A Self-Help Book for an Era of Self-Help Overload
· The Atlantic
Marisa G. Franco is familiar with the art of secure attachment. She’s spent years studying it: that coveted quality that makes some people so trusting, so quick to accept that they are, in fact, loved. She wrote the 2022 best seller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends. She knows how to make connections without being clingy, how to be self-sufficient without pushing people away, how to avoid taking things personally.
Visit mwafrika.life for more information.
Well—she knows how all of that should look in theory. In reality, Franco told me, she can be sensitive. She can get hurt by someone who’s not doing anything remotely wrong. At some point, she realized that she was striving so hard to be secure that she was performing well-adjustedness for her own therapist. “There’s this way that I can lean on the very real parts of myself that feel proud and feel happy and impressive and glittery,” she said. “But there were these other parts of myself that felt ashamed or felt needy, and I would try to not talk about them.” The truth, of course, was that her therapist needed her not to be composed or even coping, but to be honest. And if she wasn’t being honest, she was arguably wasting time.
That lesson is at the core of her latest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” This might seem like a defeatist argument for a self-help book, but it’s an apt one at a time when the literary-self-help industry is thriving. Many of Franco’s readers may already be fluent in therapy-speak, ready to chat about attachment theory, and keenly interested, as she was, in presenting themselves as mended and enlightened. She’s not convinced it’s helping.
In the past decade or so, the self-improvement industry has grown colossal. According to Gitnux, a market-research firm, U.S. self-help books earned a collective $813 million in 2023 alone. And the behemoth has sprouted new arms: With the mega reach of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify, people can consume a constant drip of life advice. One hungry customer might listen to the audio book of James Clear’s Atomic Habits on the way to work, use a meditation app on their lunch break, and scroll through some therapist-influencer posts in the evening. Then, while getting ready for bed, they could turn on The Mel Robbins Podcast—the most followed show on Apple Podcasts last year, from the author of The Let Them Theory, the best-selling book about tuning out other people’s judgments. Gitnux reported that 52 percent of the industry’s patrons were “repeat buyers”—and some analyses have found that the literary-self-help category specifically caters to a pool that’s 80 percent repeat customers. If you’re looking to publish something new in the genre, you have an enormous potential audience of people who take self-optimization very seriously.
That opportunity is also a challenge for authors like Franco. They have to set themselves apart—and maybe even help readers unlearn guidance they’ve already hoovered up. Some writers have started speaking explicitly to this task (which allows them to signal a bit of knowingness about their company in the self-improvement aisle). In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, for instance, Oliver Burkeman argues against the idea that any one trick will get you on top of your to-do list; your best hope, he says, is to accept that a human life is terribly brief, far too brief to accomplish all of your goals. In Amir Levine’s 2026 book, Secure, the Columbia University neuroscientist questions the feasibility of mining security within yourself—and instead suggests seeking out people who make you feel valued from the start.
[Read: The psychiatrist’s case for downsizing a friendship]
Franco’s approach, too, is a little meta. Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure. (I pictured the “this is fine” dog grinning vacant-eyed through the flames.) So she didn’t want to give people more ways to go through the motions. She wanted to know: “What does it mean to feel secure in the marrow of your bones?”
A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure. One explanation can be found in “self-verification theory”: the uncomfortable tension one feels between their own self-image (bad and stupid) and how others see them (not perfect, but perfectly valuable). “At the neural level,” Franco writes, “the brains of people who feel unworthy are sticky for criticism and slick for love.” (All of the screenshots of nice messages I’ve saved to my computer, I concede, haven’t fixed me yet.)
Worth, then, is about setting down all of the tools you have for demolishing your flaws—and instead looking at your insecurities plainly, asking where they come from. Franco believes they’re rooted in the past: Even if you had amazing parents and a great childhood, you might still have some formative memories of times when someone made you feel less than, whether intentionally or not. Psychologists use the phrase open memories for the ones you haven’t come to terms with. You push them away, or you fixate on them unhelpfully, or you burst into tears when you talk about them. They’re too painful to bear. They’re also associated, in some studies, with low self-esteem. Securely attached people, according to the classic theory, can describe their own traumas without getting overwhelmed by or denying feeling; their memories still sting, but they’re “closed.” But Franco is speaking to people who might be in such a rush to move forward that they haven’t effectively processed what they’ve gone through.
Thus, Franco walks the reader through some ways to gently fold those memories shut. One is the act of “memory reconsolidation”—which involves recalling a painful event but then changing it in some way, perhaps by imagining a different outcome or picturing what the present version of yourself would tell the version of you from that time. This is different from rumination, she says, which is when you revisit a memory obsessively but superficially. Instead, you really feel what a recollection brings up for you, and then you inject the memory with some new, more positive meaning.
Franco mentions a memory-reconsolidation study in which one participant, for instance, recalled how a partner had lied to her about committing a crime (which he was ultimately arrested for); she then pictured reassuring her younger self that she wasn’t at fault for believing him. A week after this exercise, participants rated their chosen memories as less upsetting and reported higher self-esteem overall. Other studies have shown that similar processes alter activity in the hippocampus, the hub of memory storage. “We become emotional archaeologists, digging out the grounds of our psyche,” Franco writes, “and then we build over them with a new psychological home.”
[Read: How ‘somatics’ became the solution to modern life]
There’s no way around it: That kind of excavation is painful work. Franco doesn’t believe that you can heal with a sense of urgency—what she calls “dragging the dog across the street on its hind legs”—or bypass vulnerability by using therapy terms, branding your ex as a gaslighter or your parents as narcissists and moving on.
Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. In one study, she says in Worth, the depth of a client’s emotion—how much they expressed feelings such as sorrow and fury—was the best predictor of whether therapy would raise their self-esteem. “I don’t get to change,” she said on our call, “without going through grief.”
And even grieving won’t make you perfectly secure on the other end. The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads—the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic