Profs and Pints DC presents: “How to Feel Worthy,” with Marisa G. Franco, psychologist, assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland’s Honors College, and New York Times best-selling author of Platonic and the forthcoming book Worth: The New Science of Self-esteem and Secure Attachment.
If you don't feel worthy, you can achieve great success but still feel like a failure. You can find great love and still feel unlovable.
Sometimes the very things that should make us feel worthy only make us feel worse. Studies reveal that if we don't feel worthy, we are more likely to deflect compliments and affiliate with people who treat us negatively. Fascinatingly, when positive events happen in our lives, we only feel sicker.
But there is a way forward.
Join Dr. Marisa G. Franco, who previously gave outstanding Profs and Pints talks on friendship, for an interactive evening built to help you shift long-held negative beliefs about yourself.
She’ll describe how self-worth is stubborn, because our brain is invested in maintaining the same sense of self-worth that we developed in childhood. It does this to protect us, so that we don’t trick ourselves into feeling better and get further crushed should the harms of our past—rejection, bullying, neglect—happen again.
You'll learn about the paradox of self-worth and how the very things that should make you feel more worthy--people who love you, great success—can actually only make you feel worse. You worry that you can't live up to others' expectations and you experience more anxiety.
Dr. Franco will discuss the foundation of self-worth and how, as researchers put it, “memories are the database of self-esteem,” with low self-worth stemming from memories of being rejected, bullied, or otherwise harmed.
We’ll delve into research-backed ways to improve self-worth. Although we can't change the past, cutting-edge research on memory reconsolidation finds that we can change how the past lives within us. As researchers put it, memories are made to predict the future, not to record the past, which means the emotional impact of memories can be updated every time we revisit them. You’ll learn how to do so during this talk.
Being on hand will help both those who have struggled with their sense of self and those who think they have it figured out. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: From “Triple Self Portrait” by Rick Beerhorst (Creative Commons).