Welcome to Unf*ck Your Brain, I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and Founder of the School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Kara: Hi.

Dr Franco: Hi, nice to see you again.

Kara: I know, it’s been since my book tour.

Dr Franco: Right? Yeah.

Kara: So, for those of you watching, this is Dr. Marissa Franco, and she did me the favor of speaking with me when I did my book tour. She is also an author. She already has a bestselling book, but that was not enough for her. She needed a second one. So her first book was Platonic, How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. And now you have a new book coming out called Worth, The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment.

So, you know I like to make women brag about themselves. So I just did a little bragging for you, but…

Dr Franco: … you did.

Kara: Brag for yourself some more. Tell us who you are, how you came to write this book.

Dr Franco: Sure. So, I came to write this book because my book Platonic on the science of making friends, there was this kind of theory that I still thought about, the one that got away, called self-verification theory. And it’s this idea that we look for people that verify our sense of self. Which means if you see yourself negatively, you might choose to affiliate with people that mistreat you.

Why? Because if people see you too positively, you’re like, I’m going to let them down at the end of the day, and they’re going to find out who I really am, and they’re going to find out I’m not so great. And so there’s this way that unworthiness can really manifest as an inability to process love.

And so understanding that, I realized that being able to connect with others is not just about sort of these strategies you can use to connect, which I go into in platonic, but it’s also about having a certain relationship inward so that healthy relationships aren’t a threat to you. And so I wanted to give people advice on how to do the work internally so that you can be in positive relationship with other people.

Kara: I love that so much because I think when I was dating, one of those unhelpful things you hear is like, you can’t find love until you love yourself, or you can’t be loved until you love yourself. And that’s like manifestly untrue because other people can love you whether you love yourself or not. But what is true, and I love having this name for it. I don’t think I had a name for it, is that you can’t really accept love if you don’t love yourself because of that cognitive dissonance. I feel like that explains so much. So many people have that experience of being like, I know that I’m in something I don’t like, but I keep choosing this, or I keep coming back to it, or I when I do go out with someone who seems nice, then I’m bored, or it doesn’t feel exciting or whatever.

So that seems like such an important, I guess I’m thinking about it more in the romantic area, but I know you write a lot about friendship. Are you focused on one or the other in the book?

Dr Franco: Just relationships in general. I see more continuity between romantic relationships and friendships than most people. So any experience of intimacy that I think it’s true in, I think in terms of friendships the way I’ve seen it manifest is that friend that will never accept a compliment. They will reject the compliment like their life depends on it. And what you were saying reminded me of a study that found that how much people perceive their partner love them more strongly correlated with their own self-esteem than how much their partner actually love them.

And so we can think about our sense of worth as a projection in that if we don’t feel worthy, we think everyone doesn’t like us or is going to reject us or harm us. And if we feel worthy, we think good things will happen to us. We think people do like us. They do accept us. And so self-worth in a way is a theory of self, and we look for information that confirms that theory.

Kara: I love that because every person I coach now is like, well, if my partner did this, then I would know they love me. I’m going to get to be like, I now have proof it’s not about. I already knew it wasn’t about them, but now I really know. But the example of the friend who won’t accept the compliment is so interesting. I just had this interaction with my husband yesterday where he both wants more verbal affirmation, right? Or that he thinks he wants that. But then when you give it to him, he doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

And so yesterday, we had that where I said something and then he didn’t respond. And I was like, okay, so it’s, you asked for this and I’m trying to give it to you. What’s going on with you? And he was just like, well, I mean, that would be so indulgent to like sort of acknowledge that you heard it or like affirm it or like it’s like they said something nice, now you just move on. So it’s such an interesting moment of like, oh, this is something that he really feels that he wants and craves. And yet, when it’s given to him, it’s so hard for him to accept it.

Dr Franco: Exactly. And in the book, I really argue that process, those insecurities, they’re adaptive. Because if you have this negative theory of self that people will reject and harm you, then when people try to bring you up and tell you how great you are and you’re so convinced that at the end of the day, people are going to harm and reject me, it feels like they’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security so that I can be further crushed. That’s what the felt experience is like.

And so if you understand how worth works, it really makes a lot of sense why our insecurities make us reject signs of love and why that’s so threatening. And in fact, it’s changed the way that I show up in my relationships because when I have friends that are feeling less than, those feelings of inferiority come up, I used to be like, but you’re so great, and you’re so wonderful, and these are all these great things about you.

