How to Fix Our Loneliness with Dr. Marisa G. Franco
February 14, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Well, hello everyone. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today we’re talking about friendship, loneliness, how the hell we do friendship, how we find friends, make friends, and keep friends. And before we introduce our guest, I want to talk to you about why I am obsessed with her and why I think this is just the perfect time and place to talk about loneliness and friendship.
Glennon Doyle:
Last night I got back from a trip. Half the people on this friend’s trip are on this podcast. Okay? So Abby’s sister and then a few other friends. We went away together for friend time. We got back last night. This is the second trip that this group has done together; we went away last year. When we went away last year together, someone on that trip mentioned some information from her life about eating disorders and it threw me into a tailspin. After that is when I went into my deep therapy for anorexia. This trip was with that group.
Glennon Doyle:
During my first therapy meeting, the therapist looked at me and said, “So how is how you deal with food the same as how you deal with people?” And so I said, “Oh, come the fuck on.” What we started to understand together is I avoided food and I avoided people, that I restrict myself from food and I restricted myself from friendship, that just like food, I decided there was a few safe foods and a few safe people, my family, and then everybody else was unsafe and I kept them away. So while I am working on my food avoidance proclivities, I am also working on my people avoidance. I have come to understand that I am not some kind of different alien human being who does not need friendship, sex, or food, that I just wasn’t doing it the way other people were doing it, which made it so important to them. Okay?
Glennon Doyle:
Enter my friendship tutor, who doesn’t know that she’s my friendship tutor, but who when I read her book, I have actually a 10-page book report on the book, who has walked me through my first experiences with friendship, who I think has helped me keep them so far: Dr. Marisa G. Franco is a psychologist, international speaker and New York Times bestselling author, known for digesting and communicating science in ways that change people’s lives, which is so true for me. She works as a professor at the University of Maryland and authored the New York Times Bestseller, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends. And I just want to tell you, Dr. Franco, that if this book can work for me, there’s no one it cannot work for. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Wow, that was so beautiful. Thank you so much for having me.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my goodness. We’re going to do two episodes on friendship because it feels so hard. So I would love if we could to talk in this episode about why we’re lonely and how our attachment styles might keep us lonely, and maybe how to find friends and make them. And then maybe we can in the second episode talk about how to keep and deepen those friendships.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
That sounds great to me.
Amanda Doyle:
Dr. Franco, can we start first for the non-believers, like Glennon used to be, why do friendships matter? What is their power and why do we need them even if we think we don’t?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So first I’ll start with why connection matters in general, and then I’ll go into friendship specifically. It’s interesting that we focus so much when it comes to health on things like diet and exercise, but actually research finds that our social connections predict how long we live, even more so than our diet, even more so than how much we’re exercising. That loneliness, for example, is as toxic for our bodies as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. So we need connection. We need connection to be functioning well, to be functioning optimally. Fundamentally, being lonely is a chronic stress state. Your body’s undergoing more inflammation. Your sleep is poor because you’re waking up to kind of scan for threats at any given time. Loneliness doesn’t just change how you feel, it changes how you perceive the world. Where you perceive that people are rejecting you even when they’re not, and so it makes you want to withdraw. And it sort of continues the self-reinforcing process of loneliness in a really sad way. One of my students, Chris, he was like, “It’s like an autoimmune disease, loneliness. It triggers all of these thoughts and feelings that perpetuates itself.”
Dr. Marisa Franco:
But then when I think about the importance of friendship in particular, I think about the ways that each person brings out a different side of ourselves. And so to know ourselves fully, we need to interact with different people who bring up different parts of us.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Abby, I happen to know that you enjoy soccer, so you might have to be around someone else who has the sort of depth of understanding of soccer that you might enjoy to really be able to have a deeper conversation about it, for example.
Abby Wambach:
That’s Glennon. Glennon has the deep knowledge of the game.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. And so that’s why research has identified that there’s actually three different types of loneliness. I think a lot of the times we think we only have this desire for these deep, intimate relationships, and that is one type of loneliness called intimate loneliness. But there’s also relational loneliness, which is like we want someone as close to us as a friend, and if we don’t have that, we still feel lonely, even if we have deep intimacy.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And there’s also collective loneliness, which is our desire for a group working toward a common goal. And so if we’re not part of, I don’t know, a place of worship, a sort of league, volunteering group, we tend to be lonely for that collective that we’re a part of. And so I think we’ve always needed an entire community to feel whole, but we’ve begun to bury that truth with our narratives of just finding one person to complete you and that’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
And then that one person, it’s too much. I feel like I’m one of those Macy’s Day parade balloons, and for too long it’s been like Sister and Abby trying to hold on to the balloon. It’s too freaking … they’re like being swept off the ground every time the wind comes. And now I feel like I’m trying to bring on more … I mean, this is probably such a terrible … Nobody wants to be a balloon holder, but I’m just saying-
Abby Wambach:
I do. I want to hold your balloon.
