Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / World of Bullies #5: Strategies for Dealing with Bully Neighbors
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Hi everybody. And we are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California where we focus on training, consultations, coaching and methods and classes and programs, all to do with high conflict. It's all we think about. In this episode, we're in the fifth installment of our World of Bullies series, and today it's about neighbors who might be bullies. So if you've ever had a bully neighbor, this episode is for you. There's a lot of stories out there. So first, a couple of notes. If you have any high conflict related questions, please send them to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or go through our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast where you'll find all the show notes and links from today's episode. Speaker 1 (01:18): All right, so we are in this world of bullies series because Bill, you've come out with this brand new book called Our New World of Adult Bullies. And I keep showing it. You're showing it. We both got our copies just recently, so we're very excited about it. I'll be headed to Australia next week and by the time this airs, I'm probably already there, but I'm taking a whole bunch of copies of this book to all my trainings in Australia. So we'll start spreading the word there and you, and I'll be in New York City soon to speak for a very esteemed group of mediators across the US and I think they're quite excited about this bullies book. So bullies as neighbors, we've all heard the stories. I think this might be one of the areas that maybe would draw out a bully the most perhaps. I'm interested to find out your thoughts on that. Speaker 1 (02:18): But it can be anything from a tree that someone's cut down to a fence line that may be encroaching on someone's property. And easement. We've heard a lot of easement stories where people need to use an easement to get to their own property, but they're blocked from it. Water. Water from a well, water from a creek, water for irrigation. There's so many things that can happen between neighbors, barking dogs, and now you get to live next to this person or people because it can be maybe a whole bully situation in a family. And now your life's pretty and you're hiding coming in and out of your house. So Bill, what did you find? I mean, is this pretty common do you think? If it is, what is it that seems to bring out this bullying personality in these situations? Well, Speaker 2 (03:14): I think you think of your home as your castle. You think in my home I can do anything and also people better leave me alone. And so there's so many possible issues that arise. So like you mentioned, you may have leaves falling from the neighbor's tree. You may have dogs barking late at night, parking issues, parking space in front of your house. You don't own that. But I know of at least one story that ended fatally because someone thought they owned the parking space and someone parked there and went to a party and the person was a very clear bully. He'd been bullying and he went over and he shopped the person at the party. That's an extreme example, but I guess I have in the book, I don't have that example, but I have other examples that are extreme because I want people to know this is a possibility. Speaker 2 (04:15): And so part of the message here is be careful when people are around their home, they feel more empowered and bullies can be more dangerous around their home. Of course, concerns about guns and stuff. How dangerous is someone going to be someone waving a gun around to discourage people from coming to their property versus someone going to somebody else's party and shooting somebody because they parked in front of their house? So it's a bad combination, but most cases aren't involving guns, but they often involve encroachment by one reason or another. A clever example, tell me if you think this is one or two bullies. So somebody says, my neighbor goes by my house and he lets his dog poop on my grass on my yard and doesn't clean it up. So I've started videotaping him from my porch. He can tell that I'm video. In fact, I come up close when he goes by and I videotape him. So guess what the neighbor with the dog does now? He comes around with a camera to videotape his neighbor videotaping him and his dog saying, I'm being harassed. That made it to the nightly news one day in one city. How many bullies do we have there? Speaker 1 (05:47): I mean, video's getting to be so common now it's becoming more innocuous. So I'm going to say just, I'm going to take a guess. Maybe one bully if the one who's letting their dog poop won't stop. Speaker 2 (06:01): Yeah. Well, here's the thing is we can't really tell, but the message in here is if you react to a bully or bullying behavior with your own bullying behavior, getting in your face with your camera or your phone, you look like a bully. True. And then people start saying, well, those two people