Neighbor Rupture

Dear Carie,

My neighbor and I used to be very close friends. To complicate the matter, she was also my landlord. Sorta. I rented the house from her mom who lived overseas and my friend, we'll call her C, did not play the role of the landlord. In the 8 years, when something went wrong with the house, her mother and I dealt with it, not C. In return, I got a deal on the rent. I lived there 8 years and we, both single ladies, raised our kids in tandem. Last Spring, I let C know, with 3 months notice (and I emailed her mother too), that I would be moving out and moving in with my new partner. C was initially enthusiastic but I could feel the tension behind it and her behavior grew strange. C came over while I was out without asking, and she pulled up plants from the garden in a manic frenzy without communicating at all. She stepped up into this role of The Landlord, which she had never been before, and stopped speaking to me as a friend, and only as an official to the house. I realize it did suddenly fall to her to deal with it since her mother is overseas, but she stopped being friendly at all and the tension grew. C tried repeatedly to pressure me to leave a month early for her convenience. I spoke up and set a boundary, saying no, I will not be pushed out, and reminding her that’s not legal, and I set a boundary stating politely I did not want her coming into the house without asking first, which seemed entirely reasonable to me. She grew stony and avoidant. I asked her if we could speak, sent a heartfelt email, and then another one, explaining I valued our friendship and we should talk it out. She avoided a discussion. I moved. I left a sweet card. She did not come say goodbye. I have had to write the friendship off as a loss. We still live in the same neighborhood and when I last I ran into her she wouldn't say hi. It was terribly awkward. My problem is that I still fret over it and wonder what I should have done differently and if I should reach out to her to 'be the bigger person' and try to salvage something, just so I don't feel unnerved by the idea of running into her again. Then I remind myself to have boundaries and let it go. But how do I learn to stop obsessing over it? I am struggling to let it go when it feels so unsettled. Surely there must have been a misunderstanding that I am unaware of for her to behave that way. Is there something I need to clear up to clear my name? Please help me put it to rest, one way or another.

Yours,

Neighborly Intrusive Thinker

Dear Neighborly Intrusive Thinker,

Aï. That hurts. To lose a dear neighbor, friend, and interwoven family is hard enough. Harder if you had had a falling out. But most difficult if you don’t know why.

In some ways your situation makes me think of the difficulty Crone has in ‘Banging Doors,’ where she isn’t sure of the why. If you find the strategy there has some resonance for you, you might give it a try. (Take a look.)

But my hunch for you is quite different than my hunch for Crone. I find myself wishing that you and C had each been temporarily bad. I wish you two the facility of temporarily dipping into badness, knowing that you will dip back out, and that you don’t have to take any action—in fact usually you shouldn’t—while you lucidly allow badness to have a little airing.

If C were writing me, I imagine her saying “I thought I would be the kind of person who could wish Alice well and mean it, but I am so full of rage and fear that I can’t seem to get a grip. The harder I try to control myself, the crazier I act, so now on top of it all I am struggling with shame…”

Maybe if C could have let herself be temporarily bad—unfair, illogical, scared, hurt, selfish—this change in your relationship could have been beautiful. But she didn’t, and it wasn’t.

That’s why I wish C could have been temporarily bad. But what about you?

I wonder whether you are bewildered, or whether you just really don’t want to be ‘bad’—to succumb to thinking bad thoughts of her. In your note, I can almost feel you leaning into charitable thoughts. Just for a bit, un-lean. I also think you may be more comfortable being bewildered rather than facing the fact that she wasn’t, in that period of time, the person you thought she was. To admit how badly she acted might be to lose even the memory of friendship, and that might hurt worse.

So your intrusive thoughts might actually be a way of protecting yourself from something else. Just as C might have benefited from letting herself be a little bit bad for a little bit of time, I suggest that you might allow yourself to have some little-bit-bad thoughts for some set periods of time.

You want to be able to move on, and I think such a zone of permission would help. Notice that you don’t have to stay ‘bad.’ And you don’t have to stay grieving or angry. Just take it in sips.

But what of the shadow this casts on the past, not only yours and hers but the kids’? Would you lose this? Perhaps you might draw a parallel from ‘living in the moment’ to ‘remembering in the moment.’ There’s a grace when you invite a retrospective moment to stand on its own, for what it was in its time, rather than mucking it up with the logic of flaws revealed later on. I suspect the skill of ‘remembering in the moment’ is part of the recipe for happiness.

Carie

Conflict Skill:

• Letting yourself be a little bit bad for a little period of time.

  • You may learn something about yourself

  • It isn’t a life-time commitment to badness

  • You don’t have to—in fact you usually shouldn’t— take action

  • The price of staving off an emotion or proto-thought or judgment is that you have to keep it staved, thus keeping it in its immature, unexamined form.

  • Remember, this has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is more like sipping than dunking your whole head in the barrel.

  • This doesn’t apply in your situation, Alice, but it is important to notice whether one of the thoughts that surfaces ‘I don’t feel safe.’ For any readers who try this approach and realize the notion they have been avoiding is fear, do not stuff that thought back away. Pay very close attention to it. Bring it back to the mundane world with you and give it its due.

• Remember good times, freely—if you want to—for what they were at the time, delusions and good luck and special circumstances and all.

Note, there is a thread about how comforting it is to be able to find oneself at fault, but I’ll save that for another post as I am sure the topic will come up again!