Glennon Doyle:
… it feels like there’s so many more people and I feel more tethered. When I am making these connections, I feel more tethered to the earth.
Abby Wambach:
I think that friendship is that though. I want to hold the balloon of all of my friends. I think that that is a really good sign of friendship.
Amanda Doyle:
And your research, Dr. Franco, not only is it less pressure on the person, you said that if in partnerships where there’s friendships outside of the partnership, it actually makes you more resilient in it.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Absolutely.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s fascinating too.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. For example, if you get into conflict with your spouse, all of a sudden your release of the stress hormone cortisol is off unless you have quality connection outside that marriage. Or if I make a friend, not only do I become less depressed, my spouse is less likely to be depressed. Or for women in particular who tend to have closer friends, for example, they’re more resilient in heterosexual marriages when they have quality connection outside of that marriage.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And what we see from the research is that if you only are so focused on one person, what happens in that relationship just has such a strong impact on your health and wellbeing. Whereas if you have those tethers outside of that relationship, you’re able to stay grounded even when there’s ups and downs in that relationship, which fundamentally is a resource for your relationship, because now you can come back to that relationship like, “I’m not going to come at you in fight or flight mode because I’m able to sort of center from some of the stress we’ve been experiencing and try to approach you in a gentler and kinder way because I’m more resourced.”
Glennon Doyle:
And approaching friendship like a science experiment, which is how I have to do it right now because none of it’s intuitive to me right now, yet. So that weekend that I went away a year ago with these people, and I was terrified to go, I was like, “What are we doing? Why are we going on this women’s trip?” But I deeply respected the few women that were going, and I just thought, “Oh, we’ll try it.”
Glennon Doyle:
Listening to one of the women talk about her life with food switched something in me that reading a million books, interviewing a million people about these very issues didn’t do. When I read in your book that friendships expose us to new ways of being in the world, like they show us another life is possible, that is what it is. And that’s why you kind of have to pick people that you want to be like, right?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
I think so. I mean, there’s this theory called inclusion of others of the self, which is when we get close to people, we include them in our sense of ourselves. So if we are befriending people we want to be like, it’s like an expansion of ourselves towards becoming the type of person that we want to become.
Glennon Doyle:
Do you think that culture hides the power of friendship from us? I mean, certainly there’s no hiding of romantic. Since we’re born, the world tells us the most important thing in the world is a romantic relationship. One of the reasons I’m so interested in friendship right now is because I’m so into anything that capitalism has hidden from me, I feel like that’s probably the answer.
Amanda Doyle:
I love this.
Glennon Doyle:
Right? Like going towards, oh, rest. If I’m not supposed to have it, that’s probably the answer. Love, friends, anything that doesn’t make me productive, I feel like that’s probably where the joy is. Is it because friendship’s hard to capitalize on? Like marriage and dating and engagement rings, once you get into a romantic relationship, you’re basically financially fucked for the rest of your life. Everything is … But friendship is outside of things you have to buy?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Ooh, that is such an original thought. I’ve never thought of friendship as anti-capitalist, but I love thinking about it that way. I will say some historians have sort of speculated that basically friendship used to be valued more. In some ways, people love their friends more deeply than their spouse. The spouse was a practical relationship; it was economical, it was for our reputation. And around in early 1800s, the genders were considered so distinct that you could only have this deep intimacy with people that are from your gender. So friends were writing love letters and carving their names into trees and experiencing all the intimacy that we now consider traditional for a romantic partnership.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
I think one of the reasons things changed is that as women developed more rights and could own property and open up a credit card and get a job, they weren’t forced and almost coerced into marriage in the same way. And if friendship is a significant and valuable and viable relationship that is equal, what if all these women turn towards their friends? Would that destroy their marriage?
Amanda Doyle:
Disaster!
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. And so in some ways, it’s this devaluing process that allows us to continue to be a part, as women, in the traditional institution when there’s no longer the same economic and structural incentive. Now it’s this very psychological incentive like, “You don’t matter; you don’t have any love without this; you’re not a worthy person unless you enter into this type of partnership.”
