Looking for reassurance?

when you’re actively in an ocd spiral, all you want is to fix things and find comfort. but everytime you experience the anxiety and then want to “fix it” with a quick relief, and you do the “quick relief”, it just reinforces the ocd to keep coming back. so you keep doing that quick relief compulsion over and over and it’s not helping the core fear go away. so it’s a repeating cycle.. and in almost everyone with ocd, compulsions comes with some sort of reassurance seeking. for example, i could be sitting there fighting off anxiety and intrusive thoughts about x and start to feel really panicky and i wanna fix it, and i see the person next to me and i wanna tell the person next to me that im having anxiety and to help me, thats an example of reassurance seeking. that shows the ocd that you can’t deal with it alone and that you need to keep seeking reassurance to calm down the anxiety, and it teaches your mind that you can’t sit with the fear/intrusive thoughts.

Reassurance is never enough. It only makes OCD worse. OCD is addicted to certainty, and in this world, certainty is very hard to find. The cure for OCD is to accept uncertainty

I'm pretty sure it's because by needing to know your thoughts aren't true, you're actually affirming that you ARE worried about the thoughts. This leads to them becoming more frequent and possibly stronger. The point is to just live with the thoughts and let them be, that way they won't affect you as much in the future.

That’s right. And the reassurance will never be enough. It strengthens the cycle.

https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/is-reassurance-seeking-good-or-bad-for-ocd

One thing that's bad with reassurance is it's sort of kind of like a never ending maze? It's sort of like in those movies where there's the characters that are trapped underwater and their safe inside a submarine or of some sort then something punctures and water starts leaking in. They plug the leak and it's fine. They're safe now. Until another puncture comes through and they have to deal with that now. To add that into OCD ! For me when I get reassurance- like for example, I tell someone close to me about something about my past (compulsion) to see if they would still see me as a good person and they say it's fine. Hurray I feel calm now for about few days or so :^) until: "Oh shoot, I forgot to tell them about this. Should I tell this event as well? They don't know about it but if I don't they'll find out in the future and hate me." BAM new puncture. New thing to worry about ! :^( Then I close that hole up with another compulsion, feel okay for now until a new thought pops up and you see where I'm going? Although this is bad, I struggle with reassurance a lot and I give into it, it's not easy AT ALL to avoid it all completely! Whether I look for it on the internet or by my family or anything. If you seek for reassurance that doesn't mean it's over ! But for the BETTER is that you try your hardest NOT to get into that habit and try to lean to uncertainty as much as it sucks for many OCDers .

No one put it plain and simple that reassurance is a compulsion and we want to avoid compulsions to end the cycle and get better

Reassurance is like an addiction. At first it feels as if you're just looking for a simple relief every now and then, which a lot of people do, it's not something to be ashamed of at all. However, the more you do it out of the urge to feed the OCD, the more hungry it gets. Reassurance can feel nice at first, but it continues to grow and harness the need for evidence from dependency on other people that everything will be okay, and it gets to the point where your mind and body start stressfully spiraling out of control until you've given enough reassurance just to continue thinking straight for a while. It may feel good in the moment, though moving forward you forget how to function without constant reassurance, it's as if your mind is telling you that "the only way I can feel safe is in the approval of others," at least that's my take on it. It eventually becomes a self-destructive habit for requiring evidence that you're actually okay, and whenever you're unable to get it, your survival instincts take over, adrenaline rushes, and you're sometimes unable to function normally for a little while due to stress levels continuing to rise. I hope this helps, I have had a lot of experience in the past two years with it, and if you ever need to reach out, that is perfectly fine. Getting help is not considered "reassurance," though trying to solve what you're worrying about out using real-world evidence and others' feedback just makes it worse and continues to feed the OCD loop, the best option is to accept the thought, no matter how disgusting it can be, and move on as the amazing person you truly know you are.

Lots of good replies here. In my experience, assurance seeking has caused codependency too. I felt agony if I couldn’t verify acceptance, assurance, safety from other people. Got stuck in paralyzing anxiety about making decisions on my own, even simple silly choices that I’m completely competent to make. It has caused issues in my relationships- seeking constant validation or advice but then doing what I thought was best anyway. Partner was frustrated I wasn’t taking his advice after begging him for it and insisting he help me.

Thank you all for the explanations, I appreciate you guys helping me understand! Lmk if there’s anything else like this I should know, I’m very new to OCD

It is a bad thing because with OCD it is better to try to accept the uncertainty. Reassurance seeking helps short term but since some intrusive thoughts are rooted in uncertainty it starts the cycle of reassurance skeeing/checking behaviors again.