HealthyGamerGG - Why You Need Constant Reassurance

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Talk to a HG Coach 1-on-1: https://bit.ly/46bIkdoDr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VDr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQIn this episode, Dr. K explores the psychology of reassurance seeking, explaining why some people need constant validation and how we actually heal from trauma. Unpacking a viral clip about reassurance and a fascinating study on neurodivergence, he breaks down why modern society is experiencing a spike in trauma, how our brains are wired to prioritize bad experiences, and why we need to change how we screen for trauma in neurodivergent individuals. What to expect in this episode: Reassuring the Reassurance-Seeker: Why asking for reassurance about needing reassurance is a common loop, and why providing it is actually the easiest job in the world if you embrace a supportive, loving mindset. The Power of Stable Relationships: How borderline personality disorder (BPD) remission rates show that consistent, long-term reassurance actually works, with 50% of individuals recovering within two years of a stable relationship and up to 98% in remission after 16 years. The Candy Bar Metaphor & Dr. K's Real-Time Epiphany: A look at an adopted child's food insecurity and why the typical parental response—confiscating hidden food—accidentally reinforces the trauma of scarcity rather than resolving it. What Social Support Actually Means: Why social support isn't just having people physically around you, but is specifically the ability to safely re-engage with your trauma triggers without your survival instincts taking over. Why We Hold Grudges (The 3-to-10x Brain Bias): How the human brain is neurologically wired to weigh a single negative experience three to ten times more heavily than a positive one, meaning it takes massive amounts of positive validation to undo a single betrayal. The Erosion of Social Safety Nets: How remote work, blocking culture, and rage-bait algorithms on social media are actively preventing us from having the "corrective emotional experiences" required to heal from trauma. The Autism Trauma Gap: Why up to 47% of women and 70% of men on the spectrum suffer from PTSD caused by "non-traditional" traumas—like bullying, public vomiting, loss of a pet, or even psychological therapy itself—that neurotypical individuals easily bounce back from. A New Clinical Burden of Proof: Why Dr. K now operates under the assumption that late-diagnosed ADHD patients have a mood disorder, and autistic adults have trauma, until clinically proven otherwise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Aunoja, but you can call me Dr. Kay.

I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. 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. 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. Somebody said that it must be, like, exhausting how much you have to reassure me.

Exhausting. first of all, I love reassuring. And second of all, it's so easy. It's so easy. My job is so easy. My 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. You are part. People need to see you. Okay. My job is to reassure you and feel proud when I'm out with you and everyone stares at you. I have the easiest fucking job of the world. Okay. So, no, it's really not difficult.

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. it a men versus women think. 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, et cetera. Whereas what we know actually is that people with borderline personality disorder, the majority, the very of 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 like 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 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 like from the age of three or four or five learn 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, you know, this is kind of an interesting question, what is getting better look like in a situation like this? So there was a great question about, you know, why do some people develop PTSD from traumatic events when others don't? And this is

what's really interesting. So if we look at one of the most protective factors from preventing the development of PTSD, it is social support, you can look at people who have been experienced some kind of trauma, like physical assault or emotional abuse, sexual assault, pick. And not all of them end up with PTSD. And even then, what's kind of interesting is that the majority of people who end up with PTSD, so probably the highest indicator of trauma in some studies, single instance of sexual assault is the most likely to result in PTSD. But what we see is that more than half of people who have PTSD will no longer have it at the end of one year, even if they've had sexual assault. These are the people who develop in the first place, okay, which is less than

half of people. So the question is how, right? How is it that some people do develop PTSD? Some people don't develop PTSD. Like, what's the difference? And for people who do develop it, what determines whether they get better or they don't get better? And this is where social support and specifically what I would call corrective emotional experiences are really, really, really important. And this is why reassurance works. So I want you all to imagine for a moment that someone has been sexually assaulted. They have early stages of PTSD. They've had it for about two months. What does the process of healing over that PTSD look like?

Since this was sexual in nature, when they are in a committed relationship with their partner and they start to get sexual, the trauma triggers. They start to clamp down. They go into a freeze mode. They, you know, it's like their body goes into survival mode instead of relaxing, being vulnerable with someone, being able to engage with someone. one. And this is the really important thing. What happens next? If their partner is able to give them the space to breathe that way, and then they, you know, cool it for now, try again maybe an hour,

try again a week later, not push it, then what we're starting to do is we're starting to enroll exposure and response prevention. Because after a sexual assault, the body learns that sex is dangerous. I keep seeing comments. Dr. Kay, how do I apply this to a situation in my life? That's literally why we created a coaching program. Our coaches are certified on an evidence-based curriculum designed to help you get unstuck. This involves analyzing your patterns, increasing your understanding, and working with you week to week to help you develop a plan to create lasting change. So if y'all are interested, check out the link in the description below.