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Abby Wambach:
I also want to know about where we are right now in terms of loneliness. Are people lonelier than ever? And if so, why?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So research finds that it’s about 20 to 45% of us are lonely. And very sadly, the youngest generations are the most lonely. It used to be that they were the least. So Gen Z in particular, I’m teaching them right now and I’m concerned. Also, the rates of mental health issues are like 50% of people their age have mental health issues.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And so if we look back into history, it kind of started in the 1950s that our social connections started to go down, as people started to use televisions. Before then we spent our leisure time with other people and all of a sudden people were spending their leisure time indoors. It triggered this sloth state where it’s like, “I’m watching TV; I don’t feel like doing anything else.” And it takes energy to reach out to and interact with people.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
In the book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, he looks at all the different factors that predict disengagement from your community, and he finds television is the most powerful one. But this was in the ’90s; this book came out in the ’90s. Now imagine we have added smartphones because around 2012, loneliness began to spike a lot more. And what was happening at that time was that the smartphone became more popular. And it’s complex and it’s complicated; I don’t want to simplify things because there’s this theory called displacement theory, which is basically the idea that when we use our phones and social media to displace in-person interaction, like I’m just scrolling on TikTok all night, we’re a lot more lonely. But if we use it to facilitate in-person interaction by like, “I see your Instagram post, it makes me realize I want to reach out to you. Let’s get coffee.” Or I’m on Facebook so I know what events are happening and I go to those events, we’re actually less lonely than people that are not using technology.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
But the problem is these apps were basically built for isolation, to keep us on them. Maybe like Marco Polo or WhatsApp, but most of these apps were not built in ways to get us off of them. And if we use them to facilitate in-person interaction, it gets us off the app.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s one of the reasons I figured out I have to figure out friendship because I had this one birthday where I was on social media and I logged on, and of course there were a million birthday messages because I have a lot of followers and I got four texts from my people in my family, but no friends. And that was my doing. I had this like, I’ll put all my energy into the intense little teeny circle of my family and then disperse it at this other level of social media, but I didn’t have that middle community. And I was like, by the time I’m 50, I want to know that there’s going to be a group of women who, of course I’m going to know their birthdays, they’re going to know mine, whatever; you show up on those days. But I guess I needed to use social media to plan things instead of to avoid things.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
I’ve heard you say that one of our issues is that we only have this one word, friend, to refer to everyone we know who isn’t our partner. And I’ve even heard people say things like, “I can’t stand my friend who’s always putting me down,” or “My best friend is so terrible to me.” Are we using the word friend correctly, and is that part of our problem? Are those people actually our friends and are we having a vocabulary problem?
Glennon Doyle:
What is a friend?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. I think we are having a problem. It’s both a definitional problem and a marketing problem. I think friendship has a huge marketing problem and that we think of it as happy hour every month rather than you can do everything you do with a spouse, with a friend, aside from sex.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So my definition of friendship, this came from, I went to a friend’s wedding and one of my close friends, her husband was there and he was talking about for his bachelor party, half of his friends had canceled last minute so everyone had to pay double the price and half the people didn’t come. And he was kind of talking about his friend who lived in his neighborhood, who he can never get in touch with and never reaches out to him. And I was just thinking, that is not a good friend. That is maybe good company. Good company is someone whose company you enjoy and you like them as a person, but a good friend is “I’m committed to you. I’m invested in you. I try to follow through with what I say, to show up in your times of need, to show up in your times of joy.” It’s intentional and it requires effort. Just because we like each other doesn’t mean we’re friends, because we haven’t necessarily made that commitment and that investment in each other.
Glennon Doyle:
Remember when Luvvie said she uses the word friend more carefully than she used to because she doesn’t say friend until it’s someone who that she wants to be responsible for in life. I remember her saying that and being like, “Well, that’s why I don’t have any friends.” I make a joke about that, but that is real. And I think it speaks to what your book does and what your work does, which I find very tricky, which is that it’s about friendship, like how can I make a connection with another person? But all of your work is infused with this trickery, which is about connection to self. Because I can’t do any of this shit in your book, Dr. Franco, until I figure out my connection to self first. That’s what I think is true. For example, I can’t be authentic until I figure out what my defense mechanisms are. So every time I try to use one of your strategies, I have to go back three things and work on my own shit.
