Lacking positive relations with someone who lives near us - even while the rest of the community can be counted among our friends - is distressful. In a situation that sees a threat of violence - or one that merely involves defiant, obnoxious creatures who stare us down and speak against us to others - we lose a feeling of safety, of well-being - the traditional benefits of a home and community life.
Some of the outcomes of neighbor-related stress and misery qualify as legacies more than short-lived results. They include chronic headaches, gastrointestinal problems, sexual dysfunction, panic disorder, heart disease, blood pressure problems, alcoholism and abuse of prescription medication. Painful anxiety makes us abuse our bodies and minds, rendering us foolish enough to believe we can absorb it without long-term consequences. There were times, during the heat of battle, I felt the world was my enemy, a self-fulfilling notion, as I lacked any kind of useful support and didn't really grasp what I was up against. In severe NFH matters, family life goes downhill, work productivity and creativity dry up, and every other aspect of our lives is impacted. Victims of the worst, most aggressive and malicious neighbors often feel under siege and beside themselves. In noisy-neighbor cases, a hypersensitivity to noise develops, making even the ordinarily tolerable sounds coming from a neighbor unacceptable.
The noisy Neighbor From Hell learns to use noise as a weapon against the people who bother him with complaints. Noise becomes his or her "call of the wild," an announcement that he's on the scene. One of the more troubling responses to that repeated call, inside the mind of the victim, is a transformation of personality - going from comfortable to highly agitated, from focused and productive to deranged and dysfunctional - in a snap. This reaction can come from merely seeing the Neighbors From Hell or even thinking about them - long into battle, we can become so fatigued that we don't necessarily need to hear their noise to feel its effects. So, choosing to leave home for the evening, or going to work, or taking a week's vacation out of town, provides little reprieve and cannot protect us from previous aggression, hostility and disturbance, because the negativity has become so familiar.
I can remember being at a wedding - my own - and with everything positive that was going on I still had my Neighbors From Hell on my mind. NFH Syndrome is obsession, it's undiluted negativity. It occurs naturally in the good-neighbor underclass once we're exposed to today's noise-acculturated neighbors, and short of moving away, the only cure is correcting their behavior.
NFH Syndrome
