The More You Try to Be Secure, the Less Secure You Are: Secure Means Being Able to Admit You're Not
Secure isn't the absence of anxiety, avoidance and jealousy — it's being a safe container for those feelings. Pushing the insecure parts away means re-enacting, on yourself, the criticism and neglect that made you insecure in the first place.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Pretending to be secure makes you less secure
Franco has observed a popular piece of advice: if you're anxious because someone hasn't texted back, ‘act like a secure person’ and don't be anxious. Her judgment is that this causes a second injury — ‘not only do I feel anxious, now I feel ashamed of being anxious’. It amounts to re-enacting on yourself the criticism, shame and neglect that made you insecure in the first place. Her alternative is to first acknowledge: anxiety is allowed, avoidance is allowed, because ‘we can only heal the parts of ourselves we're willing to acknowledge’.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoSecure people are the ones who can most easily admit they're insecure
Sarah draws a key distinction: insecure attachment is a pattern, whereas anxiety, security and insecurity are emotional states — the two can't be equated. From this Franco derives the ‘security paradox’ — the most secure people are the ones most able to admit and acknowledge that they're insecure. So security doesn't depend on what emotions you feel, but on how you respond to them: the anxious type catastrophises (‘the fact that I feel this means I'm too much, there's something wrong with me’), the avoidant type pushes it away and diverts, and the secure response is ‘it's okay that I'm anxious, what do I need’. She defines worth as ‘treating your internal world as if it matters’.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoFeel first, heal second, act last
Franco offers a three-step sequence you can use in the moment: feel, heal, do. She gives her own example — a friendship she cared about a lot, which she actively maintained but experienced as one-sided; the other person cancelled a meetup because of an injury. Of course she wanted to feel only understanding, but what she actually felt was rejection. It was only because she practises ‘scanning through the day with my hand, seeing where the emotional energy lands’ that she noticed the feeling. She first sat with it and named it, then told herself ‘I am loved, I am safe’, and only then replied to the other person, ‘take care of yourself’. If you skip that step and go straight to the nice words, the negative emotion accumulates and eventually distorts the relationship.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoMemory is self-esteem's database, and it can be rewritten
Franco's core mechanism: memory doesn't just record the past, it predicts the future — ‘I've been abandoned in the past. I think it will happen again.’ That is the attachment pattern. She cites memory reconsolidation theory: every time you revisit a memory, you can change that memory's emotional valence. The method is to go back to the scene of being picked up late or abandoned by your parents, and have your adult self tell your childhood self ‘I'm here, you're safe, this doesn't mean there's anything negative about you’. Research shows that doing this not only reduces trauma symptoms and raises self-esteem, but also produces changes in the hippocampus. Sarah uses the metaphor of a ‘blueprint’: this is pulling up the original blueprint and re-editing it.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoYour insecurity is actually trying to protect you
Why is rewriting the blueprint a precondition? Franco's explanation: for an anxious type who expects to be abandoned, letting your guard down, letting yourself feel good, actually receiving the other person's love, is threatening — because if you really do get abandoned, you'll be crushed even more thoroughly. So ‘our insecurities are really trying to protect us’. This also explains why simply telling someone to ‘act more secure’ often doesn't work: without dealing with the memory first, security itself is a threat. Sarah adds: some people are in fact already in a safer environment, but the old blueprint keeps them from seeing it.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoFinding secure relationships is about initiating and screening
Franco gives two things. The first is initiation: people who believe friendships happen naturally are lonelier long-term, because they don't put in the effort; you have to repeatedly show up in front of the same group of people, using the mere exposure effect (familiarity breeds liking) — for example, don't just go to one happy hour, sign up for a mothers' group. At the same time you have to overcome covert avoidance — being there in body but not in mind, scrolling your phone or only talking to people you already know. The second is discernment: ask yourself what your nervous system feels like around this person, whether you're calm, whether there's reciprocity, whether your values are close, whether the other person genuinely wants you to succeed. She also mentions mutuality: holding your reality and my reality at the same time.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoReflective functioning determines whether attachment gets passed to your child
Sarah introduces reflective functioning: the capacity to notice and be curious about your own and others' internal states. She says research shows that if you're insecurely attached, your child has a 70% chance of having the same style; and among the portion who don't pass it on, one predictor is how high their reflective functioning is. Franco sees this as consistent with the mechanism described earlier — only once you can perceive your own internal world do you have the spare capacity to recognise another person's world, because you're less in a threatened state.
— Dr. Sarah Bren‘I was perfectly agreeable’ can be a signal of numbness
Franco interviewed a numb interviewee and asked what the signs of numbness were; the answer was ‘I was perfectly agreeable’. This woman saved her dark side for her child — because a child won't leave, she no longer had to stay agreeable to maintain the connection; she even once locked her daughter out of the house, and feels deep shame about it. From this Franco rewrote her own definition of a good person: a good person isn't someone who never feels negative emotions, but someone who allows themselves to feel them — otherwise the emotions accumulate and eventually hijack you at some moment, hurting people more vulnerable than you. She also mentions that internalisers turn their emotions on themselves, showing up as depression and persistent anxiety.
— Dr. Marisa G. FrancoYour child erupting lava at you is healthy
Sarah uses the ‘lava’ metaphor: we're most likely to lose our temper at the safest person, the one least likely to abandon us — for parents that's often the child, and children do the same thing to us (restraint collapse). But the key difference between the two is asymmetry: it's healthy for a child to erupt lava at a parent, and the parent needs to be able to recognise it as ‘this is lava’ without absorbing it into their body; conversely, when a parent erupts lava at a child, the child doesn't have the cognitive capacity to say ‘this is mom's lava’. So occasional is fine; becoming a pattern damages the attachment relationship.
— Dr. Sarah BrenIn their own words · checked verbatim
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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco8:12
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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco10:12
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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco20:19
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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco23:20
if we truly want to be good people, good goodish 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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco33:25
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. Marisa G. Franco41:32
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.
Dr. Marisa G. Franco42:32
Figures
| Probability of insecure attachment being passed to a child | 70% | 29:25 |
Glossary
- secureish
- A word Franco coined for the state of not pursuing perfect security but allowing your own insecurity to exist.
- self-verification theory
- People seek out others who confirm their existing self-concept, even when that concept is negative.
- memory reconsolidation
- Every time a memory is revisited its emotional valence can be changed; this is the method for rewriting the attachment blueprint.
- covert avoidance
- Showing up in body but not in mind — scrolling your phone or only talking to people you already know.
- mere exposure effect
- People tend to like those they're familiar with, so repeatedly showing up in the same setting makes connection easier.
- reflective functioning
- The capacity to notice and be curious about your own and others' internal states; predicts whether attachment gets passed on.
How to listen
Parents who already have a foundation in attachment theory but ‘know what to do and still can't do it’; and anyone who wants to understand why they keep falling into old patterns in relationships.
17:00-19:20 is an ad for the host's own therapy clinic; skippable.