THEY NEED ME, THEY NEED ME!
If I can carry them, I’ll be loved
PREVIOUS: Secretly angry-nice #1
KINDNESS vs Angry-NICENESS
True Kindness is a positive trait, coming from an inner place of abundance – the person having enough of their needs & wants met from their healthy family, themself & in the world. It allows them to be reasonably happy with their life, but not complacent. As a result, they can be thoughtful & generous, without needing or expecting a return.
This satisfaction translates into relating positively to others, but not a as pushover, victim or martyr. AND developing a safe support system carries them thru hard times – showers or storms – which happen to us all. Being a genuinely kind person is never a liability when it’s an outgrowth of personal strength, emotional stability & humanity. 
True Kindness is totally the opposite of co-dependence. It honors our own needs & values, expressing this to others so they know where they stand with us.
Sometimes healthy kindness is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means saying ‘No” to someone’s request or demand, because it’s not good for us, or not good for them – like not giving money to an active addict, not spending the night with a stranger, not over-doing when sick or tired….
NOTE: Our True Self may indeed be helpful, caring & kind. And for wounded people who want to scrub off the False Self layer, with enough Recovery we who are ‘natural helpers’ can find a balance between legitimate giving & appropriate self-care.
Other personality Types can finally uncover & admit that ‘helping’ is not really their style at all – they need more privacy & solitude to fulfill healthy goals & natural talents.
ARTICLE:”For Everyone who has been called ‘Too Nice’.” Re. Positive niceness!!
Co-dependent Fake Niceness
Most people occasionally need to hide their anger behind the face of politeness – especially when it’s the only way to protect oneself. This is normal.
Here we’re focusing on suppressed-anger-niceness as a way of life. It’s a defense mechanisms, one of many ways damage shows up, used to disguise unhealed wounds of the past. Childhood abandonment always leaves us with a great deal of anger, which ‘nice’ people turn in on themself. Lacking genuine self-esteem, we latch on to others so we can manipulate them into providing our many unmet needs, instead of working to develop these for ourself.
Co-Dep is an outgrowth of self-hate, which tells us that we caused our own pain, from birth – on. And according to this distorted thinking, if we caused it then we surely can cure it. This is the WIC’s sense of false power, who is convinced it can control how we’re treated – by being extra good – no, perfect! (opposite of Al-anon’s 3 Cs)
But all we end up doing is twisting ourself into whatever pretzel we think others want, and trying to fix people who are the least likely to change – the narcissists & addicts around us who are too self-absorbed to even see us, much less care. Neither effort ever works!
In reality we could not possibly have caused any of our early suffering, since the damaged adults who raised us were already fully formed before we arrived! It’s not fair that we have to clean up the mess they left us with, but we do have the ability to heal much of it to better out life. Yet many people are unwilling to shed deep-seated defenses, since it would mean dealing with the original wounds that caused a need for them.
Without a strong inner core of self-esteem, clear thinking & good boundaries, hoe we interact with others is not ‘clean’. At the very least, the surface agreeableness of our angry-niceness is a pretense. At the extreme, being overly-sweet, overly-solicitous, overly-helpful hides our anger , but will come out sideways.
Actually, our carefully controlled actions are basically self-serving, because we’re only being ‘so good’ as a way of conning others into taking care of us – emotionally, psychologically – & often in all 4 PMES way. Whether or not we’re aware of our compulsive patterns is not the point. (See Part 1 re. Selfishness).
If you’re still actively Secretly-Angry, you want to be seen as a kind person, in spite of how you feel inside, because society considers that a virtue. And being desperate for positive strokes, you assume that’s what is always required & expected of you. But you’re still living in emotional deprivation, so no amount of people-pleasing will fill the void.
Then, the more you do for others, especially if there’s no acknowledgement or appreciation – the angrier you get. But ‘nice’ people aren’t supposed to get angry – so the feeling transforms into resentments.
NEXT: Co-Dep defined #2
HEAL & GROW for ACoAs 