Kara: Let me just give you good thoughts to think. Let me just feed them to you.

Dr Franco: And it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s just like, I just see it slip off.

Kara: Like water off a duck’s back, yeah.

Dr Franco: Yeah. So I’ve started to say, it’s understandable that you feel that way. And what’s contributing to it? And I’m here to listen.

Kara: That’s sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop thing. I think that’s such a prevalent part of what’s going on when people are having trouble being happy or accepting that something is good, right? I see this come up a lot in dating when I’m coaching on dating where people have had a bad experience in the past or I mean, nobody who’s dating as an adult has not had a bad experience at some point. But then there’s this, it’s like you just tell yourself all I want is someone who treats me this way.

And then that person comes along, and then you’re just anxious that it’s a fake, are you being love bombed? It’s only a matter of time. I mean, I totally used to accuse my husband, not of love bombing, I didn’t think he was doing anything consciously on purpose, but my version of it was like, oh, well, you have ADHD and I’m just your new hyperfixation. Like this is, you know, you can’t really have these feelings this strongly or this fast.

So that’s so interesting. And I actually totally agree with you about friendships or romantic relationships being more of a spectrum than like an on off. I think there’s so much of the coaching I have to do around dating is like, it’s not a magic other portal. It’s not like, right, it’s like…

Dr Franco: You have these skills already. Use them in friendship.

Kara: …it’s just a friendship with someone you also want to have sex with. It’s not, most of the time, maybe not if you’re asexual, but right, it’s not this sort of like other dimension of being where like all different rules apply or it’s going to feel so completely different after that first, whatever, 18, 24 months of like hormonal honeymoon period. But I think so much suffering comes from that thinking of like, yeah, I have friends but like, I don’t have this kind of attachment. I don’t have this kind of relationship. If I just had that, it would validate me.

So, I know you write that in the book, you write that women in particular, you can correct me if I get this quote wrong, but it’s will destroy their sense of self in the name of grace for others, which I think is, I just recorded an episode earlier today about the word “fine,” like how often women just say like, I’m fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine when things are not fine. And I would just love to hear you talk about self-abandonment and calling that niceness, right? That’s how we’re trained to think of it. And how you see that kind of come up in this work.

Dr Franco: Yeah. So this was when I was doing an event with Danielle Bayer Jackson, who also wrote a book on friendship, and the women were sharing some of their struggles in friendship and they would say things like, my friend invited me for a baby shower, but I just had a miscarriage. Am I a bad friend if I can’t show up to this? Or, I’ve been reaching out to my friend and I see they’re posting on Instagram and I’m hurt that they never respond to me. Should I just be giving them more grace?

And it was like over and over and over again, we heard these stories of these women fighting with themselves, fighting with their authentic reaction, fighting with their actual feelings because they felt like they had to live up to this role of being endlessly grateful. And I saw in that moment the ways that women were using grace to really abandon their sense of self. And I wanted to validate like, those feelings are real. Like you are grieving this miscarriage. And maybe when you attune to yourself, you realize it’s not the time for you to be around a baby shower and that is okay. And you can share that.

And so I think sometimes so much with women, it’s like, we are aware of our feelings. We talk about them with friends all the time. We have this practice relationally of being aware of our feelings, but we fight with them. We fight with them, we fight with them because there’s this oppressive ideal that we have to live up to of being so graceful and being so accommodating that can really estrange us from ourselves.

Kara: Yeah, it is so interesting because many women are often talking a lot about their feelings. And then, but also when you get into it in coaching or I imagine therapy as well, it turns out they have no idea what they’re feeling or can’t admit it to themselves. It almost feels like there’s sort of a like, I don’t know what it is. There’s like, I guess a discourse of the acceptable feelings that they’re willing to talk about that you’re annoyed with your boss at work. You know, it’s like that one is comfortable to rehash or like, I don’t know what to make of how this person’s texting me, like that, you know. But the sort of like, am I a bad daughter? Am I a bad mother? Am I a bad friend?

Yeah, the shame stuff, like and exactly what you’re saying, the feelings that don’t align with what society has taught you to think, those are the feelings I feel like that people don’t bring up and that probably are more connected to self-worth, right? It’s like, because I’m a step-parent, I follow all these step-parenting accounts on social media, and one of the women just did a like, submit your secret feelings about being a stepmom kind of thing.

