Girl, get yourself a nice pair of stomping boots and go to town!

Beyond that, know the law and know your rights. They can make noises, it sucks that you can hear them but maybe figure out a new apartment to work towards and move again once you save up if you have to. If there’s a noise ordinance in your town you can record them violating it during quiet hours if that happens. They can’t threaten you physically or verbally, if that happens tell the cops and then inform management.

Had this problem at one point with upstairs neighbors who outside of making noise also did other insane shit such as trying to use my ground floor patio as a staging area for furniture they intended to winch up to their 2nd story condo without any consent from myself or the building management because apparently trying to winch a 200 LB armoire over a flimsy railing and denying someone else access to their patio was somehow easier in their minds than riding an elevator with it 1 floor upwards.

Record it, every time it happens and note the date and the time. And then every time it happens, send the documentation to your board/building manager pursuant to whatever noise bylaws you have. Eventually, someone will agree it is an annoyance and then they will get warned, and then when they don’t stop, they will get fined.

In my case it did take a fucking year, but because fines at my condo double per infraction, so eventually they were essentially evicted by proxy because the fines were likely into the tens of thousands and they couldn’t afford to continue living there the way they were.

The last of the many arguments I heard from them through the ceiling was when they were trying to move out, and between the two of them they couldn’t seem to manage carrying a bed frame down their hallway 10 feet without scraping the fucking shit out of their walls and started accusing each other over whose fault it was.

Lastly, look into “Mighty plugs ear plugs”. They are the best ones I have ever found, and gave me some respite from the noise. If you feel as though you can’t when you sleep because you won’t hear the alarm, go look for alarm clocks made for deaf persons that have a vibrating mattress pad. Great combination, you can sleep completely deaf but still wake up on time.

Don’t just fucking sit there and take it while reasoning with morons like them. If you have to, get the police involved. If the landlord sucks dick at handling things, like mine are, you’ll have to go that route. Enough calls and enough of a background history that is made on these people, the more police will be pressured to do something about it since they don’t like having to revisit places or people that are a problem.

Change your thought patterns. Minimise their actions in your mind.

They are not “psychopaths”, they are just “idiots”.

They do not “counterattack”, there is no “attack” from your side. They are just “being a nuisance”. Frame all the bumps and thumps as renovations if you want.

When they make a noise, turn UP your tv, just a little, so you can hear it over it. “Gee those renovations of theirs are a bit noisy, maybe I should put in a complaint.”

When they rattle the ceiling of their apartment, “Hey it must be time to vacuum, thanks for reminding me. I’ll do it now while you’re renovating and making noise so it doesn’t disturb you too much”.

“I hear that plants respond to music so I’m just going to leave some on for Ferris, my pot plant, while I go out shopping for a few hours this morning” - Not too loud, just loud enough for Ferris to enjoy it. If you hear a lot of thumping it must be just them taking the opportunity to renovate while you can’t hear them. I do hope they don’t damage their ceiling with all that thumping while you’re out, oh well.

All that activity on their part takes a lot of energy, your activities take very little. Which one do you think is going to end first?

Make as much noise as you want.
Record the retaliation.

After you have 2 or 3 go to your leasing office.

You have as much right to quiet enjoyment of your apartment as they do.

Probably don’t be a dick and make extra noise, but moderately loud TV and normal walking is not an issue.

I’m so sorry

Step one: Document, Document, Document.
Step Two: Did we cover documentation yet?
Step Three: Complain, with documentation, to the apartment management.
Step Four: Document.

Recordings such as video and audio are useful. Just keeping a log of all such interactions can help as well. But, you want to have the documentation to prove your side of things. If things go really sideways and you end up in court, the judge won’t give a fuck about what you say, only what you can prove. Be ready to prove your claims. As we say in the DFIR world, “logs or it didn’t happen”. Then, start complaining to management. And document (keep a written log, you probably won’t be able to record) your interactions with management. All logs should include date, time, who you spoke with, what you spoke about and any actions which management said they would take or actions you said you would take. If it’s an option, keep your communications with management in email. Both the sending and received emails will be timestamped and the headers will provide a reasonable record showing that the emails were to or from management controlled email servers and addresses. And they log what was talked about quite nicely.

Ultimately, the goal is to move this from being your problem to management’s problem. And it’s possible that your problem neighbor is also someone else’s problem. If management has three tenants all complaining about the same neighbor, they have more impetus to take action against the problem. Of course, this assumes a neutral management, which can be an open question. But, this is likely the least costly way to resolve the issue.

To me it sounds like you may be assigning motives to things that aren’t as evil as you perceive. Just live your life and be a normal, respectful level of loud. You’re going to hear your neighbors in an apartment. Accept it and move on. Unless it’s past quiet hours and affecting your sleep I don’t think there’s much you can do, practically.

Are they confronting you in person or something? Have they said anything to you or do you just hear noises?

First, you should probably lessen with the therapy speak. This is a personal thing but the commodification of therapy is actually a huge problem that we should talk about. But I digress.

Second, maybe clarify this up a little bit? Are these people your roommates? Your upstairs neighbor? Downstairs? Next door? I genuinely don’t know who you’re talking about.

But (I’m assuming these are your up or downstairs neighbors?) I had a buddy who was in a similar situation where even the microwave beeping would cause the upstairs neighbor to thump on the floor. He just had to complain to the apartment complex a bunch (basically every time it happened, as it happened) and eventually they got it sorted. The upstairs neighbor stopped being annoying and moved out shortly after.

In an apartment you will hear your neighbors and it’s unrealistic to expect them to be perfectly silent all the time.

Go to the landlord and provide your account of what is happening. Document as much as you can, and stop trying to figure out why they are so upset. You’re not going to discover some hidden rational explanation, nor is that your responsibility. Protect yourself.

This may be horrible advise but they are doing this because they can get away with it. You back down everytime they escalate things and they know it. They are afraid of consequences because they stoped the floor vibrator incase they got sued or the police came just not from you.

You need to stop backing down record the noises, get security cameras that record 24/7 if you can and get evidence to give to the landlord or the police.

Better yet get a family member or a friend who doesn’t mind conflict to hang out for a few nights a week and have them go and talk to them whenever they pull this bs. After a few times they will back off. It’s better to do this yourself but it sounds like you need to work on your confidence before you can do this yourself.

It’s an apt: shared walls, shared noise. The only way to avoid this is to move into a home that doesn’t have shared walls and even then you’ll have noisy neighbors.

Be as loud as you need to be within reason.

Don’t worry about how loud they are, and ignore any retaliation until someone talks to you about your noise levels.

Consider wearing slippers indoors.

Consider buying a rug.

Go on the offensive, record every sound they make, catalog every interaction ,aggression,etc in a journal.

You live above them, you have the advantage in any sound based battle.

If they make noise record and report and then follow up on each of your reports. Call the leasing office every fucking day until its resolved.

I would agree to complain to a third party. The landlord, and if they don’t do anything, try whatever the equivalent of a local government/city council/etc is in your country. Depending on your legal system, this may be a dispute that could be resolved in a civil court if escalating to landlords/councils/etc goes nowhere. And also, clearly there is nothing you can do to stop them from making these noises, so stop trying, and be as loud as you want. They are already being as loud as they want.

Are you the only two households in this block? If not, your neighbours also have neighbours who will be annoyed by the noise. You could lodge a collective complaint to the aforementioned authorities, or you could as a group confront these neighbours, if you don’t expect them to be violent/armed. By “confront” I mean knocking on their door and talking to them about it directly, to be clear.