Falling apart; abusive neighbour

[ShelterIt]

Hi,

I live in a small coastal town, lived here for 12 years. 2 years ago a couple moved in next door, both real-estate agents. I'll only mention the man, as I've never talked to his wife.

A bit of context here is that I suffer from LPTSD and trauma from having been bullied and abused as a child over many years, and I've got 25 years of therapy trying to have a normal life. I'm still today struggling with social anxiety and I'm painfully conflict shy. I wouldn't dare to try to fix a wrong order at Maccas.

After two years of mostly verbal abuse (trees, bushes, our chickens, anything he doesn't like) it culminated last Wednesday with him assaulting me in my driveway (tree dispute where he doesn't like councils' decision). Reported it to the police, of course, but i'm concerned not much will come of that unless he attacks again. I now live in constant fear of waiting for when he'll attack next.

The incident last week has left me completely destroyed. My neighbour has always been aggressive and abusive, to everyone in my household and people visiting, to council and others. And now I'm shaking like a leaf, afraid to be in the house, to be outside the house, to come and go, I can't sleep without hefty pills, and I'm on two different anxiety meds just to stay upright. It's been over a week, and I feel I'm losing it.

So my question is; what to do next? I've done all the obvious things, police, council, lawAccessNSW, seeing psychologist, GP, but no one can do anything. We've talked about selling, but a) that's hard on the kids, and b) unfair to those we sell it to. Abusive neighbours are perfectly allowed to be abusive, it seems. And I'm running out of strength, this anxiety and the very thought of having to live with this is just so overwhelming. Has anyone had to deal with something like this?

[Karen0901]

How are you going now? Did going away help? I really relate to how you are feeling, despite our reasons for it being completely different. So I'm really hoping you are feeling better.

My psychiatrist said that strong anxiety can not be helped well with medication. The only medication that can really help only work for a short time. They are also addictive....

I use  medication and therapy. The therapy should help reduce the anxiety enough the medication can help more. Your GP should be able to prescribe medication.

Try deep breathing and other anxiety calming strategies.

Have you thought about renting your house and then moving into a rental in your area? This might be an option for you to decide how to solve your problem and give you time to work on your mental health.

[missep123]

ShelterIt,

I am so grateful that you have continued to keep us updated, it has been a little while since your last post so I wanted to check and see how you are doing!

We are here for you

[ShelterIt]

Hi all,

Sorry for the low response, I've taken 1.5 weeks off without a computer to try to reset, and have just returned. There's mainly two updates / insights;

I'm going through PTSD trauma therapy, it's ongoing and is useful for understanding both the situation and myself, but not so much for reducing anxiety. I think the major insight for has been that my trauma is more linked to the feeling of being alone and helpless more than any violence angle, which explains the ongoing triggering my neighbour incurs. I've got ADD with a strong sense of justice and fairness, and *that* has shaped my trauma more than the incidents; there was no justice around me, no one could help, so all my anxiousness (and now probably depression) comes from fairly common human issues but amplified to trauma through ADD. I have for most of my life (and still to this day) had problems with recurring nightmares that always had a strong supernatural non-physical theme. I now realize that this is a manifestation of the same trauma; an invisible, hard-to-define but powerful force that controls my surroundings, and I'm helpless to get away from it.

The other insight is just realizing how much of me has been shaped by my ADD, in particularly how hard it is to find friends and people like me in the odd anti-emotional mono-cultural Australian society, and that I have gone through a grieving process of letting go of all those people as I left my home country (Norway) for Australia some 15 years ago. This probably is a larger consequence for my depression (that now has been super-charged) than I realized.

I'm still a mess, but I've got good days and bad days. The anxiety attacks have receded into a reality of continuous dread, not sure if that's better or worse. I'm now only on anti-depressants (the common kind) and as long as I can live this way, it's a path forward. I've been a practitioner of meditation my adult life, and maybe that's helping me, breathing and counter-focus, etc, and I use philosophy for all its worth in finding (at least) intellectual understanding underneath it all.

Thanks all for the support and getting back to me, I do appreciate it.

[missep123]

Hi ShelterIt,

Thank you so much for keeping us updated because we really do care about you here!