Glennon Doyle:
So my question is, this has to do with attachment style. P.S. this should be the new like when you’re in a bar or in your whatever and you’re like, “What’s your sign?” It should be like, “What’s your style?” Everybody should have to wear a name tag with their attachment style on it. This is how we should find each other or avoid each other. Okay? Can you talk to us about attachment and how if we knew what our attachment styles were about ourselves and others, it might help us be compassionate with ourselves and each other, and what an attachment style is and how we can use it to be less lonely?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. I love just the way that you describe it because I think you described it in such an empowering way. Our attachment style is basically the sum total of our earlier relationships that have created within us this template for how we assume people will treat us. And that template becomes more true than the truth because most of friendship is ambiguous; we don’t actually know what’s going on. So whatever our template is telling us and reaching for in light of this ambiguity is the ways that friendship actually impacts us.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So you have these securely attached people. They have this history of healthier, loving, trustworthy relationships, and they are so good at friendship. They’re initiating more friendships, they’re having less conflict. When they do, they’re working through it better. They assume their friends will like them, they trust other people, but they also are not Pollyanna about it. They’ll sort of adjust their expectations based off of the feedback they get in real time. They start with optimism, but then adjust.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And so these secure people have the secure relationship with themselves because, fundamentally, one of the ways that our attachment harms us is that our attachment style is a breakdown in our relationship with our emotions, not just other people. For example, anxiously-attached people, they always fear other people are going to abandon them and reject them. And so what happens in their friendship is that they build intimacy very quickly as a sign that you won’t reject me, but then it sort of blows up because it doesn’t have much of a foundation or because they tend to see rejection when it’s not there. Even in their brain, you can see that their amygdala is reacting more strongly to threat than the other attachment styles. And that they tend to experience more threat at the neural level in response to their relationships than other attachment styles.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And so what you tend to see with these anxiously-attached people is that they tend to sacrifice themselves to be in relationship with other people because they feel like they need to, otherwise people will leave them. And so when it comes to friendship, they’re sort of marked by high effort, but low reward. They’re putting in so much, but yet their relationships are blowing up and they’re so fragile and they don’t always know or understand why or what are the sort of behaviors that are coming out in your friendships that may influence them in this way.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And then you have avoidantly-attached people who basically don’t trust anyone. And so they’re kind of taking themselves out of the game of friendship. They’re not initiating, they’re ghosting, they’re withdrawing from people. There’s not a lot of vulnerability in their connections. People that are close to them feel like they’re kind of an enigma. It’s kind of low effort and low reward. They tend to focus more on work than relationships and they tend to enjoy their friendships less. And so you’ll see with avoidantly-attached people, either they have few friends or they have friends, but it tends to be very shallow kind of party friends.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And I wanted to go back to my point about your attachment style’s a breakdown in relationships, but it’s also a breakdown in internal relationship to your own emotions because the insecurely attached people in some ways, this sounds like kind of victim blaming, so I’ll say it and then try to backtrack it a little bit, but they’re in some ways using other people as a tool to regulate their emotions because they haven’t learned to do that for themselves internally.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So anxiously-attached people, it’s like “I’m constantly feeling this threat, I don’t know how to soothe it, so now I have to control you. Now I have to tell you, you need to show up for me in this moment. Now I have to take away your sense of agency and try to force you to reassure me in the ways that I need.” And the avoidantly-attached person, so threatened, so I’m trying to handle those feelings of threat and lack of safety by now, that shows up in my relationships as me pushing you away all the time and keeping you at a distance all the time.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And so I think becoming secure is like it’s about how we relate to our relationships, but it’s also like we start to relate to our own emotions in more validating and loving ways so we’re able to let other people be full people rather than sometimes needing to use them in this way that where we’re using them to soothe our own emotional world.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So all right, because the attachment is your gut feeling about what’s going on. Right? It’s your interpretation of what’s happening. It’s-
Amanda Doyle:
My favorite understanding of it, it’s a series of predictions. The way you say it’s a series of predictions of like, “Well, this is what’s going to be happening. That’s what you’re doing. This is what’s next.”
Glennon Doyle:
Right. And so you seek what you shall find. What you seek, you find. So it becomes reality. Pod squads, this is just what blows my mind, so let’s just stay here for a minute. Let’s take a specific thing. Your friend doesn’t call you back. You make a friendship, you take the leap, your friend doesn’t call you back. A secure-attached person thinks, “Oh my friend’s probably busy.” Right? Is that what a securely-attachment …
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Mm-hmm.
Glennon Doyle:
An anxious person thinks, “My friend hates me and I have to fix it.” And an avoidant person thinks, “I hate my friend.”
Dr. Marisa Franco:
That’s great.
