Unconditional reassurance and cheerleading are important, especially at first, but they're only one aspect of "help and support."
When I first started trying to get sober -- and I’ve seen this time and time again with other newcomers -- I had this weird distorted sense of emotional entitlement in which I had an extremely skewed perspective on the "compassion" versus "tough love" issue. The "compassion" I thought I needed and deserved was actually more like mollycoddling or enabling. Nerves are raw in early recovery, and I easily took offense at being treated in ways that didn't line up with my narrow, preconceived notions of what was "helpful" or "supportive."
In hindsight, the error in perception was mine alone. What I really needed in order to recover fell more toward the "tough love" end of the spectrum, and part of that could have included being confronted -- in a constructive way, of course -- with examples of the dishonesty, faulty logic, self-pity, and other aspects of alcoholic thinking in which I was indulging.
Being mollycoddled may have felt like what I needed at the time, but it wasn't what ultimately got me sober.