are bullies. And you don't want to be identified as the bullying person. So it's better to be the reasonable person and say, Hey buddy, you might've missed it, but your dog just pooped on my grass. And that new law that you're supposed to carry a little bag and pick that up, I dunno if you remember about that, you might've forgotten, but can you please do that in front of my house? If the person's a bully, they're going to say, I don't like you. That's why I had my dog do that. Speaker 2 (06:57): You were too loud last night or something or other. So you got to watch out is handle these things in a way that doesn't just escalate. And one of the things I really want to put in a plug for is community mediation centers. Most big cities have a community mediation center, maybe several community mediation centers where people sit down and talk with their neighbors to talk about problems and talk them out and say, can you please cut back your tree because all these leaves are dumping in my yard, or can you please bring your dog in at 10 at night so I can sleep? I go to work early. Can you bring in your dog at night? At night so I can sleep? And community mediation centers have resolved a lot of disputes. They have a third party mediator there sitting to help them talk and help keep things calm. Speaker 1 (07:59): But how do you get a bully into mediation? That's the thing. Speaker 2 (08:03): Well, since I volunteered a mediation center 1980s, something like that, we had good intake people and they were trained at calling the other person. So let's say you have a dispute with your neighbor and your neighbor's a bully and you want to deal with it peacefully. You call up the mediation center and then they have an intake person. So okay, I'll call your neighbor and say, I've been approached and this is a nice method. Help people to calm things and talk and your neighbor's interested in having a chat and would you be willing to come in? We have trained mediators to help people talk about neighbor issues, and we've settled like 8,000 neighbor disputes. So things like that. The success rate is around 60 to 80% for mediation in general, and a lot of community mediation is pretty easily solved. Part of what comes out, people call the police, they start with the police, and if you have to for safety reasons, start with the police. Speaker 2 (09:10): But if you don't have to, I think starting with mediation may be good or even a lower level is to go to your neighbor's house and knock on the door and say, Hey, you may not have realized it, but you were loud. Speaker was on late last night till midnight and it made it hard for me to sleep and I have to get to work early. Could you please close the doors and windows at 10 at night? A lot of people weren't being bullies, but it feels like they were like they have their noise on where they park their car, all they do these things. So you don't have to start out assuming they're bullies, and sometimes just that neighborly connection helps. But if that doesn't work or you're not feeling safe, go to tribe mediation, that doesn't work or you're not feeling safe, then go to the police. There's a lot of laws about how communities are run and the police are there to help calm things down. Speaker 1 (10:15): So let's apply this to a situation I just heard about recently where a woman who had lived in her home for I don't know, 40, 50 years, knew the neighbors next door. The house was sold to some new people and she thought, well, it's a great time. I've wanted to get a plot of the land and see if the fence line is correct and just all those things. And she discovered that the fence between she and the neighbor of the house that it was selling, it was encroaching quite a bit onto her property, cutting into her property. And so she thought, well, I'll wait until they move in and then I'll go knock on their door and introduce myself and we'll talk. And I don't know if it was a first time or second time they talked, but she let them know she'd changed the fence or she'd had this plot taken care of and that discovered the fence. Speaker 1 (11:10): It was a little bit over. So she says, I've been thinking about changing, putting in a new fence anyway for a while, so I might as well just let's put it in the right place. According to the maps, she asked them if they would mind paying for half the fence, which is pretty much a neighborly thing to do. I think that's pretty common to ask for when you have a fence in common to ask for, see if they'll split it or not. And so the neighbor said, absolutely not. And it's gone back and forth, back and forth, and half of the fence got knocked down at some point. Now there's threats, all kinds of threats all over the place, including the one that you call the nuclear threat, which is to accuse this woman of child molestation. I mean just randomly out of the blue. So let's say she's tried, the conversation didn't work, let's say she goes to the next step, mediation and the mediators, the intake folks call the neighbor and the neighbor