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. The trauma is triggered. It's safe. Trauma is triggered. It's safe. Trauma is triggered.

It's safe. And this is what good social support literally does. So the child hides the candy bar. Parents come in and say, hey, you don't have to hide the candy bar. Child doesn't get it. No real consequence. So can you feel that way? Okay, fine. We're going to take the candy bar because there's sands. You can hide another one. And this is really scary. You know, I was thought about this. I've told this story before. I never realized this. No wonder that child keeps hiding the candy bar because it keeps on getting taken away by the parents. Wait, what? I just had a breakthrough. Man, talk about failing your patience. I don't know why

Did you guys realize that? Did you all pick that up? Actually, we're, like, we're doing it again. Did you guys see that? Seems obvious now, right? Right? So it's so interesting. What an epic fit.

I mean, the kid got better. So that's the good news is that you can miss some of these things and you can still provide the right support without doing things precisely correct. But this is what we need. We need corrective emotional experiences, which was originally not related to trauma. I mean, that's been, that's a deep part of the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic literature. Okay? About like even the.

childhood traumas that we have, we're looking for corrective emotional experiences through psychotherapy, through transference, countertransference, and all that kind of stuff. But the way that we heal trauma is by, you know, we have one experience and then we learn, oh, this is scary. And then we have to have other experiences that show us this is safe. And the problem is that our brain is wired to wait negative more than positive. We literally will wait a negative experience three to 10 times as much as a positive experience. So if you guys have ever had a cat, right, you can pet a cat for one year and be friends with a cat.

But if you have a single bad altercation with a cat, the cat will keep a grudge and remember. They don't keep a grudge that are just, you know, that's just how they work. They're now wary of you, right? And it's like you can be married for 20 years, one instance of betrayal heavily outweighs 19 or even 20, 19.9 years of fidelity.

That's just how we're wired. With people who heal from trauma, we have to have these corrective emotional experiences. We have to have other data points that will help us put the negative thing in context. And because of, if we look at the example of fidelity, this is why people need so much reassurance, right? And this is why if we look at, I think, something like 96%, 95 or 90, 95 to 98% of people with BPD are in remission 16 years after diagnosis. So 50% at two years, 90% at like 10 years, 98% at 16 years. I think we're the stats that I remember off the top of my head. So you need a lot of those data points.

Now, here's why I think we're seeing a huge spike in trauma. Because those corrective emotional experiences, those social support structures, the repeated chances for salvation are disappearing from society. We live in a world where people get blocked. We live in a world where we're working remotely. We live in a world where once I get dumped and something bad happens to me, I go to places on the internet where we can have an experience like this and look at what the top comment on Instagram is.

Is this because it's upvoted the most? Is this because Instagram knows this is going to get the highest level of engagement? But it's like, boom, rage bait, rage bait, right? It's like, what? So I think the reason we're really seeing a spike in trauma-related things is because if If you kind of screw up, you get punted off the escalator and you kind of get left behind. And there isn't an opportunity for corrective emotional experience. This person says, oh my God, like, is it hard to reassure me?

I want you all, and this is beautiful and heartwarming and whatever, right? So, fine. But I want you all to think about this person's response. And how easy or difficult is it to find someone like this to provide you with reassure? assurance, right? And then we run into another problem, which is beauty is in the eye of the beholder, totally fine. But like, what happens if you're not the most beautiful person on the planet? What if you're south of five out of ten? Then how hard is it to find a person like this? Right. And then we begin to see, not that this person is doing anything wrong or anything like that. And I'm

not saying that this person is a 10 or whatever. I really do believe that beauty is in the eye the beholder. But it's like, now we begin to see why everyone is so fucking traumatized all the time. Because the basic elements of what is required for correction do not are harder to find. And it does require a large dose. So this person requires reassurance about needing to be reassured. Seems like they're getting it. We can put this in the W column. The challenge is that so few people, if we're talking about gender dynamics for a moment, now there's a big movement, right, to like a man's emotions are no longer somebody else's responsibility. They have to handle them on their own. And I'm not disagreeing with the argument. I think that self-sufficiency is really, really, really important. But then the

