to build up in me and shape how I show up in this relationship.

(16:15):

So my ability to attune to them makes me able to show up in this relationship more authentically. So that’s sort of the present approach of noticing that this is even happening, because sometimes we push away these feelings so quickly, we won’t know that they’re there. Acknowledging that it’s happening, literally feeling it in your body as tightness in your chest or your throat, maybe putting your hand on your chest, telling yourself what you need to hear to feel calm, what you need to hear from someone to feel more grounded in that moment.

Dr. Sarah Bren (16:46):

Yeah, because then what I feel like happens is there’s that congruence. Yes, congruence. If we feel one thing and in order to respond to our friend in the quote pro-social way we’d like to, in order to do that, we have to kind of fragment a little bit and say, “I have to cut myself off from this pain so I can be nice to my friend.” Then there’s this discordance, right?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (17:17):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:18):

But if we are able to first notice the pain, acknowledge it, validate it, soothe it, then when we can authentically pivot to the friend and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry that happened. Take care of yourself. Let me know how I could be there for you later,” there’s congruence.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (17:40):

Exactly. It’s feel, heal, and do. And yeah, when you do it, you’re able to be authentic to yourself and also more caring towards other people.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:54):

Yeah. That is a very helpful kind of simple breakdown of that.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (18:00):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (18:07):

I want to pause here for a minute because I think this conversation really highlights just how much our relationships matter to our wellbeing and also how complicated they can be. We all want close, healthy relationships. We want to feel good about ourselves, connected to our partners and friends, and able to build strong, loving bonds with our children. But knowing that we want those things doesn’t always mean we know how to create them. Our own histories, insecurities, patterns, and ways of protecting ourselves can all show up in our relationships, sometimes in ways we don’t even realize. And this is something we help people with every day at my practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group. Whether you’re struggling in your relationship with yourself, feeling disconnected from your partner, having difficulty creating or maintaining meaningful friendships, or wanting to strengthen the bond you have with your child, our team can help you better understand what may be getting in the way and work toward creating healthier, more fulfilling relationships. And that support can look different depending on what you need. It might mean individual coaching or therapy focused on your own patterns and sense of self, couples work to help you and your partner feel more connected, or parenting support to help you better understand your child and strengthen your relationship with them. Together, we can help you understand your patterns, build new skills, and create different experiences of connection with the people who matter most to you.

(19:29):

If you’d like support doing that, visit upshurbren.com to learn more or schedule a free 30-minute consultation with a member of our care team. That’s upshurbrend.com, U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com or simply click the link in the episode description. Okay, let’s get back to my conversation with Dr. Marisa G. Franco.

(19:50):

So present is one way. What’s your other way?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (20:00):

Okay. So my theory on. Well, not really mine, this is from a lot of research trademark Dr. Marisa G. Franco. So when I tried to understand self-worth, attachment styles, where they come from, here’s what came to me from the research. It’s this idea that memories are the database of self-esteem. They’re the database of our attachment styles. It’s because we have these memories, right? And the thing about memories is they don’t just record the past, but predict the future, and that’s what attachment theory is. It’s, “I’ve been abandoned in the past, I think it will happen again, and so now I’m acting more anxious.” And so that sounds like a tragedy for us who we can’t change the past, but we kind of can. I mean, there’s this theory that I found called memory reconsolidation theory, and it’s the idea that every time we revisit a memory, we can change the emotional valence of said memory.

(20:57):

And this is in your child work, this is re-parenting work, right? It’s us going back into that memory where maybe we felt really abandoned by our parent, maybe our parent chronically picked us up late from soccer practice, picturing our adult self saying to our child self, “I’m here, you’re safe. This doesn’t mean anything negatively about you,” and telling ourselves what we need to hear. When we do that, and I have these exercises in the book that really detail these research back ways to achieve more security, when we do that, not only do people’s trauma symptoms go down, do they report higher self-esteem, but you also see changes in their brain, in their hippocampus, the part of their brain that records the memory. So this is people that have been doing work on attachment, visualizing a safe and secure person in the middle of an insecure experience can really help us come to feel more secure.

