BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
Think about a memory that still makes you wince. Maybe it is the time you said something embarrassing in front of people you wanted to impress, or the moment you felt out of place while everyone around you seemed completely at ease. Most of us carry a few of those moments that have never fully faded. They just sit there, coming back at inconvenient times, reinforcing a story about who we are. What the science is starting to suggest is that those memories are not as fixed as they feel.
The neuroscience behind memory and self-worth
Psychologist Marisa Franco, author of Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment, draws on research called memory reconsolidation theory, developed by behavioral neuroscientist Karim Nader. The basic finding is that memories are not recordings. Every time you recall one, your brain reconstructs it, and what gets rebuilt is something you have a say in.
“The thing about memories is they don’t just record the past, they predict the future,” Franco says.
That matters more than it sounds. A painful memory from childhood is not just a replay of one bad afternoon. Each time it surfaces, your brain is updating its prediction of who you are and what you deserve, and that prediction is part of what shapes how you see yourself right now. Research has found that people who work with difficult memories this way show higher self-esteem, fewer trauma symptoms, and measurable changes in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where memories are stored.
The reparenting exercise
Franco’s exercise, which she calls reparenting, asks you to step back into a difficult memory as your present-day self and offer your younger self the reassurance that was not there at the time.
She walks through her own. As a kid, she was one of the only children of color on her soccer team when her mom arrived late to pick her up. Going back to that memory as an adult, she can still feel it: the shame, the embarrassment, the sense of not belonging the way everyone else did.
“When you return to a memory and envision yourself intervening as an adult and saying, ‘You’re safe, I care about you and I’m never going to leave you,’ it can be quite transformative,” Franco says.
In her version, adult Franco shows up at practice before her mom gets there. She is thrilled to see her younger self. She gives her a hug and tells her: even though your mom is late, she loves you. A moment that was never available to her becomes one she can finally give herself.
“It allows me to see the good in the world, to not evaluate things based off of the negativity eclipsing everything good about it,” she says.
Why self-esteem shapes more than how you feel
Low self-esteem is not just a bad feeling about yourself. It is about what you cannot let in.
“All the beauties of life slip off of you when you have lower self-esteem,” Franco says. “You can experience great success and still feel like a failure. You can find great love and still feel unlovable. So your ability to internalize the good is disrupted by your own sense of self.”
Franco says building self-esteem starts with something most people never got a clear model for: treating your own emotions as if they matter. The reparenting exercise is not about changing what happened. It is about filling in something that was missing, giving your younger self what it needed, and finding out, maybe with some surprise, that it does something for you now too.
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