Amanda Doyle:
I knew that person wasn’t a real friend! You said that we act in ways that fulfill the prophecy of our greatest fears.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
So what’s the greatest fear of an avoidant person and an anxious person?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah. The anxious is that you’re going to abandon me. The avoidant is that you’re going to hurt me. It’s like if I let you in, you’re going to do something to harm me. Both of them have trouble feeling safety. I think both of them really share this underlying fear of rejection. For anxious people, it’s on the surface more. For avoidant people, it’s like repressed. It’s like, “I’m not actually scared of you rejecting me, I just don’t like you in the first place.” There’s this extra defense mechanism that happens with the avoidantly-attached.
Amanda Doyle:
Hmm. So avoidant manifests the same fear but with aloofness, and anxious manifests the same fear but with clinginess.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Exactly. It’s like two different strategies. And I think it’s important to mention, because I don’t want to end on a victim blaming note, that these are coping strategies. Hello? We developed them to cope with something. It was an effective way of coping. If you’re with someone who you cannot trust fundamentally, it is adaptive to be avoidant. It is adaptive to withdraw from them. The issue is not that you have this coping mechanism, the issue is that you use it indiscriminately. So you don’t notice that sometimes people will accept you or sometimes people are safe.
Glennon Doyle:
So some signs you might be avoidant. Ghosters.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Ghosting is my best strategy. So is ghosting avoidant?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yes. Yeah, ghosting’s linked to avoidance.
Glennon Doyle:
I have a new friend. You and she have been my friendship tutors. And early on in our friendship, she understood my avoidant situation before I did. And she said to me one day, “I want to make sure that you just don’t leave in our relationship, that you just don’t leave.” And I went home with Abby and was like, “Did you hear that shit? I can’t promise that. I can’t promise that I’m not going to leave.” And Abby said, “She didn’t say, ‘Just don’t leave.’ She said, ‘Don’t just leave.’ Meaning don’t just leave without trying something else first.'”
Glennon Doyle:
So would it be an avoidant strategy to, when a conflict comes up in a friendship, like somebody’s hurt my feelings, somebody’s done something, an avoidant person just leaves? Instead of trying something else first, an avoidant person is out of there. What would an anxious person do? For people who are listening, how do they find themselves in this? How do they know who they are in the friendship?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
So the anxious person probably thinks “It’s my fault. It’s my fault that there’s a problem. Let me stay engaged because it’s my fault.” And they continue on in the relationship even though they feel uncomfortable in it and they don’t address the problem until they start to boil over or there’s passive aggressiveness that starts to come out. And so at some point there’s like this volatility that happens where their friend might be like, “What happened? Why are you so upset? I didn’t even know anything was going on or happening.” The avoidant is kind of just ghosting earlier on. Avoidant is linked to being more likely to end friendships and in these indirect ways like ghosting. That anxious is holding on for dear life. Sometimes we do see anxious people use avoidant strategies too, where if anxious people feel they’re being rejected, they kind of might try to reject first too.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
The secure person, first of all, they’re not assuming something’s wrong until they have enough evidence that something’s wrong. And this was my hardest thing when it comes to attachment, like conflict in friendship is definitely the piece that makes me feel most anxious because I felt like it’s my responsibility to get over it, and if I’m not getting over it, that’s me not being a good friend. And the growth that I experienced in Platonic was just reading about how people that address these issues with their friends, they have more intimacy. They have more closeness.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
There’s this psychoanalyst, Virginia Goldner, who talks about how you could have flaccid safety which is like, “We’re close because we pretend there’s no problems.” Or you could have dynamic safety which is like, “We’re close because we rupture and we repair and we rupture and we repair. And whenever there’s a rupture, we know that we can repair.” And so literally I needed to read all this research that said, people that have open impacted conflict have more intimacy in their relationships. And I was like, okay, if the research says, I guess I will try to actually address the problem with my friend, even though I’m so scared because I think she’s just going to reject me or be mad at me for it.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And that’s the other problem of the anxiously-attached people, right? They confuse addressing conflict and how you address conflict. So often an anxiously-attached person, they’ll address the conflict, but it’s boiled over so much that they’re at the point of attack and it’s like antagonistic fight or flight. “You’re a bad friend; how could you do this to me?” And then their friends pull away and they’re like, “Oh, I guess I can’t address conflict. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess I have to pretend that I have no needs and keep sacrificing in my relationships.”