Dr. Sarah Bren (21:56):

That’s fantastic. I love that. I’ll often talk about attachment as a metaphor of a blueprint, and so the earliest experiences that we have with our primary attachment figures, that kind of informs the initial draft of that blueprint, and we then use that blueprint to predict how we carry it around with us and predict how you think an interaction’s going to go, all of this happening somewhat subconsciously. It sounds like with memory reconsolidation exercises, you’re quite literally trying to pull up the original blueprint, look at it, re-experience it in a new way, reframe certain things, allow yourself to soothe yourself actively while. Go back and kind of edit the blueprint. And I’ll often describe other types of therapies or other corrective emotional experiences as being ways to edit the blueprint.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (23:03):

Exactly. Editing the blueprint, because if you don’t edit the blueprint, what I find is that it can be quite threatening to act secure. The reason being is that if your memories predict the future, and if you think, let’s say for an anxious person, you’re going to be abandoned, it feels really threatening to not be prepared for that, to try to ease in and tell yourself that everything’s going to be okay because it almost feels like you’re defenseless against this reality that your brain is convinced will happen. And so that’s why our insecurities are really trying to protect us, right? Because if I think I’m ultimately going to be rejected and I let myself feel good about myself and accept how much you love me and I really receive it and I feel better about myself and I think at the end of the day you’re going to reject and abandon me again, I’m just going to be further crushed when that happens. And so that’s why I think memory reconsolidation can really help liberate us so that feeling more secure isn’t threatening for us.

Dr. Sarah Bren (24:11):

I think that’s so important and I keep thinking about the people who. In order to challenge that sense of lack of safety, you kind of have to be in a safer place. And I think for some people, they’re in a safer place and it’s just hard for them to look around and recognize it because they’re operating off of the old blueprint. And then for other people and for a lot of people, we might not be in a completely safe place. We’re going to interact with people who aren’t going to meet our needs or are going to hurt us, who might abandon us.

(24:50):

I feel like on the one hand, we want to be able to give our own internal experience the skills to soothe that inner child, to be that secure base for ourselves, even when we have to interface with people who might be genuinely not the safest people, because that could still help us create safety, like authentic, real safety in the present. But also I feel like if you are finding, I want to feel more secure, but I’m in relationships that don’t help me feel secure or I just have an absence of relationships, and so there aren’t these good objects to start to use to rewrite this blueprint, to have these corrective emotional experiences with. I’m curious, you wrote a whole book on friendship and how do people who want to build more secure relationships increase the people in their lives that have that high quality secure relationship? How do you encourage people to think about building that skillset?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (25:59):

Yeah, that’s a great point. And certainly you can’t secure yourself out of a harmful relationship. Secure people are still impacted by harmful relationships, and so listen to yourself. Don’t try to white knuckle it because you think you’re secure. So when it comes to finding those true quality connections, I would say two things are very important, initiation and discernment. Initiation, so we tend to think that friendship happens organically, but actually people that think friendship happens without effort are lonelier over time because they don’t make that effort. And we need to show up in places where we can connect, hopefully places where we see people repeatedly because that capitalizes on something called the mere exposure effect, our tendency to like people who are familiar. So instead of going to one happy hour, maybe sign up for a mom’s group. And then when you show up in that place, you have to overcome something called covert avoidance, which is our tendency to show up physically and check out mentally.

(27:06):

We’re on our phone, we’re talking about one person we already know, right? We have to introduce ourselves, “Hey, how old’s your kid? I’m Marissa,” and engage with people. Now, initiation’s going to really help you have more people in your life, but are they the people that are going to make you feel safe and secure? And so it’s not just about initiating, but being discerning of the people as you’re getting to know them.

(27:32):

And so maybe some questions to ask yourself or how does your nervous system feel around them? Do you feel calm? Do you feel authentic or do you feel more nervous, anxious? Is there reciprocity in the connection? Does it seem like they’re putting effort into the connection too? Do you feel like you have shared values? Do you feel like this person is rooting for you to succeed? What’s the best for you? Also, as relationships progress, they tend to engage in something called mutuality, which is I’m thinking about your reality and mine and what’s best for both of us. So for example, I interviewed someone for Platonic and her friend had a rehearsal for. I think it was a play she was in and she couldn’t go because she got sick and during the pandemic, she was afraid to go outside and her friend got mad at her for not showing up for that rehearsal.

(28:25):

And I think that wanting people who can consider you and who you are as a person and what your needs are, even if that comes at sometimes a loss for them because they’re thinking about both people and whose needs are more urgent in a particular moment. I mean, and then we know things like consistency really help with feeling more secure, predictability, like responsiveness, all of those things be important to cultivate a sense of security.