says, Nope, not doing it. Which in this case sounds like that might be what would happen. So then is the next step police or is the next step, is it a civil matter or will the police say it's a civil matter and it needs to go to the court, go talk to a lawyer, or can you make that decision yourself based on what's going on? Speaker 2 (12:32): Well, I think since there's a legal issue involved, police is a higher escalation. So I would say that's a good time to be consulting with a lawyer about what are my options here? And you might have a lawyer write a letter to the neighbors and say, my client's figured this out. She's right, and we'd like to resolve this peacefully and easily. Do you have a lawyer I can talk to about how we can resolve this? And so keep it peaceful that way. Lawyers kind of add a sense of authority to it. And it's not the same as police coming to your door, but it's a next up level. That's how society works is we have rules and laws and when we enforce them, society works. And that's a big part of dealing with bullies is there are rules and laws and you do have to follow them. You're not exceptional. No one's exceptional. You always all have to follow them. So I would say going to a lawyer next, but I've seen those kind of cases get resolved in mediation. I think it's worth the try and to see if the intake person can get them to come in, but if not, that would be the next level I'd recommend. Speaker 1 (14:02): In some cases, let's say it's a case where they're playing their music loud intentionally, which we hear about cases like this or start to hoard on their property to a point. There's rats. We start from the hoard and then come across into the neighbor's area and they just don't want to do anything about it. And even when approached, they almost torture their neighbor with it. If it's a bully, they might continue to do it just for the sake of driving the neighbor crazy. And so they can escalate these things. Bright lights we're hearing about people turning on very bright lights at night to right into someone, a neighbor's window and refused to stop it. So these kinds of things maybe are more on the after you've tried some steps that we've discussed here. Maybe that's when you would call law enforcement. Speaker 2 (14:55): Well, at that stage, if you've gone through a lawyer and they've ignored that is then having police come and say, this is against the law. You may have to be served a citation. You may go to court to get them served with some kind of restraining order on their lights, et cetera. And some bullies are really paranoid, and so they might have all these bright lights around their property. They think their neighbors are out to get them, when in fact the bright lights are really upsetting their neighbors. That's the kind of thing ideally in mediation is calm down, meet the neighbors and don't mistrust them so much. But yeah, so here's where you might have the police serve a warrant or serve a restraining order, something that has some legal consequences and the person would be called into court as a criminal matter, perhaps the line, the property lines of civil matter, but there's some things reach the level of a criminal matter disturbing the peace. And it's interesting, you can get restraining orders for disturbing the peace, not necessarily that hard, and these kinds of things might bring that out. They violate the restraining order, they can actually go to jail. So there's legal steps and that's a lot with bullies. And in the research for my book, so many cases end up being stopped at the legal level, sad to say, but that's what they're there for, stopping bullies. Right? Speaker 1 (16:41): We did receive a listener question, so thank you for sending this in. I'll read it and then we'll take our break and we'll discuss it when we come back. So when I was 10, my neighbor, an 80 something year old man, shot and killed one of my dogs. When I went looking for my dog, I asked him if he had seen my dog and he told me he had shot a dog like that this morning, frozen. I asked where he was so I could bury him. The old man told me that his body was in the dumpster and that he would shoot me too if I didn't get off his land. I ran through the woods back to my house screaming out loud in anger and punching trees until my knuckles were torn and bloody. When I got home, I called the police and the canine unit came out to my house. He retrieved my dog's body and I buried him. The worst part was that my dog was very sweet, and I do know that generally sweet dogs can be threatening, but it was very against his nature. My neighbor had tied him up and broken all of his legs, then shot him point blank in the chest with a shotgun. Now this is extreme and we do understand listeners that this is extreme, Speaker 2 (17:51): But this exists, this exists Speaker 1 (17:52): It, this exists. I have never felt more rage in my life. My mom took the man to court and he was charged with animal cruelty, and the judge asked how much money I thought the dog was worth. I was dumbfounded and croaked