Dr. Marisa Franco:
But not knowing that, it’s not the fact that you brought it up, it’s how you brought it up. Because securely-attached people, they’ll use conflict as an act of love and reconciliation. It’ll look like “I want to be close to you, and so I want to bring this thing up because I don’t want it to pull us apart because you’re so important to me. And this is how I felt in this situation, but I also want to understand what was going on for you? What were you feeling in this moment? How can we navigate this in the future so that we can stay close?” That’s what conflict looks like for more securely-attached people.
Abby Wambach:
How do we get this way? As a caregiver of children, I’m trying to see their attachment styles and I’m like, are these kids just born this way? Am I making them this way? Is it genetic? I need to know because I feel very confused not just dealing with my own attachment styles, but looking to my children as their caregivers.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
It’s complicated. I think a lot of the attachment research has traditionally focused on early caregiving relationships, but now we see that there is a genetic component to it. We’ve also seen that secure attachment has been decreasing over time. And so I think that technology use honestly plays a role because you’re not getting that time alone with yourself to develop that ability to regulate your emotions. That time to feel is part of what keeps you secure. But in caregivers that foster more security, we tend to see a lot of responsiveness, which means if your kid has a need, you try to meet it instead of being like, “Well, why do you have this need?” Or, “You shouldn’t cry or you shouldn’t be sad.” You don’t try to dismiss; you kind of treat your kid like you would another adult with needs. Instead of trying to suppress them in your kid, you encourage your kids’ emotional expression. You validate their emotions.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Those sorts of behaviors that, in terms of the ways that parents treat their kids, whereas attachment gets transmitted intergenerationally because someone who is anxiously-attached, for example, might take their kids actions as an affront to them and then are reacting from a triggered space. “My kid needs to distance themselves and that’s an attack on me, and so I’m going to sort of escalate this.” Whereas the more securely-attached parent can deescalate with the kid and try to be the source of emotional regulation for the kid, but that requires them to be regulated themselves.
Glennon Doyle:
And then there’s this pattern, you said, the rich get richer; that’s how I’ve always thought about attachment. If you are a secure person who’s just always walked around believing that people are good and that they’re going to like you and that most people can be trusted, then you go into relationships like that, and then guess what? People like you and they trust you. Because when people feel trusted and liked, they like you. And so then your entire life is like you’re a young white man and you just keep investing money over and over again, and then it keeps growing. You’re like, “What? Like it’s hard?”
Glennon Doyle:
But if you’re an avoidant person and you go into things thinking, “I can’t trust them, I’m going to get hurt,” then they feel that energetically. They don’t feel trusted, so they become more distant. So it’s constantly your whole life a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it’s not just your caregivers, it’s like the relationships you choose later because of that first seed of what you believed about the world.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Exactly. Exactly. Securely-attached people, it’s not just that they relate to themselves well, they also then choose relationships that foster further security in them. Secure people will not choose to be in a relationship that someone who’s anxiously-attached might tolerate because they think they have to. Whereas a secure person, if you’re not treating me in ways that align with how I feel about myself, I’m going to go find someone that will.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And you’re right that our attachment, we don’t recognize the ways that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So one of the tips that I share for making friends, and this comes from the securely-attached, is that they assume that people like them. Trying to remember to make that assumption, so that when you’re deciding, “Should I reach out to this person?” and part of you is like, “Oh my God, they’re going to reject me and think I’m weird,” you have another voice that says, “What if they accept me? What if they might like me?” Right?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And that, according to the research, when people are told to make this assumption when they go into a group, even when this is false, it’s no evidence that you’re going to go into this group and be liked, they actually become warmer and friendlier and more open toward other people. Whereas we see that people that are rejection-sensitive, which is a quality of anxious-attachment where you see rejection when it’s not there, when someone, for example, is maybe a little bit more tired than usual, they tend to respond by being cold and withdrawn. These people that always fear rejection are consistently rejecting other people and not realizing it, and then they’re getting rejected back. And that’s why I think understanding attachment style is so important, not so that we can be like, “Well, I guess I’m doomed and good for all those people that had those healthy relationships,” but so that we can be like, “Oh, I didn’t realize how my fears were manifesting in how I treat other people, and that I can treat other people differently and get a different result. It’s not hopeless for me.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s so good.
Amanda Doyle:
And in fact, there’s a likability fallacy, right? If you’re thinking, “Well, what she’s saying is probably true for most people, but not for me, people don’t like me,” it’s true that we underestimate that people will like us. Across the board.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yes. So this is called the liking gap. It’s this research where strangers interact, afterward they’re asked, “Okay, how much do you like them? How much do you think they like you?” And so in a bunch of different settings, in the lab and the community center, researchers have found that we underestimate how liked we are by other people. And not only that, the people that are most critical of themselves, their liking gap is most pronounced. What that means is you might think that the ways that you are so critical for yourself are the truth, but they’re distorting the truth even more. People like you even more if you’re very self-critical of yourself than you think.