question is, like, who does the work? Who does the work of social support, trauma, healing, things like that? Right? And I'm not saying this is right or wrong. This is just how things are. And as society changes, the first most important thing to do is to understand why things are changing. What is the mechanism? Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. Then we can figure out what comes next, right? And this is another, so I was like looking at this. Why do some people develop PTSD after, from traumatic events when others don't. So I was trying to answer this question. I came across this paper. Experience of trauma and PTSD symptoms in autistic adults. Risk of PTSD development following DSM and non-DSM five traumatic events. So basically, if you look at our diagnosis of trauma,

we have a kind of event that qualifies for trauma. So here are the examples of things. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, serious injury, abduction, sudden death of close friend or family member, suicide attempt by close friend or family member, serious injury to another individual, learning, witnessing, sexual abuse, threats to one's life from another individual suicide attempt. So in the diagnosis of PTSD, these are DSM-5 traumatic life events. This is what causes PTSD. Okay. Here's what's really scary. Although rates of Criterion A trauma exposure have been found to be 25% in individuals with ASD, we just looked at Criterion A. That's like. the bad stuff that we normally think about with trauma.

More than 50% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder were reported via parent report to experience at least one event in their lifetime, which was interpreted as traumatic. 47% of all females and 70% of males reported having experienced a life event that they found to be traumatic, which did not meet DSM-5 criteria. Bullying, non-traumatic bereavement and traumas relating to mental health problems such as anorexia are breakdowns. In addition, abandonment by a significant other mother, wife, and stress associated with social difficulties were also reported by multiple individuals. So here's what's really scary. These are the kinds of things that people on the spectrum will experience as traumatic.

Bereavement, police visit to the house, bullying, abandonment, death of a pet, psychological therapy. Therapy is of itself traumatic to some people on the spectrum. Injury of family member, parents, divorce, ASD, the process of getting diagnosed with autism is in and of itself traumatic. Own violence to other, right? So when they lose control, because they're behaviorally dysregulated and hurting someone, boarding school, their own illness, just having autism. Vomiting is huge, grossly underappreciated source of trauma for people on the spectrum. Social difficulties. I was like, okay, why do people recover? How do people not recover? What I stumbled into is actually way scarier, which is that if we look at specifically people on the spectrum, their capacity

to experience trauma is elevated. There are lots of experiences that non, I was about to say normal, neurotypical human beings experience that are not traumatic. And let's understand why. Because when I get bullied, I have a brain that knows how to form social connections. I have a brain that empathy is more easily accessible. I have a brain that doesn't need a script, a strategy, or a game plan for social interactions. I can feel my way through life. And what I'm capable of feeling my way through life, my capacity for social support is increased. So on the spectrum, we have two challenges. The first is that the experiences that other people may have, which are not traumatic, are traumatic for us. And that's because of the way that our brain processes this information. The amount of emotional

activation that we get when we get bullied, the persistence of bullying, the frequency of bullying. And then we lack the social support that is necessary to protect us from the trauma, to stabilize us afterward. And so one of the things that I stumbled into, which I was really kind of like honestly proud about and also happy about, was the realization that when you get diagnosed with ADHD, when you get diagnosed with ADHD late in life, you also have a mood disorder until proven otherwise. See, as a psychiatrist, I used to think, okay, this person's diagnosis is ADHD. And they may have depression. They may have bipolar, but that was like a maybe. Now my thinking has shifted. If they have adult diagnosed ADHD, I am assuming the burden of proof has now

changed in my mind. They have depression until I'm sure they don't. It's not a possibility. it is true until it is proven otherwise. And having worked with people on the spectrum, what I'm now realizing after seeing this paper, it clicked for me, I was like, oh, these people have trauma until proven otherwise. I'm going to operate under the assumption, 47% of women and 78% of men who are on the spectrum.

Staggering percentages are traumatized by things that we do not usually assess for in an intake. Because literally, I have a script, when I'm evaluating someone for trauma in the emergency room, have you ever been physically abused, emotionally abused, sexually abused, what was growing up like? I don't ask, have you ever seen a therapist and found yourself feeling traumatized by that process? Have you been bullied? Have you ever lost a pet? Right? And I don't know that these need to be screening questions because that was one person that said the loss of a pet.

Right. And this is the important thing. Losing a pet is hard for everyone. but it has a greater likelihood of becoming PTSD if you're on the spectrum, right? That's what's really scary about this. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe.

Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess. Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.