And it was like, it was fascinating. I mean, this is not how I feel. I’m glad that I’m a stepmom, but there were so many like anonymous, like, I regret doing it. I would make a different choice. But all the shame around that, right? The same way that we don’t really allow women to talk about regretting having kids or all those things that transgress those social roles.

Dr Franco: Right. I love what you’re saying because I think worth starts with acknowledging who you are and acknowledging what you feel and just admitting it. And I think something I talk about in the book is like attachment theory. Attachment theory has become so popular and secure attachment has become like a status symbol.

And quickly for folks that aren’t familiar with attachment theory, attachment theory is just this idea that when you’re growing up, the way your parents treat you leads you to create an internal template about how everyone will treat you since. And so if you’re anxiously attached, you had to earn your parents’ love and you think people will reject you unless you prove yourself to them and you will sacrifice yourself to stay in relationship with others versus avoidantly attached where you’ve experienced a lot of emotional neglect.

Your parents has shut down or shamed you for your feelings, and you feel like if I get close to people, it’s going to be unsafe. They’re going to harm me. So you never…

Kara: Those two like to pair up.

Dr Franco: Those two pair up. And then securely attached people who had good enough parents who go into relationships assuming that they can go well and I can be vulnerable and I can feel safe and I can show affection and… you know, there’s so much research behind this theory. I even wrote my first book based on this theory, but I started to see the way it was used in that secure attachment has become a status symbol. People all want to be secure. They talk about it on their dating profiles, think pieces galore to the extent that we’re estranging ourselves from who we actually are and the insecurities that we have. And it’s like, if I feel anxious or I feel avoidant, that’s bad. I have to be secure. Let me just ignore those parts of me.

But in fact, you are reenacting the shaming, the neglect that led you to be insecure in the first place when you treat yourself like that. So in this book, I argue, maybe we shouldn’t try to be secure, but secure-ish. So there’s always room for us to acknowledge when you feel anxious because you can’t regulate what you don’t acknowledge. You can’t heal from parts of yourself that you’re denying exist. And so really worth, my take on worth is that it’s about opening up your internal world to yourself and being able to acknowledge whatever is painful, uncomfortable, antisocial, and admit that it’s there because you can only heal from what you acknowledge.

Kara: Yeah, I love all of that. I have like a substantive response, but I also kind of want to ask you what percentage of the content you see online about attachment do you think is accurate?

Dr Franco: Oh my gosh. That’s a great question. You know, I think I can’t knock all of the stuff on attachment theory because I think it’s helpful to learn relational skills, is how to be in a healthy relationship. But I think the fatal flaw that I see that I have gone through myself in a relationship is that a lot of attachment stuff is really focused on how you relate to people and not yourself. And so for me, I’ve tried to be so secure in relationships by co-regulating, regulating a partner, anchoring a partner, so much so that I became estranged from I’m actually uncomfortable. I’m activated and sometimes I don’t have the capacity to regulate you without losing touch with my own pain.

And so I just wish that attachment theory in the zeitgeist, first of all, started with is this technique or tool aligned with you and your capacity and where you’re at emotionally because it might not be and you might not be able to do this tool. And second of all, with so much less shaming. Clearly, there’s a hierarchy of attachment now and secure is at the top, but I think there should be no hierarchy. It’s not about having to be secure. It’s about just being able to admit who you are.

Kara: Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this from what you were saying. I mean, one is that it reminds me of the way people talk about nervous system regulation as if like you’re always supposed to be regulated and always calm when that’s not actually a regulated nervous system is a resilient nervous system. You actually need your survival reactions. You need your stress responses sometimes. You just want to be able to come back to baseline.

It’s sort of that’s and also, I mean, the other thing that comes up for me is that it I think it’s just like another way of avoiding the vulnerability of being imperfect and being a human. Like, I don’t want to be someone who’s anxiously avoiding and has to like ask their partner to accommodate that, right? I just want to be perfect. I just want to like be secure and never feel ashamed or never whatever.