Glennon Doyle:
And that comes to the self thing.
Glennon Doyle:
So if I go into being an avoidant person, I was an addict for a very, very long time, and I can look at alcohol and food and all the things as avoidance of self. I suppose they could also be things anxious people would use to numb self.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, regulate.
Glennon Doyle:
When I’m reading your work and when I’m reading about attachment, and I think I have to have a connection to myself. When I was on this weekend, one of my friends needed tampons, so I remembered “She needs this.” And then I was in my room and I was like, “I’m going to bring her this.” And I told Abby, when I came back, I was walking to a room and I was saying to myself, “I am a thoughtful person who does thoughtful things.”
Abby Wambach:
I’m a thoughtful friend who does thoughtful-
Glennon Doyle:
“I’m a thoughtful friend who does thoughtful things.” And it actually helped me. I was like, “Look at me. I am doing a thing a friend would do.” Is that batshit crazy? And is this internal talking to yourself like a friend and liking yourself … Because if we think everybody doesn’t like us and that makes people not like us, then would liking ourselves, believing we’re likable really inside, not just acting like it, would that make friendship easier? And how do we like ourselves more and be more connected with ourselves and not avoid ourselves?
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yes. Yeah. So there is this theory called self-verification theory, which is the idea that we look for people that verify our sense of self, whether positive or negative. So people that have a more negative sense of themselves, they actually prefer to interact with people who see them more negatively because they feel more understood, because they don’t feel like an imposter, because they don’t feel manipulated. If someone is like, “I love you so much,” and you don’t feel lovable, you’re like, “You’re lying to me.”
Glennon Doyle:
Or you’re stupid.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
Yeah, you’re stupid. Or it’s only a matter of time till you find out the truth, and I don’t want to be in this relationship where I feel like I need to play pretend. So even though all of us want to be loved, if we don’t love ourselves, we can’t believe that we’re loved, it becomes very, very hard. And so that’s why I think this is an idea for a next book, that the work on the self is really required to build those healthy relationships with other people because we need to work on ourselves so we could actually receive the healthiness and the love that’s out there.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And like I said I say in Platonic, avoidant people, when people are loving toward them, they think there’s an ulterior motive. “They’re trying to get something out of me.” Versus secure people who are like, “This is an act of love; now I feel closer to you,” the avoidant is like, “I feel threatened by you because you’re trying to get close to me so that you can harm me more.”
Glennon Doyle:
And that comes from lack of self-love and self-esteem because “You must have an ulterior motive since I’m no good.” If I were secure, I would think, “Of course this person wants to be good to me because I am good. Why wouldn’t they?”
Amanda Doyle:
That was the part of your book that blew my mind the most. Those two things that if over time, if you’re being in a state of self-protection by not sharing yourself, it actually becomes self-harm because your biggest resources for getting through things is your ability to connect with people. So the self-protection turning into self-harm.
Amanda Doyle:
And then the second piece that goes exactly to what you were just saying, Dr. Franco, if you have this imposter thing, well that’s great that you like me or love me, but the only reason you like or love me is because you don’t know this thing about me, that as soon as you did, you would not anymore. So you can’t actually really love me or like me. But that becomes a ceiling to how much love you can actually receive because you internally believe there’s no way that your love for me is real because I haven’t shared with you this thing. So the sharing of yourself is the key lever that dictates how much love you can accept in.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
You’re so good at putting it. I love what I wrote being flossed through you. I’m like, yes, yes, yes, that’s it. It’s the ceiling. It’s that if we’re never vulnerable, if we’re never sharing ourselves, if there’s these parts of ourselves that feel so full of shame, then we will never trust love. Because if you don’t know me, how can I trust that you love me? And I think for a lot of us who maybe have a lower sense worth, it’s like we don’t let people know us because we feel like if we do, they’re going to reject us. That’s the avoidantly attached strategy.
