If it helps, my childhood trauma had to do with my dad and my sister clomping around the linoleum in the kitchen outside my room. My family would fight so often that I became scared of those footfalls and door-shuttings–I wished everyone would just leave me alone. So now I’m interpreting the noise as not merely noise but as a threat to me. Only there *is* no threat. In fact, there’s barely been a sound all evening. But they’ve made enough sounds late, at reasonable volumes (like shutting the bathroom and/or bedroom door), that I, in my hypervigilance, have worked myself into a tremendous amount of anxiety over it. I anticipate sounds, which produces far more suffering in me than the actual sounds (though the actual sounds serve as a sort of “confirmation” that my anticipation was right, even if the anticipation does not help me).

As an apartment-dweller, I really shouldn’t expect absolute quiet. I mean, *I* am not absolutely quiet. The people below me are simply living. So it’s my own hypervigilance, my own irrational fears, that are overtaking me. I practice things like breathing exercises and telling myself that there is no danger, I’m not at home when I was a kid…and it’s not my fault. I’m emotionally reacting to things based on old ways of thinking that were survival mechanisms growing up, but that no longer work and that now in fact cause me massive suffering.

I just spent about an hour making a list of things that I automatically think when hearing (or anticipating hearing) sounds from below. Then I make a list of reframing thoughts, thoughts I can replace the automatic thoughts with that are positive and accurate. The DBT book I have says to practice thought replacement coupled with relaxation techniques as often as I can. I’ve been doing it quite often, but I’ve also been mired in automatic thoughts, sometimes without even realizing I’m thinking them.

The automatic thoughts are easy, because I experienced so much hell, so much emotional abuse through the first 16 years of my life that the thoughts simply came as defense mechanisms. Was there fighting going on the vast majority of that time? Yes. Did my sister emotionally abuse me almost constantly for 16 years, while my parents didn’t know how to soothe me? Yes. So the thoughts and fears back then were justified.

They aren’t justified now. And yet I still think them. I’ve been countering as I said with positive thoughts and techniques, but I feel like I’m at the very bottom of an impossibly sheer and tall hill–I have no idea how I’m going to get through this.

And, if I moved somewhere else, who’s to say that I won’t run into a similar or worse issue?