Difficult relationship with neighbours

Hello lovely coaches,
I am hoping you can help me shine some light into my relationship with my neighbours.

Even thinking about writing this activates my nervous system and I am aware of a cringey embarrassment about not being able to sort this out myself. But it is having such a huge impact on mine and my partners life too.

Where to start…about 6 years ago, not long after we moved in, our neighbours on one side started to cut down the plants in our garden that were on the boundary line. I mean like they leaned over the fence and cut as far as they could reach, like arms length. I was furious. We have very different gardening styles, but they don’t actually live in their house. It was inherited from her parents and they visit once a week or so, for a day or two and then go home. They were cutting into the garden I look at daily, my home.
I was experiencing a period of extreme burnout at the time, and my nervous system was shot. I worked as a gardener in a garden that was open to the public and a huge contributing factor in my burnout was being unable to cope with the scale of the grounds, and the volunteer gardeners and visiting publics opinions on what I should or shouldn’t be doing, or did or didn’t know. I was not in a state to speak to my neighbours about their actions in my garden.

It seemed like the easiest option was to replace the old existing fence with a tall one. Which we did, and it felt great. The neighbours started reaching up and over that too. It was less than before, but still they kept cutting. This has been going on ever since. Lockdown, when they couldn’t visit was a strange sort of respite.
One day recently, we got home and they had cut a huge branch off one of our trees. Badly. The cut was terrible, the wood split, the bark on the tree ripped down the trunk. Again, I was so angry. We tried to discuss this with them calmly but it got very defensive and confrontational with both sides. They do less cutting now, but nag and complain through the fence at us about any minor growth that crosses the boundary, including leaves etc.
My partner and I have talked about this a lot. We are fully accepting of them not wanting our natural garden invading their very tightly controlled one. And that our defensiveness of our boundary is probably more similar to the neighbours than we would like to admit. However, I struggle to move forward with this, and so does he. If I see their car is here, my nervous system goes haywire. Heck, even thinking about them triggers me. I avoid them and avoid going into my own garden. I catastrophise, ruminate, and am angered by their very presence if I’m honest. When we were recently returning from holiday one of my first thoughts was that I hoped they weren’t in.

I have put this into an unintentional coaching model

C: The neighbours

T: Oh my god what are they going to do next/what have they done now…

F: Panic

A: Nervous system activation, defensiveness, anger, catastrophising, rumination, avoidance

R: Stress

I am so caught up in it all that I would really appreciate some help to move things even in the direction of an intentional model. I’d like to feel neutral towards the neighbours, but can’t get further than that at the minute on my own.

I look forward to your thoughts 🙏

Answer:

There is no need to feel embarrassment here – we welcome you with all of your strengths, and all of your struggles fully.

The purpose of creating intentional models is that we’re creating things to think and feel with intention. You can choose to feel angry, you can choose to feel calm, you can choose to feel love, and you can choose to feel neutral. Why do you think you need to get further than feeling neutral in an intentional model right now? And perhaps a better question is, what does feeling neutral mean for you?