And having a real relationship often involves, I mean, yes, of course, you can work on those patterns. And for sure, I used to be, I mean, I think before I knew any of this language, the work I was doing was like, oh, it’s my relationship with myself. The reason I’m so anxious about whether or not somebody texts me back is not because I have anxious attachment that can’t be changed. It’s because my thought is if they don’t text me back, it proves I’m going to die alone. So like, of course, I’m anxious, right? So I totally agree with you about it healing the relationship with yourself. And though I also see a lot of like, especially women who are really into like self-help and development, all of that, the perfectionism version of that, right? Which is like, I’m going to be always regulated. I’m going to be securely attached.

Dr Franco: Perfect mom.

Kara: I’ll never that way, I’ll never ever have to deal with the discomfort of like being vulnerable, being imperfect, needing someone else to accommodate me.

Dr Franco: Needing your help. I need your help. Saying I need your help. It reminds me of this quote from Marion Woodman. It was like, I think a poet and a psychologist and she said, it’s easier to try to be better than who you are than it is to try to be who you are.

Kara: Yeah, I think that describes like 80%, 90% of like the wellness industry and unfortunately, the rest of the coaching industry also. But I think that’s so interesting, that sort of secure as a like both the status symbol, but also kind of like a Myers Briggs. It’s just sort of like, here’s another like label or it’s like the less we are in touch with ourselves, the more we cling to these different like labels and categories, I think.

Dr Franco: Let’s get into that. You’re touching on something I go into in the book actually.

Kara: Oh, all right. Tell me about that.

Dr. Franco: Well, this is really from the psychedelics research.

Kara: Of course, how do we not get to the psychedelics yet?

Dr Franco: Well, there’s this researcher Robin Carhart Harris and he says that we develop a really rigid identity because life is unpredictable and chaotic and we cope with that by becoming rigid ourselves. And so now I have to be perfect. I have to be good. I have to have grace. I have to be self-made. And if any part of my internal world violates that, I’m going to push away my internal world.

And so what we can take away from like and what I guess psychedelics do or many different ways you can get here is to in a way let yourself not know yourself, let yourself not be who you’ve been so that you can then acknowledge feelings that violate the good mom, that violate the graceful woman. And so you can actually know all of who you are only when you allow yourself to not know who you are.

And so in a way, I think of worthiness as like, I can have high regard for myself, no matter who I am, no matter how I feel and not have to be perfectly secure to be worthy. I have to have the perfectly regulated nervous system to be worthy. I will always be in support and beside myself even when I’m low. And I really think of the most secure people as the people that can admit when they’re feeling insecure.

Kara: Yeah, I love that. I will say I have not done psychedelics. So for me it’s a thought work thing, but I think that…

Dr Franco: Sure. Many different avenues to get to the same place.

Kara: That’s the thing that I’ve never done. I guess I probably I think I did mushrooms in my 20s, but it’s not been my main path to self-development. But I think that it’s the same idea which is often when I’m coaching, I’m sort of like, okay, you’re starting down here, which is like, I hate myself. Nothing I do is good enough. Everything is terrible. I’m bad at everything. And yes, the first place I would love for you to get to is like, I am actually good at my job. I am actually whatever.

But what I really want you to get to is like outside of that hierarchy altogether, right? Like, who cares if you’re good at your job? Maybe you’re bad at your job. Who cares? Right? That you can still love yourself. You still care about yourself. It’s like, now when I get asked, how do you deal with failure? I’m sort of like, well, I can define what other people would count as failures for sure and tell you how to think about them, but that is not like a way that I talk to myself. That’s not how I think about it. My like self-acceptance is not dependent on I’m making this amount of money, I’m running this kind of business, I’m in this relationship, whatever.

And I feel like that’s the like, I don’t know if you listen to the podcast, Diabolical Lies. It’s a great podcast, you would love it. I know one of the hosts through like the podcasting world. But it’s like a cultural intellectual feminist podcast critique, but one of the things they’re always sort of joking but not joking about is that their motto is like, let women be awful, which I love. Because it’s just sort of about that same. You know, it’s like, yeah, okay, maybe you’re awful. Maybe you did something wrong. Maybe you’re bad at your job. Like men are allowed to do all those things and be all those things and then they don’t have to hate themselves. Like maybe you don’t have to either. Anyway, that was just my soapbox.

But so since we’ve talked about psychedelics, I’d love to talk about something else in your book, which is memory and how because I think if I say the idea of like, hey, we’re going to rewrite your memories, that sounds like something that you’d do on psychedelics. But that’s not the only way. So I’d love…

Dr Franco: Not the only way.