Dr. Sarah Bren (28:52):

Yeah, that part about the mutuality piece makes you think of reflective functioning, which for people who aren’t familiar with that term, it’s like our ability to imagine, to notice and be curious about the internal state of ourselves and others. Yes. And it’s a pretty big predictor of whether or not a parent might pass their attachment style on. There’s a lot of research that shows if you have an insecure attachment, there’s a 70% chance that your child’s going to have the same attachment style as you, but the percentage that don’t pass that same attachment style on, one of the variables that predicts that is how high is their reflective functioning?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (29:50):

Yeah, that is so interesting and it kind of sounds like what we were speaking to when we talked about the importance of attuning to your internal world, so then you have. Capacity to recognize the world of another because you’re less under threat. And so yeah, it sounds very harmonious with some of the other things we’ve been talking about.

Dr. Sarah Bren (30:11):

Yeah. Okay. So earlier you were talking about initiation and obviously I think that the filter then, the discernment filter that you use when you initiate interactions with others is obviously very important to help you get into those safe places. Yeah. The initiation part makes me go back to that idea of like, oh, I’ve got to kind of do the self-talk. I have to walk into that moms group or that happy hour or that new pottery class with a little bit of a internal secure base that I’m going to be for myself. The self-talk that says, this is going to be a little hard and you might feel scared and that’s okay, we got this. This is a new experience and we’re working on rewriting the blueprint. So it still goes back to that self-work and that new sense of internal security.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (31:07):

Yeah, absolutely. One of the tips I share in my first book, Platonic, that tended to be really helpful for people was this idea of trying to assume that people like you. Because when we think we’ll be rejected, we reject people. We’re more closed off, we’re more withdrawn. When research finds that when people are told they’ll be liked, even when this is deception, they become friendlier, warmer, more open, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And worth, I feel like, is really about how to get there. The reason you assume people don’t like you is because you have these memories of rejection and they’re predicting that people will reject you again and how you actually do this deep work of going back to those memories so you don’t bring those fears into every interaction in the future. But Sarah, I think you put it really well in that even in a given moment, part of us is really afraid.

(32:00):

Not all of us is afraid, right? There’s maybe a part of you also that feels more optimistic and that believes you when you say to yourself, “This could go right. I can meet friends, the kind of friends that I’ve been looking for.” And so in that moment, it might mean also trying to have humility around the voice that feels so cynical and be open to the part of you that has hope.

Dr. Sarah Bren (32:25):

Yeah. I think that’s really good advice. It sounds like you’ve done so many interviews and done all this research. I’m curious if there’ve been any stories you’ve encountered along the way that really touched you or helped you feel very seen or connected to the person who you spoke with.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (32:49):

Oh my gosh. So I was trying to interview this woman because I was trying to interview people that were numb because I’m telling people to basically return to their memories. And in a way it’s not about the memory, it’s about the emotion. They’re trying to change the emotion in the memory. They’re trying to make it so that the memory isn’t unresolved or anxiety provoking and that they have more emotional closure on it. And so I asked her, “What are some signs that you feel numb?” And she said, “I was perfectly agreeable.” And I was like, “What? I feel personally attacked by that.” Like bullets, bullets, bullets all over my body. But that interview really, really helped me. I think as someone who’s my more anxious sides could really manifest as being over-functioning to protect relationships, continuing to offer grace even when this person isn’t treating me like I like. And the idea that people’s access to me depends on their treatment of me, that was new information to me. And so that person who talked about being perfectly agreeable, her darkness would come out with her children because she was now the person in control and she didn’t have to be agreeable to win, I guess, to stay in connection because the children will just stay in connection. And she talked about when her daughter got angry, locking her outside and she felt so much shame over the fact that she did this. But you can see how, especially with women, we’re so socialized to try to be good and to have to be good.

(34:32):

And how this actually leads us to become the opposite because the more we try to numb out on our own anger, the more that comes out as hyper emotionality at other points, right?

