People who are always nice and unfailingly empathetic

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They are sweet and caring mainly to "important" people because they have something to gain from it.

But they are often arrogant and rude to those who are considered "lesser" to them.

Yep...they could "turn it on and off" at a moment's notice.

I've been the recipient of this sort of treatment.

Does this make me bitter? Hell no!

I just try to live my life the way I want to live my life.

If people want to call me "syrupy sweet," let them. I don't give a rat's butt!

I believe people who are downtrodden need both empathy and a GENTLE kick in the butt.

Being nice and understanding all the time is bizarre.
I knew someone like this.
No one took them seriously because they were too nice and understanding all the time.
There was no judgment or criticism of anything and no interesting discussion about anything.

I've only known a couple people in my life who were genuinely nice and trusting and empathetic all the time. But OP the person you've described isn't ALWAYS nice as she's stabbed people in the back. I think that 'syrupy' description is apt. Once someone has done the dirty but presents as nice, I tend to trust them less than the people who are usually nice but occasionally have slip-ups.

Yes kraftiekortie--we have no control over others, but we have control of ourselves!

We have freedom of speech/ expression, thought, emotion, and many other freedoms.

At the end of any given day if I can ask myself "did I do the right things?" and I can honestly answer "yes," then it's a day to feel proud of myself for each small triumph, to be happy in the present moment, and to love life.

I ask myself similar questions.

Sometimes, the answer is not what I wanted; therefore, I have to improve in order to obtain the answer I want.

My wife definitely doesn't believe I'm "syrupy" sweet. I'm not actually that way myself. I could be blunt. But I'm not a jerk, either. If I come off as a jerk, I feel bad. I don't like to deal with jerks in my life, either; I don't believe they are "real," just like people who are overly nice aren't "real."

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 02 Jan 2015, 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Aha and if I wasn't feeling jaded enough about the human race, I just opened my door to find that somebody had opened a package that was sent to me, taken out all the contents and left the empty box outside my door! Arg!

Syd, your dog is so cute!

I think you guys understand now what I meant anyway. I know that I'm too blunt and should curb it more, but I think being honest and open is good. You just have to be respectful while you are doing it, not doing things like smiling to to someone's face, but then going to personnel and talking about them behind their back!

I've mentioned this before, but I actually think there are some times when it's good to be fake smiley, for instance, if the person is hopeless and talking to them honestly won't help. Or if you are stuck being with them for some reason, you work with them or they are inlaws and you just want peace. Having said that, I never can pull it off. Gets me in trouble.

Apparently I need to be meaner.

I really do hate the "fake nice" people. They always show me who they are eventually. I'm no threat at the bottom of the social ladder, because no one ever believes me. I've learned to spot them from a mile away for self-preservation.

I think that genuine niceness is a good thing, but it's rare because it goes against human nature.

psychopaths and narcissists

I've known people who are selective about who they are nice to. I saw lot of that in my childhood. I also had a teacher who was selective about who she picks on and would be nice to everyone else. These are the worst people you can meet because when one singles you out and treats you bad and discriminates you, you can't tell others about it because they won't believe you if they are nice people and don't treat others that way so they make you look like the crazy one. No one believes this until it happens to them or to someone they know and it happened to my brother and then I understood why some kids had problems with my choir teacher and would bad talk about her and say how mean she is. I just thought they were defiant and didn't respect her and didn't like following her rules so they didn't like getting consequences for it. That is what those sneaky bullies do, make the victim look crazy because they only pick on one person and then move onto the next person.

Part of strategy called gaslighting, often practiced by psychopaths, narcissists and other aggressive types that lack compassion and crave status.

Why is it called gaslighting?

I started to respond by saying that no one is always nice. Everyone has things that push their buttons, and everyone will have a bad day.

But then I thought of my mom. She is always nice. She does not say bad things about anybody. She has a chronic illness that makes her experience pain on a daily basis, but she will still go out of her way to help others. There is no underlying selfish reason for her behavior. She is just really, really nice. She sees the world in a positive way and reflects that positivity in the way she interacts with others. While many people look at their mothers and are critical of the mistakes they have made or the things they should/shouldn't have done, I have always looked at my mother and known that I will always fall short. She, of course, would say that I haven't fallen short at all. But if you compare us against the same yardstick, she is a better person than I am.

But I can say that most people who are always nice are either a) manipulating the people around them, or b) suffering from severe insecurity and feel that they have to earn any nicety they get from other people.

It means manipulating somebody into thinking they are crazy by playing tricks on them. There's a great movie called Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman, not sure if that was when the word was coined or not.

The irony thing about what I said in my post was instead of the bully doing the gas lighting, the victim is doing it to themselves because they think they are crazy and paranoid and that they must have done something to deserve the treatment because they (the bully) are not treating anyone else that way. That is why the victim usually does not tell anyone about it because they don't think anyone is going to believe them and everyone will just think they are lying or because the victim thinks they are just imagining it or they did something to deserve it and think they must be doing something wrong. I think this is what the bully intends to do with their victim so therefore it's a form of gas lighting they are doing.

Yeah! It's creepy. When the woman that I mentioned in the OP first started acting out on me, I could hardly believe it. It so went against everything I knew about her. I told my friends and they were like, shut up, she's just a sweet little lady! Then she started doing it to them. Then we started hearing from other people around the firm about her history of behavior. But the bosses never see it. Even with us, she'll act like she's being all benevolent, WHILE she's stabbing us in the back. IF you try to call her on it she'll say, I'm not going to fight with you and she just turns her back on you.

I always hear her telling people, "Some people try to fight with me, but I'm just not a fighter, I'm too shy to stick up for myself that way!" She always says that about her husband, he just wants to fight with her all the time. But in reality what she is doing is engaging in hostility, blaming us for her mistakes to the bosses, lying about other things to them - then acting like the person she does it to is hostile and crazy and just wants a petty fight when they try to discuss it with her. Wallah, she never has to admit to anything.

Then her "victim" is in the I imagining this zone? You are exactly right, League Girl (PS Hi!)

The whole thing is fascinating in a way, it's like watching a human spider at work.