Verwandte Artikel zu Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment

Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment - Hardcover

Franco PhD, Marisa G.

 
9798217046591: Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217046591
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic, a groundbreaking guide exploring the promise (and limits) of secure attachment to help us feel better and boost our self-esteem.

“I can't think of anyone who won’t need this book.” —Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author and host of For the Love

What if what you thought you knew about secure attachment was wrong? Or worse, making you more insecure?

Dr. Marisa G. Franco is the New York Times bestselling friendship expert whose advice Glennon Doyle calls “wise, concrete, and effective”—Dr. Franco literally wrote the book on how to become a securely attached friend. But since then, she’s realized that when we feel unworthy, the things we think should make us feel secure and raise our self-esteem often backfire:

  • Optimistic self-talk makes us feel worse, not better.
  • Positive feedback raises our blood pressure.
  • Compliments make us uncomfortable.
  • Positive events make us sicker.

The good news: Self-esteem is a skill that can be learned—and you can get better at it, which in turn strengthens all your other relationships. In Worth, Dr. Franco mines promising new research at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience to show us why so many of us still struggle with self-esteem (even in this self-obsessed age), and how we can build a foundation of lasting self-worth that doesn’t rely on likes or followers.

Through exercises, stories, and the cutting-edge science of memory reconsolidation, updating damaging memories to change the stories we tell ourselves, Dr. Franco shows how we can bring meaning, self-worth, and secure attachment back into our lives, from the inside out. If you feel like you’ve read every book on healing, but you are still struggling, Worth will help you finally find the transformation you’ve been looking for.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Marisa G. Franco is the New York Times bestselling author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. She holds a PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Maryland and works as a professor there currently. She writes for Psychology Today and has been a featured psychologist in The New York Times and on NPR and Good Morning America. Dr. Franco delivers talks about connection, belonging, and worth all over the country to private companies, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Her newest talk is entitled “Worth and Belonging: How to Build Self-Worth to Foster Belonging at Work.”

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1

Defining Worth

The best and worst people both have high self-esteem.

By high self-esteem, I mean that they score high on a classic assessment of the concept. Yes, they say, I am satisfied with myself. Yes, I have a number of good qualities. Yes, I'm a person of value. No, I don't think I'm a failure. No, I don't feel useless. No, I don't think I'm no good at all.

And yet, as you look closer at these high-self-esteem havers, you'll start to make out two very distinct groups of them. People with high self-esteem are either the kindest, calmest, most generous people you know or the meanest, most hostile, and most selfish. Self-esteem, it seems, is not a purely "good" or "bad" trait. And yet most of us would agree that self-esteem is a defining-perhaps the defining-characteristic of worth.

So how do we know if we have enough (and the right kind) of self-esteem?

Why Does Self-Esteem Look
So Different in Some People?

When I came across these clashing profiles of high self-esteem, I thought of a party I hosted where I served two specialty drinks with identical ingredients, except one contained alcohol and the other didn't. We called the nonalcoholic drink the "good friend" and the alcoholic one the "toxic friend."

My guest Heather asked, "Did you do it on purpose, make the toxic and nontoxic friend look the same?" Another guest requested a good friend but was accidentally served a toxic one. She began to feel loose and woozy. "Are you sure that was a good friend?" she asked.

Although both kinds of people with high self-esteem can appear identical at face value, there are tells. Some high-esteem individuals use their sense of worth for good . . . others, not so much.

Ask someone with high self-esteem about a time they did something bad, like broke the rules, acted unethically, or disappointed their parents. One will tell you why their behavior was someone else's fault, one study found. The other will admit they were wrong and share how they honestly felt. They'll reflect on their remorse, regret, and growth.

Imagine this person with high self-esteem was your romantic partner, and one day, you were too engrossed in your work to acknowledge that they entered the room. One would interpret this as a sign of disrespect and ignore you back. The other would assume you're invested in something important and go on with their day, as revealed by a study where people were exposed to those scenarios.

High self-esteem affects how people interact with the wider world. It can either make them angrier and more hostile than the average person, or it can make them less so, another study found. Because of this, according to another study, one type of high-self-esteem haver has the smoothest and most intimate relationships of all, while the other has the least.

In other words, while you might find no difference in how these high-self-esteem people speak of themselves-as worthy, confident, special-you will find a stark difference in how they treat others. One group treats others the best, and the other, the worst.

I call these two groups the "good" and "bad" twins of self-esteem because this same trait expresses itself so differently. Michael H. Kernis, the late psychology professor who studied self-esteem, referenced these twins of self-esteem when others critiqued his ideas and he jokingly replied: "I could respond to these commentaries by thoughtfully assimilating their meaning and modifying my position . . . or I could begin my response with a resounding #%+$@&*! OFF."