Dr. Sarah Bren (34:43):

Right. It’s got to go somewhere.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (34:44):

It goes somewhere. And that’s what I saw with the parents that I interviewed that they tried to push away their own discomfort, their own insecurities, and it came out as these moments they felt so ashamed of and how they treated their kid. And so that’s when I was like, I think I end that chapter with like, if we truly want to be good people, good-ish people, we have to let ourselves feel desperate and upset and angry and antagonistic and whatever emotions are actually there so that they don’t collect and culminate in a moment wherein we’re hijacked into causing harm, particularly onto people that are more vulnerable to us. So I completely changed my definition of being a good person is less about never feeling any of these negative emotions and more about allowing yourself to feel them.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:35):

Right. Which is completely different than what most people have been told is good person, which would be agreeable.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (35:42):

Yes, exactly. So…

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:46):

It’s actually causing the exact opposite to happen.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (35:49):

Right. And it can also be sometimes for people that are internalizers who take out their negative emotions on themselves, and I think all of us are internalizers and externalizers to a degree, sometimes the impact of being agreeable is that you feel depressed, you feel anxious all the time, right? Something’s happening internally where you’re not feeling right because all of those emotions are now being taken out internally on you. And so we just don’t. Suppressing our emotions, it may seem like they disappear, but they don’t. And the stakes are ourselves or everyone we’ve ever loved.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:29):

Right. That makes me think of two really important things that I know about attachment, which is one, we tend to show up most ugly with the people we feel safest with. And so that makes me think of that mom. She had all this shadow stuff that she was fragmenting out of her awareness and wasn’t processing or releasing any of it in the moment. And then it has to go somewhere because we are not an infinite abyss. And so where is it going to go? The lava will erupt and the lava’s going to get directed at the people who feel safest to us, that we feel least likely to abandon us. And as a parent, like you said, that’s probably going to be our kids.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (37:21):

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (37:21):

And guess what? Our kids do the same thing to us. That’s like restraint collapse or we always talk about our kids save their worst for us because we’re their safest people. And that’s actually healthy for kids to do to their parents because that’s the other thing that made me think about attachment is our attachment with ourself is a really mutual balanced relationship of give and take with ourself. But our attachment relationship with our child, the parent-child relationship is asymmetrical in that it’s healthy for them to share all their lava with us and ideally a sturdy parent that can contextualize that as lava and not take it in as let it come all the way in and burn our insides, but just say, “Ah, my kid is losing their mind right now and this is lava and I get it. They’re sharing it with me because they feel safe.” Immediately that depersonalizes the lava. But if we’re doing that to our kids, they don’t have that kind of cognitive ability to say, “Ah, that’s mom’s lava. She’s sharing it with me because she’s having a really hard time and it’s just erupting and she thinks I’m her safe place and I’ll hold it for her.” That’s that asymmetrical quality of that relationship.

(38:53):

Sometimes we need to learn how to do that. Not all adults know how to do that and that’s an important skill. Totally. But kids are not, we can’t ever expect them to know how to do that. That’s not to say that you’re never going to like lava on your kids. I definitely have by far. But I mean, if that’s a pattern, we have to look at it because it can cause a lot of problems in the attachment relationship.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (39:19):

Exactly. I think you put it so well. And at the end of the day, I just have so much compassion for parents because I’m sure so many of your audience who they’re here because they’ve been lava’d at many a times and somehow they have to carry the heaviness of the past and all the lava they still carry from that and also not continue the cycle. And so just my deepest compassion to all of the parents that are out there listening.

Dr. Sarah Bren (39:53):

Yeah. It is hard to be a parent, but it’s hard to be parented. Every adult, every parent who’s trying to figure out this out for themselves and their children was parented. They have their own parent-child attachment in the other direction. And so there’s always, I think, something to learn from that and to build skills around. And I think that’s why I think your book Worth really helps people heal the stuff that they’ve been holding now.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (40:28):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.That’s why I created, I think after I wrote Platonic and I showed people like, “Okay, here are all the behaviors you can do to build relationship.” I just remember talking to a reader who was like, “It’s helpful to have the tools, but I still feel insecure deep down. How do I actually change my nervous system?” And I took on that question. I was like, “Yeah, I don’t want people to feel like their security is a performance. What does it look like to feel secure at a more molecular level so the things that you’re saying are synchronous with what you actually feel inside?” And so that was the work of worth. What does it mean to upend an insecure nervous system and to find more security and more groundedness? And so yeah, I shared the best exercise I could find in the research on how to actually do that.

(41:22):

And I think what’s beautiful is that you can do that, but it’s a very counterintuitive. I think what I’m suggesting, which is actually shining a light on all the ways that you’re not while in a grounded place. And in my own therapy, this has been quite revelatory. I remember I had a part of me that was very needy, that I felt a lot of shame over. And in my therapy, we use the idea of the divine. And so my therapist was like, “Why don’t you offer that part of you up to the divine?” And what does the divine say? And what the divine told me was, “That part of you is perfect. It is perfect too.” And that was transformative. I was so used to relating to these parts of me I struggle with by trying to change them and push them away or make them into something different rather than just being like, “You are meant to be here.