out that I didn't want money, I wanted my dog. The neighbor was fined $500 and I made him pay it to the local Humane Society. So it kind of goes on a little bit, but that's the crux of it. We'll go to break after this, but what's interesting, this happened to me too, bill, I don't know if I've ever told you about this. So let's take our break and we'll come back to tell you. Speaker 1 (18:32): All right, we are back. So we've talked about this. We just talked about this story of a dog being shot. And so what happened to, in my situation, I was about 16 when a neighbor came by and I lived out on a farm. My parents were gone into town or something and he said, your dogs have been killing my baby calves and the offspring of cows. And I mean, it does happen in rural life sometimes, but these two dogs in particular were really very sweet, similar to this story that I've just read. And the one wasn't even big enough to take down a calf. He said, I'm going to shoot those dogs if you don't do something about it. Alright? So when my parents came home, about an hour later, I told them about it, and then I went over to our, we had a ranch a few miles down the road with another home, and I went over there and those two dogs were laying dead in the yard. Speaker 1 (19:40): And for a 16-year-old girl, that was devastating. It would be devastating for anyone, and it wasn't even an hour since he made the threat that he was going to kill these dogs. So when it comes to pets and especially dogs and things, we can take it even more personally and probably want to retaliate. I know I've never forgotten about it when I've seen this man a few times in my life, that's what I think of. Was he a bully? I don't know. I don't think so. Maybe in rural life. That's just the way it is. But so if we go back to this story of someone who's just shot this young boy's dog and he admits to it but then threatens to shoot him, that's a stunning, downright bully. Speaker 2 (20:26): Yeah, I think these are bullies, even the one that you experience, because what it is is inflicting pain and suffering on another person. In this case you by killing your dogs, certainly pain and suffering for the dogs, and this is why I think it's so important to understand. I think bullies aren't really thinking things through that this is the way they see the world and they feel justified. I had a right to do this. It's my land, it's my calves, it's my peace of mind, my quiet space, whatever it is that this is part of the problem. There's a continuum of bullies, how severe and how not severe they are. And these are some pretty severe examples, but I think we have to operate from realizing there are people like this out there and that they need to get reigned in and they need to have consequences. Speaker 2 (21:27): The fact that the bully in this story had to pay $500 would I think be a consequence that will slow him down in the future. And while it's sad that this happened, this may be the best possible outcome because it's a consequence related to the crime. The punishment should fit the crime. I've said earlier, there's six things, six strategies in my book. Recognize the pattern, pull the plug on any way you're helping set limits, impose consequences, but then educating others. That's the fifth strategy is because I think as a society we're seeing bullying increase and we're seeing copycat bullying, and what we need to do is start doing the tighten up. We've got to set more limits and impose consequences, and then everybody will feel safer when anything goes, people don't feel safe and bullies. I have this saying that where there are no rules, only bullies will rule. Speaker 2 (22:39): And so we need a little bit more rules and a little bit more imposing consequences for the rules that already exist. But that's why neighbors, there are a lot of rules that cities have rules, but they often don't get enforced and people don't know about them and don't speak up about them. But you want to catch things sooner and realize that people are affected by dogs, by noise, by parking, by leaves, and have empathy for each other. That's part of the human being is to have empathy. Although we have to have empathy for bullies who often lack empathy. It's be strategic, be strategic, not judgmental. Speaker 1 (23:23): That's my next question is if I'm listening to this and I've been that person that's harassed my neighbor, I mean, we have heard these stories about someone just parking one inch closer to the neighbor's property every day just to drive them crazy or play the music late at night just to drive 'em crazy, whatever is, if I'm listening to this podcast and I'm that person that's been doing that, am I going to connect the dots that that's bullying behavior? Speaker 2 (23:56): Probably not. The bullies don't connect the dots. That's part of the problem. Or they disconnect the dots. They figure, oh, it goes back to somebody else. It's their fault. I have to punish them. And I did put that in my book, is the idea of connecting the dots. That's what they