Speaker A
hey guys Heidi prep here welcome back to my Channel today is a video that is partially a rant if you've been around for a while you know that maybe a third of my videos start off this way but I am
Heidi Priebe explains the fawn response (a trauma-linked people-pleasing reaction) and contrasts it with genuine kindness, which means asserting your own needs while considering others.
Key Takeaways
- Being 'too nice' is usually a fawn response, not genuine kindness.
- Kindness means asserting your own needs while considering others' needs.
- Both excessive fawning and inconsiderate self-assertion are unhealthy extremes.
- Clearly communicating your wants is itself a form of kindness that enables healthier relationships.
What the video covers
- Heidi Priebe argues there is no such thing as being 'too nice'; people who say so often mean they are having too many fawn responses.
- She describes the four F responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn), drawing on psychotherapist Pete Walker's work on complex PTSD.
- A fawn response means suppressing your own wants and needs to give others what they want, often as an adaptive childhood reaction to authority.
- Women may be more prone to fawning due to socialization that rewards politeness and agreeableness.
- Confusing the fawn response with niceness leads people to overcorrect into inconsiderate, self-centered behavior.
- She frames the healthy middle ground as clearly stating your needs while also listening to others and finding solutions that work for both.
- She defines fawning as dissociating from or lying about your wants to keep the peace, and inconsiderate behavior as asserting wants without regard for others.
- Examples include saying yes when you mean no, or deferring on where to eat dinner, versus kind responses that negotiate mutually acceptable outcomes.
- She connects the overcorrection to a culture of hyper-individualism that encourages cutting people off and labeling others as toxic or narcissistic.
- She ends by stressing that failing to state your needs is not kind, since it creates one-sided relationships where others must guess what you want.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Why 'Being Too Nice' Is a Misconception
- 01:14Cultural Context: Hyper-Individualism and Isolation
- 02:23The Four F Responses and the Fawn Response
- 03:30Socialization, Gender, and Confusing Fawning with Niceness
- 04:29The Pendulum: Fawning, Kindness, and Inconsiderate Extremes
- 06:38Defining the Terms: Fawn, Caretaking, and Inconsiderate Responses
- 07:38Examples: Favors, Dinner Choices, and Healthy Communication
- 10:00Conclusion: Clear Communication Is the Nice Thing to Do
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
getting very sick of a particular thing that I keep hearing people say online in pop culture and what that phrase is is people claiming they are too nice I would like to State for the record that I don't believe there is such a
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thing as being too nice I think we live in a world that is brutal and where people are largely actually quite inconsiderate towards each other and that often when we say we are being too nice what we actually mean is that we
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are having too many Bond responses now the problem is that the average person does not know what a fond response is so they assume that the problem is that they're just too nice and in order to try to resolve the problem they then
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become giant inconsiderate who don't take anyone else's needs into account whatsoever and I think that this issue at large really feeds into the current culture we have of hyper individualism where the narrative is like cut people off look at everyone
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else's toxic you're not getting along with someone it must be because they're a narcissist and what is this culture doing for all of us it is for the most part making us more isolated more lonely and more truly misunderstood than we
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were before and I think that the problem is we are missing the middle ground here so on one end of this kind of pendulum I see Fawn responses what is a fawn response a fawn response is part of what
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Pete Walker who is a psychotherapist who specializes in complex PTSD calls one of the four F responses the four F responses are what happens when our sympathetic nervous system is activated and we are in what is commonly thought
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of as a fight-or-flight response so generally this is when we're picking up on some sort of perceived threat in our environment and our bodies are responding to it as though it is real danger and in these cases whether we are
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in real danger or not our body tends to choose one of four responses we either fight we become combative and ready to go into battle whether that's physical or emotional or we go into flight so we try to get out of the situation or we
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might freeze and kind of dissociate or become numb to the situation or stop responding to it or we might Fawn when we are fawning what we're doing is almost giving ourselves Amnesia about all of our own wants and needs and
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deciding in that moment that the only thing that's important is giving the other person or people involved what they want or need and the fun response is actually very adaptive in many cases so when we're young if we're in the
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presence of intimidating authority figures who are going to punish us in some way for asserting our own wants and needs it's adaptive to stay quiet numb ourselves to our own wants and needs and defer to whatever the authority figure
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wants in fact I would go so far as to say in North America this is how we train and condition children to behave right what is going to elementary school other than getting punished if you assert your wants and needs at a time
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when you're supposed to be listening to the authority figures and doing something else so I think that so many people and I I think women might be a little bit more likely on average to have an overactive Fawn response than
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men based on the way that women are socialized which is to be polite and agreeable and not make a fuss but the problem is that we mix up that obedient Fawn response with the experience of being a nice person being a nice person
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does not mean failing to State your wants and needs and giving other people whatever they want being a nice person means making your own wants and needs clear and then also listening to other people's wants and needs and finding
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solutions that work for everybody which could be a range of things it could be okay tonight we'll eat where I want and tomorrow will eat where you want or it could be let's find a place we both kind
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of like or it could be let's go eat at different places for dinner so we both get what we want because that's more important to us than having this meal together there are so many different solutions that can be found when you are
