The Day I Realised “Being Nice” Was Getting in the Way of Being Honest
I have been described, at various points in my life, as “easy to be around.” Low maintenance. Someone who doesn’t make a fuss.
For a long time I took this as a compliment.
Thomas d’Ansembourg’s Cessez d’être gentil, soyez vrai! suggested, gently but without ambiguity, that I might want to look at this more carefully.
“Stop being nice, be real!” The French is blunter than it sounds in English. Thomas d’Ansembourg is not arguing against kindness. He is arguing against the specific kind of “niceness” that has nothing to do with kindness at all – the performance of compliance, the suppression of honest feeling, the endless accommodation of others at the expense of your own truth.
That particular kind of nice, he argues, is not a virtue. It is a strategy. Usually a fear-based one.
Table of Contents
Who Is Thomas d’Ansembourg?
Thomas d’Ansembourg is a Belgian psychologist, lawyer, and certified trainer in Nonviolent Communication – Marshall Rosenberg’s framework for compassionate and honest communication. He trained directly with Rosenberg and has spent over two decades teaching NVC in French-speaking contexts.
Cessez d’être gentil, soyez vrai! was first published in 2001 and has become one of the most widely read personal development books in the French-speaking world. It is not an NVC textbook. It is a human, readable, quietly confronting guide to why we hide our true feelings – and what it costs us when we do.
The Difference Between Nice and Kind
Thomas d’Ansembourg makes a distinction I had never articulated but immediately recognised.
Kindness comes from a full place. I want to help you because I genuinely want to contribute to your wellbeing, and I have the capacity to do so right now. My yes is a real yes.
Niceness, as he describes it, often comes from a different place. I say yes because I am afraid of what saying no might cost me. I suppress my discomfort because I am worried about the conflict. I accommodate your needs at the expense of my own because I have learned that this is what keeps the peace, keeps the relationship, keeps me safe.
The problem is that this kind of niceness creates a slow accumulation. Small resentments, unexpressed. Needs, unmet. A gap between how things appear and how they actually are. And eventually – sometimes suddenly, always recognisably – something cracks.
Thomas d’Ansembourg is not harsh about this. He was, by his own account, extraordinarily good at being nice and extraordinarily bad at being honest for much of his professional life. He understands the pattern from the inside.
The Violence of Suppression
This is where the book becomes uncomfortable in the best way.
NVC, in Marshall Rosenberg’s formulation, talks about violence not just in its obvious forms but in the everyday suppression of authentic feeling. When I swallow what I genuinely think and feel in order to present a more acceptable version of myself, I am doing something that looks considerate from the outside but is, in fact, a form of self-abandonment.
And this suppression, Thomas d’Ansembourg argues, inevitably leaks. The frustration you do not express directly tends to express itself indirectly – in passive aggression, in exhaustion, in resentment that colours every interaction without ever being named. The people around you feel it even when they cannot explain it.
I thought about my teenage daughters when I read this section. The way adolescents are so extraordinarily sensitive to the emotional weather of the adults around them – to the things that are not being said. They feel the suppression even when they cannot see through it. Authenticity at home is not about oversharing or burdening children with adult feelings. It is about being genuine enough that the emotional temperature makes sense.
Self-Empathy First
This is the part of the book – and of Nonviolent Communication more broadly – that I find most genuinely difficult.
Thomas d’Ansembourg is emphatic: you cannot be authentically present with another person if you have not first checked in with yourself. Self-empathy – genuinely asking “what am I feeling right now? what do I need right now?” – is the prerequisite for the kind of connection the book describes.
Without it, you bring the accumulated, unexpressed weight of all your unmet needs into every interaction. You meet the other person through the filter of your own unprocessed state. And what looks like communication is often just two people defending their unacknowledged feelings against each other.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires pausing before responding – particularly in the high-intensity moments of parenting, of marriage, of any close relationship. It requires treating your own inner state as information worth attending to, rather than noise to push through.
I do not manage this consistently. Not even close. But having the language for it – having a framework that says “self-empathy first” rather than “push through and stay nice” – changes what I reach for when I notice I am off.
What Authentic Communication Actually Looks Like
Thomas d’Ansembourg’s practical framework follows Rosenberg’s four steps closely, but with a warmth and accessibility that makes it more immediately usable.
Observation without evaluation. What actually happened, stated neutrally. Not “you always do this” – but “this morning, when the conversation ended that way…”
Feeling. What I actually feel, stated as mine. Not “you make me feel…” but “I feel…”
Need. What need is underneath the feeling. Not the strategy or demand – the deeper need. Connection. Understanding. Respect. Rest.
Request. A specific, doable request that would help meet the need. Not a demand – a request I can hear no to without it becoming a crisis.
What this creates, when both people are operating from this framework, is a different kind of conversation entirely. Not a negotiation between competing agendas. A meeting between two people who are both trying to be honest about what is true for them.
This sits naturally alongside The 5 Love Languages – Chapman identifies the need; Thomas d’Ansembourg and Rosenberg give you the language to express it.
Practical Takeaways
- Ask: is this niceness or kindness? When you say yes to something, check: is this coming from a full place, or from fear? Both matter, but only one is sustainable.
- Practice the pause. Before responding in a tense moment, pause. One breath. One internal question: “what am I actually feeling right now?” The answer is almost always more useful than the automatic response.
- Name the feeling, not the accusation. “I feel frustrated” lands differently from “you’re being impossible.” Both might be true. Only one opens the conversation.
- Work backwards from the feeling to the need. Frustration about what? Sadness because of what underlying need being unmet? The need is where the real conversation lives.
- Distinguish between suppression and appropriate restraint. Not every feeling needs to be expressed in every moment. The difference is: am I choosing restraint from wisdom, or from fear?
Why This Belongs in Heart
Heart on this blog is about family, relationships, and connection. And Cessez d’être gentil, soyez vrai! is a book about the interior conditions that make genuine connection possible – or prevent it.
It belongs here alongside Nonviolent Communication (the full framework) and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen (the practical tools with children) as the third layer of the Heart reading list. NVC gives you the theory. Faber and Mazlish give you the scripts. Thomas d’Ansembourg gives you the honest account of what is actually happening inside when you reach for “nice” instead of “real” – and why that matters.
This is the book to read when you have read about the methods and you are still not doing them. Because Thomas d’Ansembourg gets into the why underneath the difficulty. And the why is almost always fear.
I am still working on this. Still catching myself performing niceness instead of expressing honesty. Still, on some days, choosing the path of least resistance over the path of truth.
But I hear myself more now. I notice the gap more often – between what I actually feel and what I present. And noticing, Thomas d’Ansembourg would say, is the first step. The gap closes more slowly than I would like. But it closes.
Parfaitement imparfaite. Still figuring it out.
Et toi? Is there a relationship in your life – or a version of yourself – where you are being nice instead of real? I would love to hear about it in the comments or come and find me in the Notes from Soph community on Skool. This kind of conversation is worth having out loud.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Book Details:
Cessez d’être gentil, soyez vrai! Être avec les autres en restant soi-même – Thomas d’Ansembourg
Published 2001 | Éditions de l’Homme
📚 Amazon.fr https://www.amazon.fr/dp/2761938828/?tag=websitenotesf-21
Also available in translation as Being Genuine: Stop Being Nice, Start Being Real https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1892005212/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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