Dr. Marisa Franco:
And Glennon, I honestly like talking to you about it, because I think a lot of the times you see avoidant-attachment manifested as “I just don’t like people. I just don’t think people can be trusted or I just don’t really need people.” And I see you going that one step further and saying, “Well, actually, there is these fears that manifest as that desire to distance myself from other people. And there’s this underlying vulnerability or fear or work that I need to do on myself.” And I think a lot of people don’t get there. They just stay in the place of “I can’t trust people. I don’t need people. What value will they bring to my life?” And it’s like you actually don’t know the value they will bring to your life if you never allow yourself to experience it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s it! I didn’t know. When I said, Dr. Franco, “I don’t need friendship,” I was right because the way I was doing it was I always said, “It’s just a burden. It’s just like another thing to do. It’s another burden.” And the way I was doing it was because I would get together with someone and they would share themselves, and I would offer my best to them. And then they would ask me how I was, and I would give them what you call packaged vulnerability, which is a story about something that I had already just solved. And so it was nothing but a burden because it was no help to me. It was no figuring out, “Oh, when my friend talks to me, I should say the thing I’m really thinking and really struggling within this moment,” because my go-to was “I’m supposed to be vulnerable.”
Glennon Doyle:
So “I was bulimic since I was 10 and I was alcoholic. Here’s my vulnerable story.” It’s vulnerable as shit, but not, because it’s not right now … Right now what I’m thinking is “I’m really scared, I don’t know how to do this. Are you going to take over my life? I feel like I’m losing control of my time. Are you going to call me every time you need something? How does this work?”
Glennon Doyle:
And I’ve struggled with mental health my whole life, and I think that one of the reasons your work is so important is because I have always thought I don’t have time for friends because I just have to spend all day not losing my shit. I have all of these mental health strategies and I have to do all the things every day to just stay on this side of the abyss. I didn’t understand until this past year when I’ve been experimenting with friendship, my time with friends has helped my mental health more than spending all day doing all that other shit. And I say this like it’s a science experiment. I was a big skeptic. “This friendship just adds another thing to my to-do list.” I figured out I was anorexic. I figured out all these actual things through exposure to other healthy women’s lives and through their support, that I’m in a better place a year later than I ever have been after decades of mental health strategies that are isolated.
Abby Wambach:
It’s really something because we just got back from this trip and Glennon has a regimen every single day. She goes on her walks, she’s reading, she’s doing yoga, doing the things-
Glennon Doyle:
Box breathing for two hours, all the things.
Abby Wambach:
She’s doing the things that are regulating her emotions. And then we go on this trip this last weekend, she doesn’t have to do a single thing except talk. Actually one night we got back into the room, I said, “I can’t believe how much you’re talking and you’re still engaged.” And I can see that there’s a part of her that’s coming to life like it does when she meditates for an hour.
Glennon Doyle:
But she doesn’t know I’m back in the room going, “Okay, let’s see, here’s Platonic. Okay, I’m on page 49 now. She says this, I say this.”
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s stop here and come back because I want to talk the pod squad through your advice about how to find friends, how to make friends. Because I actually have followed a lot of it and it’s working. And I don’t like that we have considered so much of this intuitive because for many of us, it is not at all intuitive. For me, recovery from eating disorders, don’t tell me to fucking eat intuitively. If I could do that, do you think I’d be in this place? Right? I need you to tell me what to do first until it feels natural, and that’s what I feel like your work does.
Amanda Doyle:
And as a little teaser, we’ve been talking about how the cap on the love and the friendship that you can receive and that feeds your mental health relates to your vulnerability and authenticity. And no one knows what the fuck that means, but Dr. Franco says authenticity is who we are without defense mechanisms. Okay? Just marinate on that for a couple days and come back because that is the stuff. We’re going to talk about defense mechanisms, how that is your blocker to your authenticity, which is your blocker to your friendship and love in your life.
Glennon Doyle:
But I mean, Dr. Franco probably won’t come back because for sure she’s going to abandon me in the next hour.
Abby Wambach:
Before we head off, I just think it’s actually really incredible because I would call myself a secure-attachment, and the fact that you’re my best friend and the fact that you’re such an avoidant, would you say you’re avoidant or anxious?
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I want to talk to Dr. Franco about that because I think I could be both.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But one of the things that’s so hopeful about all of this, and what you repeat over and over again in your work, is that this is all totally changeable. I don’t know if I would have been willing to go look at friendships if you hadn’t proven to me over the last, however the hell long, many years-
Abby Wambach:
Seven.
Glennon Doyle:
… seven years, that all of my ideas were wrong. That this person can be trusted and isn’t going to abandon me. And you are changing my predictions about what’s going to happen. Our relationship is, and that’s allowing me to test more people.
Amanda Doyle:
Test more people!
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. We can do hard things. I’m sweating. We’ll be back with Dr. Franco next time. Love you.