Kara: … tell us about that sort of the rewriting or changing your memories and how that relates to worth.

Dr Franco: Well, understanding worth as this kind of theory of self that continues to impact how we see everything to match that theory. It took me a year where I was like, how the heck do you change this theory? And then I came across a researcher who says, memories are the database of self-esteem. And so it dawned on me that theory was created from somewhere, and it was your memories. You have been rejected, you have been harmed, maybe you’ve been abused, maybe you’ve been bullied, maybe it’s the crap that society throws at you based on your identity that have showed you that you are inferior.

And knowing that, it can feel like we’re kind of doomed, right? Because memories like they already happened. But the thing about memories is that they are made to predict the future, not just record the past. So you can update the emotions of your memories each time you revisit them. And so there are powerful studies where people go into a negative memory where they have been harmed and intervene as their current adult self and tell their younger self, you’re safe, I’m here, nothing’s wrong with you. The way this person reacting to you has nothing to do with you.

And after they do that, after they activate the memory with all of their senses and they vividly picture themselves intervening in that memory, they then not only report higher self-esteem, but you see changes in the part of their brain that records the memory, which is the hippocampus.

Kara: That’s wild. I had known that memories are not like factually faithful recordings and that they like change or degrade every time you recall them, but it’s so interesting to think of working with them directly. Is that something that people can do on their own or do you need to like EMDR, you need like a practitioner to help you?

Dr Franco: Well, I have all the exercises to do so in the book straight from the science. I would say, if you feel like you’re overwhelmed, then probably do it with the help of someone else. I did a lot of them with my friends and they were really transformative experiences where I felt safe. But therapists really like my book, so maybe you do it with your therapist too. Either way, but the information is there in the book for all the different ways that we can reconsolidate our memories.

Kara: And do you think that works if like somebody hasn’t had a big trauma in their life, right? I feel like sometimes when I’m often when I’m coaching, especially like since women are socialized to kind of second guess themselves and like there’s a lot of sort of like, well, nothing really traumatic happened or it wasn’t that big a deal or you know, my sister was treated the same way and she feels fine or whatever. Do you think that this works even if you haven’t had a kind of capital T trauma that you’re reliving?

Dr Franco: Yeah. So if you think about like trauma, a psychologist, we would really used to define it as something life-threatening. But we’ve really evolved in terms of like what’s called little T traumas, which are just things you’ve been through that continue to negatively affect your sense of self and how you view the world. And really nobody can define that objectively. Like that depends on you, your temperament, your sensitivity, what has continued to stick with you. And these things can be quote unquote small, looking at them now, but especially when you’re a kid, we don’t realize how vulnerable we are as kids, how much we are taking in the environment. So there’s really no objective measure that something is significant enough to have an impact on you aside from the fact that it has an impact on you.

But I will say related to your question, not all of our memories are things that we remember. So there was a study of women that had undergone sexual assault, had even gone to the hospital after, and 1/3 of them didn’t remember that it happened. And so it’s very common that we don’t remember harmful experiences that we’ve been through.

Kara: Wait, they didn’t know it had happened or they couldn’t recall the memory of exactly what happened?

Dr Franco: They wouldn’t say they would have been assaulted. Yeah.

Kara: Whoa.

Dr Franco: Yeah. And so what’s happening in our brains is that there’s a part of our brain that records what happened. That’s the hippocampus. There’s another part of our brain that records what we felt, what the emotion was of that experience. And so there’s a study with people with a damaged hippocampus and they were shown a blue slide loud noise, blue slide loud noise, blue slide loud noise to the extent that when the blue slides showed, they would start sweating. The researchers could pick up on that sweat.

But when the researchers asked them, what color slide was associated with the loud noise? They would say, I don’t know. But when they would show them the blue slide, they would still sweat because the amygdala was still capturing the emotion of the experience. And our amygdala develops before our hippocampus. So when we are young, we are picking up on stressors in our environments non-stop that can really stay with us and continue to affect our sense of self into the future even if we don’t know those happened. Now, I think we can still reconsolidate those kind of memories in different ways.

