Sweetichick, I will tell you what I am coming to learn about myself. I do a lot of drinking AT a problem/person/situation. What happens with that is that absolutely nothing changes with the problem/person/situation, I only hurt myself. Most recently, my relapse of about 7 months ago, and then my most recent relapse of about a month ago have been instances where I drank at my ex psychiatrist and the pain and loneliness I feel over that. Absolutely nothing positive came out of it. I didn't forget anything, I didn't feel better about anything, I only felt worse for relapsing.
I think a lot of us drink to try to push out unwanted thoughts or feelings, but does that really work anymore? I know for me it doesn't. I didn't forget about anything, in fact drinking only magnified everything. I behaved ridiculously, sent messages and made phone calls I regret, became obsessive and even more angry and hurt. Now, not drinking does not mean I will forget about him/the situation either, but at least when I am sober I don't do anything stupid and I can work with my new psychologist with a clear head to try and put this sick story behind me.
We have a tendency to expect that not drinking will mean everything will be great, which is often not the case. We have to remember that there is still work to be done on ourselves. We can only do this work properly by doing so with a clear and sober mind. After that the good stuff follows- look at all the people here with long term sobriety who bang on about how great life is... I don't think that all of these people have signed up fro accounts here in order to trick those of us still suffering, do you? I mean really, do you think they are lying to us? I don't. I believe that they too suffered as we did, had to put in months if not years of hard work and only then they came out on the other side. We can't get into this cycle where if things don't immediately become wonderful we think "ah, ok, this not drinking thing is not working, I should just go back to drinking then" No! It takes time, we have to give it time.
This situation with your neighbour is toxic and damaging to you. And girl, do I ever understand you. I recognise my own craziness in this maddening obsession I have over analysing what went down with my ex doctor. But me drinking is not going to change my doctor (which is the outcome I want) and drinking is not going to change your neighbour (which is the outcome you want) so what do we do now? We can't change them- by drinking or by not drinking. We can change what we want and how we behave. We can decide to get better mentally and physically so we come to a place where these people with whom we participated in a toxic relationship with no longer have such a large influence on our moods or our feelings. How do we do that? We work on ourselves. We take a deep, hard look at OUR part in whatever it is that happened. We heal from what WE did. We learn to never make those same mistakes again. We learn to be better people. Again, we cannot do this work if we are drinking.