I explored this research on self-esteem to help me define worth. Yet I found that the concept of self-esteem was not necessarily aligned with how I see worth, or, to be more specific, the bad twin's kind wasn't, while the good twin's was. This is why it's important to have precision in my understanding of self-esteem. If I wasn't able to understand the differences between these twins, I might inadvertently lead us to become the bad twin, springing off the backs of others to lift ourselves higher. To truly understand worth, I had to distinguish the good twin's kind of self-esteem, so I could lead us to develop the type of self-esteem that doesn't come at everyone else's expense.

The stakes here are everyone we will ever love.

Good Twins Acknowledge-and Accept-Negative Feelings

How could two types of people, who say they feel the same about themselves, treat other people so differently? My mind was working overtime to figure out this puzzle when I ran into Beth. Beth had supervised my graduate school teaching years ago. She had insisted on paying me, even though I was teaching the class for credits to fulfill my grad school requirements. Beth also listened like she left her body to live in yours. She felt what you felt, knew what you knew. She wielded this uncanny empathy when a colleague had something to celebrate. She would eagerly proclaim "Mazel tov!" and her face would light up so much, you'd sense your win was hers, too. I intuited a good twin before me.

As I told Beth about these two twins of high self-esteem, I expected us to commiserate over the orneriness of the bad twin, and in doing so, mark ourselves as a cut above the rest. But to my surprise, Beth didn't follow my lead in othering the bad twin. Instead, she began to reflect on herself. "I'm trying to think about what's going on with me when I feel defensive. I am usually feeling unseen, unheard, insecure."

Beth's words led me to a flash of insight. We all have the same urges the bad twin does, to blame or get defensive, hostile, or vengeful. The difference, Beth showed me, is that good twins, like her, can acknowledge this is happening. Renowned therapists who were teaching me about how to become worthy, like Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, and Karen Horney, sang in Beth's choir. They say we should acknowledge our every feeling-annoyance, anger, judgment, desperation, weakness, hurt, pity-as a welcome guest. Then, we won't need to hot-potato them to someone else. As psychologist Abraham Maslow put it, the secure exhibit a "lack of fear of their own insides of their own impulses, emotions, thoughts." Carl Rogers advised us to "admit [our] real self with its childish patterns, its aggressive feelings, and its ambivalences" because "we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are."

As I interviewed more people who were referred to me for having a strong sense of worth, they emphasized the importance of knowing their feelings, of welcoming the bad twin's urges within. They weren't just unafraid of their emotions. They sought communion with them. No feeling was too small to attend to. They'd search for them, cordoning off time for contemplation, justifying this act in their busy lives because they realized that in each feeling, they would find a part of themselves, too precious to let diffuse into oblivion. And that was their biggest priority-more important than resetting their bones to cast themselves into someone's definition of important-they wanted to know themselves, one sliver of feeling at a time.

Many of us squirm away from our hard feelings because we worry that if we acknowledge them, they'll grow. And this is a fair assumption. People who observed their feelings were more depressed months later, one study found. When people with panic disorder monitored their sensations, like heart rate, during a panic attack, they only felt more anxiety and panic. Acknowledging our feelings will make us feel worse-if we freak out about them.

But acknowledging our feelings is helpful if we use it as an opportunity to regulate them. While people who only observe their feelings experienced the highest levels of anxiety in one study's sample, people who observe and accept their feelings experienced the lowest. In another study, people who monitored and accepted their feelings had a more stable mood, less depression, and less anxiety than those who monitored alone.

Good twins aren't threatened by their feelings, because they regulate these feelings after they arise. This is the secret behind their kindness. While the good twins have hostile feelings, too, it is only when those feelings aren't regulated that they lead to hostile behavior. Some-like the bad twin-may confuse regulating feelings with suppressing them, a way many of us have been taught to deal with big emotions. But regulating them is more like turning toward them with open arms, allowing them in, feeling them through their ebb until they flow again. Good twins don't try to exile a feeling because it isn't "rational" (feelings are not subject to the rules of rationality), generalize them to mean something about them as a person, or label their feelings as bad. They wouldn't mark their defensiveness, hostility, or resentment as evidence of a "bad twin" within them because doing so would alienate the part of them in pain. Instead, no matter how small, uncomfortable, or even antisocial the feeling, they make space for it on the couch, comfort it, and thank it for showing up and revealing their deeper needs. And once they gather their feelings, they then infuse them with the faith that everything will be okay. It's this compassion for the self, one study found, that's linked to having more good twin-like qualities-such as being slower to anger and not particularly self-absorbed -more than self-esteem in itself is.

