I recently received a comment from somebody struggling with a neighbor noise issue.

I frequently receive messages from people struggling with anxiety and compulsions related to sounds. It’s something I struggled with as well. There were certain sounds that I could not be around. Although ERP and practicing mindfulness skills have helped me get over those issues, to this day, when I think about how those sounds bothered me in the past, my entire body starts to tingle. I couldn’t stand to be around them and it was a very physically unpleasant and frustrating experience. My entire body hated those sounds. Going through that experience of learning how to handle sounds was not only very freeing, but it helped me see how my relationship to sounds was as important to recovery as my relationship to anything else that I experience. Getting bothered and frustrated by any feeling we don’t like and then trying to control it is just another compulsion that worsens mental health.

The YouTube commenter thought that was funny. But a few days later, they returned:

There are so many mental illness symptoms that are exactly like having an invisible person walking around with you shouting things, messing up important things, threatening important people, annoying you, making it impossible to concentrate! That is exactly what it’s like. But this commenter was not feeling the accidental accuracy:

Now we’re having a teachable moment but it is, legitimately, so useful to understand the reality of the frustration that a person struggling with OCD experiences. The neighbor’s dislike of feeling contaminated is as real and as frustrating as the commenter’s dislike of listening to the neighbor wash. Both are experiencing real discomfort and both are experiencing a desire to stop that discomfort and they’re going to engage in behaviors that will only make their frustration worse.

To anybody reading this that is bothered by somebody else’s compulsions, I’ll repeat the point I made to the commenter: By understanding how difficult, strange, and unrealistic it might sound to consider getting over the things that frustrate you, the things you hate, the things that annoy you to the point that you have difficulty functioning, you can understand and have empathy for the challenges that anybody with a mental illness encounters as they try to overcome the judgments and compulsions surrounding the things that bother them. Their experiences are as real as yours. And if you can’t get over the things that bother you, how do you expect anybody else to do it?

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