83. Assurance And Reassurance Are Not The Same Thing

I have a confession to make. I’m growing tired of the word “reassurance”. I hear it probably 100 times every day in our community.

“You’re seeking reassurance!”

“This just your need for reassurance!”

“Reassurance seeking will keep you stuck!”

These are not inherently bad or wrong statements, but I think we’re collectively suffering from that disease where we use a word without necessarily always understanding what it means. Let clear this up.

Assurance is not a bad thing. It can be productive. Especially for someone new to the recovery process and new to disordered anxiety, access to accurate information and clarity about what’s going on is critical. Knowing that anxiety can feel like a heart attack or that fearing a psychotic break doesn’t make one possible is a needed step early on. Getting assurance is learning. Providing assurance is educating. Technically in our community we’d probably call it psycho education and its usually a major part of therapy at the start of the process.

Things start to veer into the wrong lane when assurance seeking becomes repetitive and automatic. There’s a reason we call it REassurance.

When you’ve been told fifty times that your anxiety symptoms are not dangerous and you want to be told fifty more, that falls into the realm of non-productive reassurance seeking. When you’ve learned that anxiety symptoms are normal and varied but you want to continually talk about the one symptom that you find most frightening, that can become unproductive reassurance seeking. This does not helps us, and can actually impede our progress and even feed the disorder. So when people are calling each other out for seeking reassurance, sometimes it’s not wrong.

HOWEVER … context matters. We have to be mindful of the bad habit of immediately yelling, “REASSURANCE” in every situation and in response to every question. Not every question or comment is reassurance seeking. Who is asking the question? What stage of recovery are they at? How much exposure have they had to the concepts and principles of recovery? Has anyone tried to teach them yet? What is their particular situation? See how many questions there are here?

This is one reason that social media is not therapy and can never be. We don’t know context. We don’t actually know each other. We can become more familiar with each other through repeated interaction, but that still isn’t enough. Sometimes we are seeking excessive reassurance and having that pointed out is helpful, but not always. This can be a tricky balance to strike at times.

Let’s at least start with keeping an eye on the difference between assurance and reassurance. If we can stay grounded in these concepts, we minimize the risk of misappropriating and misapplying a key idea in recovery when talking to ourselves, and to others.