Kara: Okay, so I want to hear about that because I actually have very few memories and I know some people think that’s a trauma outcome. I think for me, it’s more that I have a fantasia and I can’t see images in my mind. So like I can’t visualize if I close my eyes, I can’t pull up my husband’s face, like I can’t see images. And so I think that I don’t have so many memories because my brain is like not, maybe they’re stored and they can’t be read, but like there’s no, you know, the program that would create an image.

Dr Franco: Maybe there’s no DVD player.

Kara: There’s no DVD player. Yeah. So I only remember things if they’ve been like narrativized basically.

Dr Franco: Oh, fascinating.

Kara: Yeah, and there’s benefits. Like I think I’m not a very jealous person. I don’t hold a lot of resentments. Like partly because I thought work, partly maybe I don’t remember. But I’d love to hear how you can use this work because as you were talking previously, I was kind of thinking like, oh, maybe selfishly I’ll ask what you do if you don’t have any memories because, but I know also some people with traumas you say don’t have the memories to like pull back up.

Dr Franco: So for that part, I really relied on the work of Peter Levine and he was a psychologist that observed animals and how the gazelle would get caught by the tiger and might have broken free, but then the gazelle would go on and not have like a fight or flight response in the future. And so there wasn’t signs that this gazelle was traumatized. So why is it that these animals are getting traumatized all the time but not having a traumatic response? And what he noticed was that after the gazelle got caught by the tiger and freed themselves, it would shake and shake and shake and shake and shake. Almost like it shook out its trauma.

And so he theorized that trauma is just excess energy that gets stored in the body. And what research finds, this is rat studies, is that when you’re able to fight or flee after the trauma, you are less traumatized. It doesn’t impact you as much. But if you all you could do was shut down, all of that energy is stuck inside of you and that’s what predicts PTSD symptoms. It’s one of the strongest predictors is whether you had to shut down. And for those of us that have difficult childhoods, you can’t fight or flee. This is your parents. And so you probably had to shut it down or dissociate in some way and then that energy gets stuck inside of you. And so this is like if people are familiar with like somatic experiencing work, it’s about going to that sensation, that sensation, that body based residue of the memory.

Like I said, like memories, amygdala based memories will really manifest a sensation and focusing on that sensation and while you do tracking it as it, you’ll literally feel it move throughout your body. And so this is really about being in your body and attuning to the ways that the memory manifests in your body and allowing the time and space for that feeling, that sensation to move through you.

Kara: How do you access that if you don’t have the memory though? Like you don’t know what you’re not remembering.

Dr Franco: Yeah. So a good way to access it is when you’re triggered because what research is, what is hysterical is historical. And I know hysterical is not a great word that’s been used against women. But just for colloquial usage, right? When are you reacting more strongly than everyone else? When are you experiencing an extreme dip in your sense of self in reaction to something, right? When are you getting really reactive? Those are those moments that indicate that there’s probably some history there, some stored energy around this experience that’s getting triggered in this moment.

Kara: That’s interesting. I wonder how that interacts with also neurodiversity and some people being sort of just wired to be like more reactive, right? Or reactive to certain things that other people aren’t. But I think as I’m talking about this, it’s like there’s no downside because if you’re having that reactivity in the moment, somatically processing it is necessary anyway to help it move out.

Dr Franco: Yeah, but you’re right. There is research that finds that for people with autism in particular, quote unquote, like everyday experiences can be stored more acutely in the body because you just have heightened sensitivity in general.

Kara: Yeah, the more I’ve gotten familiar with like having more of a sense of when I am feeling more reactive, I think the better I’ve gotten about like having a little yell at the moment when I need to, right? Or like shaking or dancing or whatever is so helpful.

So obviously everybody should buy the book. When does the book come out?

Dr Franco: September 15th.

Kara: Okay. So everybody needs to pre-order. If you guys went through my book process with me, you know pre-orders matter. They are so, so important. We can’t just have one bestseller here. We need two. So you guys need to go pre-order this book. And it sounds like it is perfect for all of us little self-development nerds who want to do the exercises on ourselves and practice at home. Where else can people find you?

Dr Franco: I’m on Instagram at Dr. Marisa G. Franco, that’s DRMARISA G, F-R-A-N-C-O, and on my website, drmarisagfranco.com, you can download a list of practices that contribute to your worth, or reach out for speaking events on self-worth at work to get through uncertain times.

Kara: All right, everyone, go pre-order the book. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s always good to see you.

Dr Franco: Oh, so good to see you. Thank you so much for having me.