Trauma Healing Saved My Relationship With My Neighbor

As a practitioner in the trauma healing profession, I’m always helping other people with the issues that cause emotional distress in their lives. But last week, I encountered an issue of my own. My neighbor’s car has been waking me up at 5am every day for months, and it’s been very difficult to go back to sleep. After months of putting up with it while I waited for him to modify it, my frustration reached a boiling point. I started a text conversation in which I expressed that he was destroying my peace of mind and should take responsibility for the impact he has on others. This made him angry, and he threatened to make the car even louder. I could sense things starting to escalate, and it looked like a zero-sum game: either I give up and let him keep ruining my sleep, or I somehow try to force him to leave or to get a different car, at the risk of him making the sound even worse and maybe escalating in other ways. It seemed like an impossible situation.

However, dealing with interpersonal conflicts is a major use case for healing work, because issues are never one-sided. And even if other people might agree that one side is “right”, this doesn’t mean anything unless both sides are willing to let an outside opinion decide the outcome, which was obviously not going to happen in my case. However, I follow the code “never waste a trigger”, meaning that when I am emotionally upset by something, I use it as an opportunity to heal the trauma that is being triggered and causing me to be upset.

If you’re not familiar, when you are upset by something – another person, an event in your life, even one of your own thoughts – trauma from your past is being triggered. Your consciousness is perceiving that something painful from your past is happening again, or might happen again, and your fight-or-flight response is activated to prepare you to face danger. Not long ago, the only option was to adapt and struggle through it as best we could. But with the advent of modern trauma healing techniques like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Brainspotting, EFT, and Peak States Therapy, we now have the power to resolve and eliminate the traumas that cause us to be triggered. When this is done properly and completely, the same situation will no longer trigger us in the future. But deeper traumas can be hard to access unless they get strongly triggered, because we instinctively suppress them and organize our lives around making sure they don’t get triggered.

In my case, traumas around conflict are some of the more painful ones, and I’ve organized my life to minimize conflict. But now here it was, staring me in the face, and it was terrifying. I felt paralyzed by multiple high-intensity emotions. I decided that I would take the time to heal myself and document the process, in the hopes that it would allow me to come to a solution that would otherwise be invisible.

The first thing I found was a swirling mess of many emotions, but the core element was a deep generational trauma that made me feel powerless. I spent a good portion of the day working on it, and the paralysis lifted. But I still felt like my neighbor had cruel intentions and wanted to cause me harm. The source of this was what we call an “e-cord”, which is a trauma-based energetic interaction with another person that makes them feel aggressive, dangerous, or evil (hence the ‘e’). Ironically, the solution is to use a technique called Distant Personality Release, which consists entirely of unconditionally loving and then admiring the other person for being exactly how they are. I did this as I was falling asleep, and I felt a huge release in my chest. Then I thought about my neighbor, and he now seemed like a normal person instead of a threat. This was a big change. 

That night, I thought to try earplugs again. I had given up previously because I could still hear the sound and it made me angry, but maybe now things would be different. Lo and behold, the next morning, the car barely woke me up, and I was able to go back to sleep easily. I realized that the reason it had taken me so long to go back to sleep previously was that I had felt victimized by someone who wanted to cause me harm, and I felt powerless to do anything about it. Now that I no longer felt that way about my neighbor, I had no problem going back to sleep, and I could actually appreciate that the car was quieter.

However, my neighbor was still angry. Now that he didn’t seem like someone who wanted to harm me, I realized that he felt that I had not acknowledged the work he had done to make the car incrementally quieter – which was true. So I apologized and expressed my thanks, and told him I’d found a way to adapt, so I wouldn’t bother him again. Magically, he became friendly again, and even apologized for his part in the conflict. He also said that he is still working to make the car quieter, it’s just taking time. Eventually, I might not even need earplugs.

This is the power of healing work. In two days, I went from being terribly distressed and victimized in an impossible situation, to resolving it in a satisfactory way for both parties. I am more resilient to conflict, I feel more affinity for my neighbor, and I’m no longer spending an hour every morning being angry instead of sleeping. I had no idea what was going to happen when I started healing myself, because trauma makes solutions like this invisible. But once I finished healing, the answer suddenly appeared, as if out of thin air.

This is normal when it comes to trauma healing – previously invisible solutions and answers suddenly materialize. I, and my clients, have experienced this many times, whether it’s finding the answer to a longstanding dilemma, resolving issues with a romantic partner, or figuring out how to move forward in business. You might not think trauma has anything to do with those issues, but it’s actually central to almost any experience of limitation, difficulty, or conflict. Resolving the trauma causes complex situations to become simple, difficult communications to become straightforward, and obstacles of many different kinds to simply disappear or become irrelevant.

If you’d like to see if Peak States Therapy can help you resolve a difficult situation in your life, send me an email or book a consultation. My consultations are free and we do actual healing work so you can try it and see if it’s a good fit. I would love to help you move forward and thrive in all areas of your life.