can someone please explain why giving/getting reassurance is a bad thing like.. it helps doenst it? /gen /not sarcastic/not mad

I think it helps temporarily but it’s bad in the long run and just feeds the ocd cycle. And the more reassurance we seek, the harder it will be to accept uncertainty

Imagine somebody is afraid of flying, and they feel safe if they bring a lucky pendant with them, or worse, they feel safe is they do some complex time-intensive prayer sequence before the flight. If every time they land safely they think that they ONLY survived because of the lucky thing or the safety prayer, that still reinforces the idea that flying is dangerous, so their fear will never go down. When we seek reassurance we are treating the fears as real threats and acting as if we can’t handle them on our own. It’s hard not to tho 💔

It's too much of a quick fix for most of us with ocd. Like giving in to a kid's tantrum, or just using a drug when upset... It's not helping us realize that we're really just fine without having reassurance all the time. Plus most of us seek it out way too much, or get really emotional or angry when someone can't or won't give it to us. It really becomes like a drug that you're seeking because sometimes it gets to the point that we stop paying attention to how that need for reassurance is affecting others, or how it's not helping us.