Good Twins Regulate Negative Feelings

Good twins I interviewed shared insights with me on how they practiced acknowledging and regulating their feelings. Helen, a woman in her early thirties who works in policy, reflected on how she listened to music to welcome her tears. "After a couple of songs ugly crying, I felt way better. A friend of mine says, 'Find a way to say it that makes you cry.' And I resonate a lot with that. Can you find a way of articulating it that just, like, brings tears to your eyes?" she said.

Another interviewee, Dr. Skyler Jackson, a forty-year-old professor, imparted his practice of attuning to his emotions. "I think you have to slow down and explore yourself . . . meditate on these things that may seem small . . . that can allow you to learn what small things are really small things and what small things really matter and have stuck with you. . . . Run your hand over these small things just to see if there's energy somewhere."

But why do bad twins struggle so much with being compassionate toward their negative emotions? To understand the psychology of the bad twin, imagine a friend who hides their mess-a metaphor, here, for their negative emotions-in their closet. All their dirty clothes, shoes with worn soles, near empty bottles of lotion are tossed in their closet. Their room looks organized, and they can say they're an organized person. They wouldn't even be lying, by all appearances. But just because the mess is hidden, doesn't mean it is not there.

"Hey. What happened to that hoodie you borrowed?" you ask this friend one day, innocently. It's crumpled in a heap in the closet. But your friend doesn't say that. Instead, to your surprise, they get feral, "What hoodie? I returned it months ago. Why don't you remember? Are you dumb?" They're so incensed because you didn't just bring up a hoodie. The hoodie symbolizes the heaps of shame locked behind that closet door.

Eventually, because none of their shame has been processed, it becomes so colossal that any slight can trigger it. When the trigger arises along with the mountain of shame it's attached to, the bad twin's self-esteem plummets. They get feral, again. In Safiya Sinclair's memoir How to Say Babylon, she describes how this dynamic was true for her father. Sinclair recounts how the "chaos of my father's interior life" manifested as cruelty toward her: "He was never good at managing his disappointments or tempering frustration without firebombing the nearest person." Safiya was raised in Jamaica. One night, while she was writing in her bedroom, her father came by to harangue her for not taking more physics or economics classes in high school, so she'd be more successful now. When she told him she was writing poetry, he said, "You're really worthless." When her poetry was later published in Jamaica's newspaper, the Jamaica Observer, he accused her of writing for white people and hurled the newspaper at her.

Denying that your negative emotions exist is the modus operandi of the bad twin, studies find. That's why bad twins say they have high self-esteem; they simply ignore any feelings that suggest they don't. And yet, it's a costly defense mechanism. Because they have no practice being with their negative feelings, they struggle all the more when situations force them to. One study found that when emotional compartmentalizers were rejected-playing catch with others and not getting thrown the ball-they felt more rejected and their self-esteem fell more than non-compartmentalizers. Because they compartmentalize, bad twins-unlike people with low self-esteem-feel great about themselves when everything is copacetic. But at any hint of rejection, the avalanche of clothes forces open the closet door. When they're confronted with the mess that is locked away, their sense of self will violently swing to the negative . . . and their civility will follow suit.

Of course, all of us wig out like bad twins sometimes, when it's been a tough day, or we're in a bout of depression or burnout. Having to confront our feelings all the time is exhausting work. To see the good and bad twins as mutually exclusive categories, then, is too simplistic. And even for those of us who hover around bad twin-like behaviors more regularly, that category doesn't define you. It can shift. I'll teach you how throughout Worth.

Maybe understanding the bad twin's experience makes you feel some compassion for them, whether you are them or have known them. As we'll explore more later, when bad twins are slighted, they are gobsmacked with a lifetime's worth of shame, as all the humiliation locked in their closet bursts out. They feel like they're lit on fire. No wonder they have to pass that torch to someone else. Here's how this all plays out internally for the bad twin: Let's say someone told them they hurt their feelings. The bad twin's body interprets this to mean that they're bad at their core, all unprocessed feelings of unworthiness firing at once. The negative reaction punctures the bad twin's sense of self so deeply that it's all there is. It feels like being stabbed. The pain of the person they hurt doesn't exist on its own, as valid, but as mere prologue for the bad twin's pain. The bad twin's primal anger leaps out to close the wound. The anger moves in so quickly, so desperately that the bad twin can't make out their own vulnerable feelings underneath. So they respond-They're dramatic, sensitive, pathetic. That's why they're hurt. That feels better.

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217046591
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
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