do. That's the problem. That's the piece that's missing. I love that because yeah, it's an interesting concept because bullies talk a lot, I find, and what they're doing, they're often telling a story that's not accurate that makes it other people's fault that they did their own behavior. They don't see, no, you did your own behavior. You can't hold someone else responsible for how you behaved and what you did was hurtful to me or hurtful to someone else. Bullies seem to be missing those connectors in a way. Some of them learn it through coaching and consequences, but others just really don't have it. And people have to realize they don't have it and they're never going to have it. And society needs to be protected from them, especially like antisocial bullies that often end up in prison because they can't stop themselves. So society has to stop them. Speaker 1 (25:19): Yeah, it's interesting. As you were talking, I started thinking of all the shows I've watched, and if you've listened to our podcast for any amount of time, you know that I really enjoy true crime. So it used to be reality tv, and then I got bored with that, and now I am onto True Crime and I've watched all kinds of series Buried in the Backyard, cold Justice, you name it. And what's fascinating, I think, and kind of shocking to me is just how many murders there are very extreme acts in neighbor disputes. I'm not saying this to scare anyone or get you to think your neighbor's going to kill you, but just to say that they can escalate. And so I think the cautionary tale there is to think about those things like you've talked about Bill talked, where you take a stepped approach to taking care of business in a way that protects yourself and doesn't escalate and make the conflict bigger, but in some way contains the conflict. Speaker 2 (26:27): Yeah, that's like the steps. Talk to your neighbor first, unless it's not safe, try mediation. Unless you think it's not safe. Go to the police what you need to do if it isn't safe or go to a lawyer. There's actually one step that I didn't mention and that is moving, and I hate to say it. I do a lot of consultations and I can think of two cases where I told people, move, I just can't see any better answer. And it's not right that you should have to do this, but this is usually when people have exhausted themselves at court and the court isn't intervening or the person isn't accepting the consequences, the court imposes and is willing to have interest on penalties grow and come up with new things. I know people have come up with, okay, I'll sell my house. The bullies said, okay. I remember one community, 12 people went to court and ended up getting him. He said, I'll sell my house. They go, oh, finally relief. Well, guess who? He sells his house to his girlfriend. So now his girlfriend owns the house and he still lives there. And it's like, no, that's not enough. That's not it. But sometimes you just get exhausted by the endless, this is, the bullies are unrestrained, Speaker 1 (27:59): Relentless, Speaker 2 (28:00): And even the restraints you put in place, sometimes they work, but sometimes they don't. And that's the last, sometimes a move is the way to have a happier, healthy life. So I want to make sure I included that, but that's in the extreme scenario, but that's certainly better than people getting shot. Speaker 1 (28:19): Absolutely. You just have to calculate out and weigh out what's more important, some peace of mind, or continuing to just live next to some really just live in a mess, right? No one likes to have to run into a bully every time or try to avoid somebody every time you're leaving your house or coming home or just want to want to enjoy your backyard or have a garden party or something. And it's just not possible. So yeah, I mean, there are decisions that each individual has to make, but that was kind of what I brought up in the situation with the fence and the neighbor. I said, well, how much does this person love her house? Is it worth it to move? And I guess she really loves her house, so she'd prefer to settle this another way, but it does make it difficult. So I think with that, we'll wrap this one up. Take a look at the bully webinars we have coming up in September, October, and November. All the links are in the show notes. If you're interested in learning more about bullies, this book is fantastic. Our New World of Adult Bullies, how to Spot Them, how to Stop them. Speaker 1 (29:49): Please do send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or through our website on high conflict institute.com/podcast. We'd love it if you tell your friends and colleagues about us. Give us a like review, a thumbs up, anything like that where you listen to our podcast. Until next time, keep learning. Keep practicing the skills, be kind to yourself and others. Set lots of limits. Read this book while we all try to find the missing piece and keep the conflict small. It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm for high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.