You brought up a very important point about PTSD trauma therapy and how it has been useful for you in understanding yourself however it has not reduced your anxiety. I have heard that whilst processing during therapy (especially trauma related) it can be a very challenging and vulnerable process to go through! I really hope in time though that when you have processed everything in a safe environment that your anxiety does lessen. Although from what you have written I can understand that it is quite complicated given your insight about ADD feeding into the trauma experiences but I really do hope that trauma therapy helps you to understand and hopefully dissipate this link.

I'm so sorry that you have felt as if you are in a continuous dread, how has being on the anti-depressants been for you? Has it been helping this feeling? You seem to have a lot of insight into yourself, I believe that aligns also with your knowledge of philosophy so I truly hope that this helps you on the journey!

[NonStampCollectorFan]

I'm is an almost identical situation. I was foolish enough to be friendly to a neighbor that was the local hero of the region for being a fire-fighter chief. - he abused a situation in 2020 and then extorted money out of me. I've been told hes on the council and last week Ive received an abatement notice stating I got to fly down to Tasmania this week and mow grass or get a $3,500 fine + the councils fees. I don't even know if i can get down there because of shifting covid laws. For me its extortion and torment 24/7 since i got the note. I'm thinking the australian broadcasting corporation(or prince harry) could help but this is a hope/despair crisis. And NO-ONE wants to start a fight with "The corruption behind the issued compliance"/the law.

[therising]

Hi ShelterIt

Sounds like you're making some progress through the PTSD therapy which is great. I think the challenging part about gradually waking up to how things played out up to this point is...some of it can be naturally depressing. So, it can be kinda like we're waking up to a lot of potentially depressing factors in order to make our way through and out the other side of depression. For example, someone could be asking themself 'Why do I feel so weak, worthless and depressed?'. Gradually a therapist gets to the bottom of things to reveal no one in that person's life cared all that much about them when they were young. They may be led to recall many of the comments that led them to the conclusion that they're weak, worthless and a 'waste of space who will never amount to anything'. That's dark and depressing stuff which can trigger overwhelming sadness. Can even get to the point where that adult can be left grieving for the childhood they wish they'd had. At the end of the day though, it's a gradual wake up call to see how the incredibly destructive faults were in the people around them, not them. They can even be led to feel incredibly proud of how they managed to make their way through into adulthood through such an obvious lack of constructive guidance and the soul destroying behaviours of others. In other words, they've raised themself a lot of the time, even in childhood.

I wish the experts would focus more on the incredible abilities of those diagnosed with ADD, ADHD and those on the autism spectrum. There are some absolutely incredible abilities there. Problem is, sometimes it can be hard to find your tribe of the same kind of folk, who hold the same abilities. For example, just say we're 'a feeler', someone who feels so much. If you report to people in the mainstream stuff like 'That person brings me down/depresses me or that person stresses me out to the point where I can physically feel the stress they put on me and the depressing feelings they lead me to' and people can say 'You're too sensitive'. Find your tribe and each member may say 'You can feel that too? I thought it was just me. Doesn't it feel horrible. What the heck is wrong with the people who lead us to feel stress and depression. They're seriously messed up'.

[therising]

Hi again ShelterIt

Had to run, drive my son to school 🙂

That tribe factor: The people we best vibe with can develop us in a way where we can learn to live largely without a doubt. They're real self esteem boosters. As a group you may all agree 'We're not going out to dinner there, that place has a depressing feel to it. Where not going here, all the staff have a really angry vibe to them. Definitely not going there, the patrons there are generally highly selfish, thoughtless and seriously triggering'. So you know it's not all in your head that you feel these things because others are feeling them too. One of the things about ADD, it's challenging when you can feel boredom or disinterest to the point where you're on the verge of going to sleep or to the point where the fly on the wall beside you is far more fascinating than anything else. Stick a kid in classrooms for more than a decade and teach them stuff in the most uninteresting way possible and then expect them to focus. Almost impossible. Get a teacher who knows it's boring and therefor makes it more exciting and that's a game changer. Get a brilliant teacher who tells a kid with ADHD, who struggles with managing hyperactivity, 'Go run around the school and come back in 5 mins with less energy so you can learn' and that's also a game changer. Or get a teacher who recognises how hard it is for some kids to focus beyond their imagination and they'll teach that child through their imagination.