(42:18):

You are beloved in the landscape of my being. You belong here,” part that I struggle with. And really for me, that was the practice of seeing firsthand that the problem is not that the insecurity exists. The problem is how I’ve been relating to the insecurity that exists and I need to embrace it and welcome it home to me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:39):

Oh, that is so powerful. I got so many chills when you said that. It’s true. It’s all of the good, the bad, the painful, the messy, it’s all wonderful. It all belongs.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (43:00):

It belongs. It belongs so much. And now I think I can share a quote from the book on this. “I’ve realized I’m only as insecure as the parts of me I leave in the shadows, so I’m no longer asking parts of me to disappear. I’m saying to them, I’m so sorry I’ve neglected you. I’m thankful for the ways you carried the pain I wasn’t willing to see. I never want you to stop crying, raging and screaming out about how hurt you are. I want to create an environment within myself where pain isn’t something I ignore and shame myself for, because without this pain, I may have never known these depths of love.”

Dr. Sarah Bren (43:38):

That’s so beautiful. And I just feel like that’s so what anybody needs to be able to say to themselves or to their child. There’s always that parallel, like what we are trying to do with our kids, we have to be able to do with ourself and our inner children. That’s so poignant.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (44:01):

Thank you so much.

Dr. Sarah Bren (44:04):

It’s not lost on me that in writing Platonic, you try to help people understand what to do and how to make it better. You uncovered that worth is really like the prequel.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (44:20):

It’s the prequel.

Dr. Sarah Bren (44:21):

Yeah.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (44:21):

Read Worth first.

Dr. Sarah Bren (44:24):

It’s funny because I’m literally, I’m writing a book right now on kids with big explosive emotions and behaviors. And I’ve been writing this book all about how do, as a parent, you help your kid understand their nervous system, regulate their system. And I’m realizing as I’m writing it, oh man, I have to write a book first on parental self-regulation. I have this chapter about parental self-regulation in it and I was like, this could be the whole book because it’s the prequel to being one.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (44:55):

Exactly. We’re on the same trajectory here.

Dr. Sarah Bren (44:58):

It’s so funny, but it’s true. And sometimes you have to answer the question to realize what the first question needs to really be.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (45:06):

Exactly. Exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:09):

But I think this idea of accepting and loving and I like this idea of the divine of what would the divine say to every part of you?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (45:23):

Yes. What does balance love say to you?

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:25):

Even the ones that we’re afraid of or embarrassed by or been told the goal is to change it.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (45:31):

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:33):

Is by definition non-acceptance. And if the divine would say, you are so perfect, you belong here, and we could believe that. We could feel that, the shift that that creates in our system, wow, that would be very powerful for a lot of people. So I encourage everyone to just take a moment and consider that that’s important. If people want to learn more about your work or read your books, connect with you, where can they go?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (46:11):

Yeah. So my new book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, available wherever books are sold, you can get a signed copy from Lost City Books in DC if you order from there. I’m on Instagram sharing tips on connecting with friends and yourself at drmarisagfranco, D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A G-F-R-A-N-C-O. And if you go on my website, drmarisagfranco.com, you can sign up for a list of practices to improve your worth or reach out for speaking events on self worth at work.

Dr. Sarah Bren (46:39):

Amazing. We’ll link all that in the show notes too, so people can easily find you. And thank you so much.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (46:45):

Thank you so much.

Dr. Sarah Bren (46:47):

It was delightful talking with you.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco (46:48):

What a pleasure.

Dr. Sarah Bren (46:55):

Thanks for joining us. After listening to this episode, you probably have a sense of just how powerful a secure attachment bond can be for a child’s mental wellbeing. From fostering stronger self-esteem and independence, to building healthier relationships, better school and workplace functioning, and even lower rates of anxiety and depression, secure attachment is linked to so many positive lifelong outcomes. But here’s the thing parents don’t always realize. Creating a secure attachment bond isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about understanding a few core principles and applying them in the natural everyday moments of parenting. And that’s exactly why I created my free guide, The Four Pillars of Fostering Secure Attachment. It distills decades of attachment research into four simple, practical things you can focus on, to feel more confident, more attuned, and less overwhelmed by all the noise out there. You can find the link to download the free guide right in the episode description or head to drsarabren.com/secure to get it sent straight to your inbox. That’s drsarabren.com/secure. And until next time, don’t be a stranger.