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choosing the nice response of asserting your own needs listening to other people's and then finding what works for both of you so if this is a pendulum and we have fawning over here and we have kind communication in the middle what's
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over here is being inconsiderate and saying okay I'm going to go from never asserting what I want all the way over here to only asserting what I want and assuming that if anyone else wants something different it's their job to
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speak up for themselves I'm not going to ask I'm not going to pay attention to anyone else's wants I'm going to assert the crap out of my own wants and needs and if anyone tells me it makes them
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uncomfortable I'm going to call them toxic now are there times to assert your own wants and needs and not worry about other people's yes is that usually the case no usually the case is if we want to be pro-social beings who have happy
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relationships we need to start speaking up for ourselves as well as incorporating what other people want to need and depending on where you're starting from if you err on the side of fawning you might need to do a lot of
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work in learning to tune into your own wants and needs and then communicate them and if you err on the side of extreme self-reliance you might need to do some work around learning to listen to other people's wants and needs and
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incorporating those but the middle point is that happy medium here right kindness is not equivalent to being a doormat it's not equivalent to erasing your sense of self and it's not equivalent to staying quiet about what you want and
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need what people are describing when they say all of those things is the fun response so a quick kind of lexicon here rule of thumb that I wrote down just to keep things Crystal Clear before we go into examples is that a fun response is
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what happens when what we authentically want is at odds with what another person wants and we either dissociate from what we want or are dishonest about what we want in order to keep the peace or I think kind of a subset of the fond
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response could be that when we express what we want we expect the other person to caretake us so instead of being assertive about what we want we go oh I kind of want this I don't know I'm sorry
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I'm sorry I'm sorry and apologize over and over or something like that right and in that case we're expecting the other person to come make us feel better about what we want so we're looking for caretaking rather than taking
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responsibility for what our wants and needs are and then being inconsiderate is when we are asserting our own wants and needs without any care or consideration or respect for how our wants and needs impact other people so this is one I imagine I've had to catch
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myself on quite a bit in my own life I learned early on that I am to speak up and say what I want or else I'm not going to get it and in many cases I would take advantage of that when I was
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in Social environments where I knew that was not the norm so I would State clearly and confidently what I wanted and then if other people were seeming kind of wishy-washy or uncomfortable I would tell myself well it's their job to
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say what they want if they want their needs and wants acknowledged so if no one's going to speak up I'm going to go ahead and enforce what I want and that was a way of evading responsibility for the impact of my actions right now again
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the middle ground which is kindness is when we calmly and clearly and assertively state what we want and also make sure we're checking in and getting a sense of what other people want and then finding the balance between those
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things or finding out how those things can coexist so a couple of examples let's say someone asks you for a favor that you don't really want or have the resources to do font response is to say yes when you secretly want to say no and
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to grow resentful as you complete the favor because you knew the whole time you didn't really want to take that on or again it might be be a situation where you say no but then you need them to caretake you around it so you're
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saying things like oh my God I'm so sorry I don't have the time please don't be mad at me don't be mad at me right instead of saying hey that's actually not something that I'm capable of taking on here's what's going on for me right
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now I totally hear that you're looking for someone to help with that project but unfortunately I'm not going to be able to help you this time now the inconsiderate response is to gleefully turn down the request for help without
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any consideration for let's say the times that that person has helped you out without recognizing that you have a strong friendship or work relationship and that there is a level of respect that you need to show someone as you are
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saying no to them if they have shown you the same respect in the past or if they've been willing and available to help you out in similar situations so fun response yes when you mean no inconsiderate response gleefully saying
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no with no respect to the underlying relationship involved kind response saying no and EXP blaming why you're unable to take that on and showing some care or compassion for the fact that this person's in a bind and needs some
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help maybe offering them the number of someone who you think could help them or just empathizing and going yeah I hear you're in a tough spot there and I'm really sorry that it's not something I have the time for right now right you
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can say no and still show a lot of care and respect for the other person's feelings another situation where I think Fawn responses come up quite a bit is when someone is mad at us so someone has come to you and they have explained to
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you that they're either uncomfortable with something you did or that they're mad at you for something you did the fun response is usually to immediately apologize don't think at all about why you did that thing or what led you to do
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that thing or what your side of the situation was just tell them you're sorry tell them you want to make it up to them agree to any requests or demands they have about what they want you to do