All 3 of those scenarios point to abilities

1. The ability to recognise or feel what's boring and tune out from it. When it comes to that fly on the wall - the ability to study the finer and fascinating details of nature
2. The ability to channel enormous amount of energy
3. The ability to learn and channel through the imagination. The imagination's a powerful thing we can't afford to lose. Highly imaginative people throughout history include Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Leonardo Da Vinci, Martin Luther King Jr and so on. All visionaries 🙂 Actually, Musk created a private school (Ad Astra), having referred to mainstream schooling, from his experience, as 'torture'.

[ShelterIt]

Hi,

> I really do hope that trauma therapy helps you to understand and hopefully dissipate this link

Oddly, I'm not too hopeful about that, but that possibly speaks to having too much info and knowledge about ADD, trauma, and my own situation. Dealing with trauma / PTSD is much easier if you can pin it to specific incidents, but these more blurry long-term affectations are harder as they become an import part of who you are, part of your identity. It's not easy to categorise and choose embedded traits, unfortunately.

> how has being on the anti-depressants been for you?

The truth is, I'm not sure. I've been on them before, and I've never been that affected by them. I think I fall into the category of taking them as a precaution (better safe than sorry), but they don't really change my situation as much as, say, doing intellectual work does. By that I mean, I can be anxious with or without medication ad only think about what makes me anxious, but the anxiety will dissipate more if I sit down for an hour and write down how I feel and how I plan to deal with it. That's the kinaesthetic part of dealing with anxiety that has more effect for me than mere discovery work. We know from tons of experimental data that putting a physical spin on a mental exercise help us bond to the solutions we think we need, and things like EMDR is exactly based on that premise.

I think the ADD link is the most prominent at the moment, and I'm going through my life linking in negative and positive traits and experiences to that at the moment. This understanding certainly helps, even if it does not remove the anxiety, at least not completely. But also, I'm half-way through the therapy series, who knows what will happen next? I'll keep you posted.

[ShelterIt]

> they've raised themself a lot of the time, even in childhood

Spot on, and very important; people with ADHD (or any ASD) develop a whole forest full of coping mechanisms, some good, some bad, and it's often a miracle if they turned into a person who doesn't struggle in life in some way. It seems the hit rate on that is fairly low, for all of those reasons you mentioned, the lack of understanding and support for people who have a different cognitive and mental mode of operation.

I hate that we're often talking about these things with "mental health" or "on the spectrum", indicating that these things are classified as an issue for *the person* as opposed to for *society* as a whole, but I guess we have to start somewhere. Being on the spectrum signifies a difference, for sure, but shouldn't signify that the difference is a *problem*. I think this is why it became a problem for me; I was tagged as the one with issues, probably from my reactions to the bullying (anger, mostly), so I was sent to a psychologist for years rather than the people doing the bullying. I, even as a child, recognized that I was not the problem they were looking for, but felt, again even as a child, that my opinion on the matter wasn't taken into account (because experts were involved, I assume).

Luckily it was a new expert that came in and made me feel I was being listened to that *actually* resolved the bullying situation, so at least I don't have issues associated with that (experts) as much as a more systematic problem (both in terms of systems as well as knowledge).

> I wish the experts would focus more on the incredible abilities of those diagnosed with ADD

Agreed, there's tremendous potential in there, when promoted and cared for in a world of understanding. The time I've "wasted" on trying to fit in, trying to deal with a world not designed with me in mind, is mind-blowing! And I know I'm definitely not alone. I'm seeing a lot of good representation these days, so there's been a ton of good progress over the years (the support my kids got compared to me is tremendous), even though there's still a lot of work that needs to happen to bring that support and understanding into the world, especially the educational world.

I also recommend everyone go see Hannah Gadsby's special "Douglas" on Netflix, it's the funniest and truest and loveliest and most awesome ASD representation ever! I cried and laughed at the same time through pretty much the whole thing, truly amazing.

[ShelterIt]

There's toxic people out there. For us ADD people that's a difficult pill to swallow, sometimes outright impossible to feed back into our model of reality, causing a lot of anxiety that neurotypicals don't understand at all.