Why You Need Constant Reassurance

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello. Look what TJ Maxx dragged in.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. We are digital, we are downloadable, we are streamable.
The fashion event of the year is certified fresh.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:15)
Pull yourself together, we have work to do.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
Critics say it's smart and witty, and the perfect sequel.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:21)
That's all.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Get runway ready for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney Plus and Hulu, rated PG-13.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:32)
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**Alok Kanojia** (1:03)
Hey chat, welcome to the HealthyGamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Olu Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of HealthyGamer.
On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.
What is social support? So what does social support actually mean? Is it just having people around you? No, it is being able to re-engage with the things that trigger your trauma and being safe despite the trauma signals being active in here. Really important to understand. The way that you heal from trauma is by teaching your body that the reaction that you have is actually the wrong reaction. It's natural, it's normal, but it is inappropriate. We don't need to react this way, it's safe.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:00)
Somebody said that it must be, like, exhausting, how much you have to reassure me. Exhausting.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:06)
First of all, I love reassuring. And second of all, it's so easy. It's so easy, my job is so easy. A super hot friend wants to be told that she looks hot or she looks good. Oh no, oh no, the easy is a bad bitch. And if you are with a bad bitch, you need to have a bad bitch mentality. And nobody understands that. Or art, people need to see you, okay?
My job is to reassure you and feel proud when I'm out looking at everyone's stares at you. I have the easiest job in the world, okay? So no, it's really not difficult.

**Alok Kanojia** (2:38)
Okay, this is a case of someone asking reassurance about their need for reassurance. Like, that's what this is. It's like, hey, can you reassure me about how much I need to be reassured? So here's a couple of things to understand. When people are like, oh, reassurance is the easiest for women. I wonder why men think it's so hard. Okay, so I don't know why people have to bring gender into it, right? But this is the internet where it's like, let's rage bait this by making it a men versus women thing. So a couple of things to understand about needing reassurance. The first is that many people who need a lot of reassurance, there are two ways that this can go. Either this can get better or it cannot get better. So a good example of this is borderline personality disorder, where these people have a severe fear of abandonment, and they need constant reassurance that this person is not going to leave them, not abandon them, etc. Whereas what we know actually is that people with borderline personality disorder, the majority, the vast majority of them, over 90% of them get better within 10 years of a stable relationship.
50% of them no longer meet criteria after two years of a stable relationship. So if you're someone who needs constant reassurance, the vast majority of humans who get reassurance will be better, but it takes years. It'll start to sink in after years of reassurance.
And so this is one thing to understand, right? Is like that it does seem to work. So one good example of this is, you know, I was working with a family that told me that they're, they kept on finding that they had adopted a child, and they said, you know, we keep on finding ants in the child's room. They basically have one behavioral problem, and they always have ants. Why do they have ants? Because they have half eaten food tucked away inside all their drawers, and then the ants find it. And we've tried to explain, hey, you can't have food here. There's plenty of food in the pantry. Like, please stop keeping your food here. We have ants. We have to call the exterminator again and again, and again, the kid keeps doing it. Otherwise, the kid like listens to things. And so the kid grew up was in an environment where there wasn't food security. And so we're talking to like, from the age of three or four or five, learned how to hide food, and then gets adopted at the age of nine, and then tucks things away. And the parents are like, there's a pantry, like they can go into the pantry and they can grab whatever they want. We've shown him the pantry like 15 times. This is not clicking. Exactly. It takes some time to click. And this is where, if we look at, this is kind of an interesting question.