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to make it up to them all of that is usually a fun response if it's quick and immediate like that right because usually when it comes to actions that we want to change or that we realize are impacting someone else negatively
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there's a period where we need some time to think about it and figure out what a better way to approach that situation would be and so it's often kind of inauthentic if we're moving immediately into apologizing it's usually a fun
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response now the flip side of this the inconsiderate response kind of reminds me of there's this concept called emotional libertarianism that I've come across a couple of times over the years and the idea is that everyone is completely responsible for their own
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emotional reactions and nobody should do anything at all to kind of caretake or take responsibility for the way that someone else is feeling and I think that self-responsibility when it comes to emotions is incredibly important so being able to say I'm having this
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response I own it as my own I'm not saying that you caused my feelings right but I'm sharing my feelings with you I think that's healthy but the flip side of this is someone comes to you and they
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say you know know you hurt my feelings something you did was painful for me and your response is well you go deal with it right I'm not going to think at all about how my actions affect other people
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I'm not going to help other people in any way heal or move on from the ways that I've hurt them I'm just going to say you're feeling your responsibility and be done with it that is the inconsiderate response and the kind
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response of course strikes that middle ground between I'm hearing that I hurt you and that I upset you here's what was going on for me let's put our competitive wants and needs on the table that obviously led to this conflict and
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let's figure it out together right so it can be I'm sorry I hurt you and also I have needs and wants that maybe aren't being considered that is leading to this conflict let's see where we can find the middle ground once everyone's
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wants and needs are on the table and this goes back to that most classic example on Earth where do you want to eat for dinner right fawning is I want to eat wherever you want to eat being inconsiderate is I want to eat where I
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want to eat and I don't care where you want to eat but I need you to come with me and the kind response is let's find a compromise if it's important to both of us that we eat dinner together so to
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figure out if you are fawning or if you are being kind ask yourself these questions one am I aware of what my needs and wants are in this situation if this other person weren't present if someone is asking you what do you want
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to eat for dinner and you truly do just want to eat whatever they want to eat ask yourself if this person were gone what would I eat for dinner and that's your true underlying need or want next question to ask yourself have I made my
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wants and needs clear so have I told the person I'm not that fussy about where we want to eat for dinner but if you weren't around I would probably eat Indian food what are your thoughts right now you've at least voiced what your
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preferences are and sometimes it's easier to think of it that way instead of thinking of it as a need or a want think of it as a preference and then have I checked in and asked what the other person wants or needs and this is
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important to make sure you're not just swinging the pendulum all the way to the other end of the spectrum right and going I want Indian let's go there that might get you the dinner you want but it's not going to be the most conducive
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tool for having healthy reciprocal long-term relationships right so it depends what your goal is and I think that sometimes people in this process do need to distance themselves a little bit when you are getting in touch with your
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wants and your needs and your underlying beliefs and thoughts and preferences in the world after a lifetime of being disconnected from them sometimes it does help to take some time alone figure out what those things are when no one else
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is around impacting you and then you're going to find it easier as you re-emerge and re-engage in your social life to at least have an idea of what those pref references are even if you don't feel super confident stating them right from
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the get-go but the important part here is to keep in mind it is not nice to not make your wants and needs known if anything that just creates these kind of weird one-sided relationships where other people are always trying to guess
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at what you want and where they kind of feel like the because they're always calling the shots and this isn't to shame you or say you're a bad person for having a fawn response it's a completely natural instinctual response
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that comes up in situations where you might not even be aware it's coming up right but the thing to note is that it's not you being too nice it's you fawning the nice thing is to put your wants and
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needs and preferences on the table listen and seek out the wants needs and preferences of other people and then find a way to work together towards a solution that satisfies both of you and if the other person is unwilling to work
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towards a solution with you then maybe it's time to just go with your own needs and part ways with that person right but you're never going to know the answer to that until you are making what you want
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to need clear that is unquestionably the nice thing to do all right that's all I've got in me for today on this particular topic but let me know your thoughts feelings responses to this video in the comments are you a
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fauner are you someone who is only just now coming into the realization that that's what they've been doing or if you've been aware of that patterning for a while now I'm very curious about where all of you guys are at with this so let
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me know below and as always I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon foreign [Music]
Topics:fawn responsepeople pleasingHeidi Priebecomplex PTSDboundarieskindnessassertivenessfour F responsescodependencyself-advocacy
