(no subject)
Someone elsewhere on the internet asks:
What do you do when your partner and yourself are both in the "everything pisses you off" cycle of your respective mood swings? Feedback loops suck!!!
That was the cause of 90% of the fights between my sister and I when I was growing up. Mild irritation would be picked up on, reflected and magnified until it escalated. It's happened occasionally in relationships since, too - usually when my partners and I have had different, incompatible stress-coping strategies.
The best thing I've found, seriously? Time out. Even for adults. Activities of pretty much any engaging sort that you can do alone and not bother each other with for a while. If it helps, agree to check in after a while / occasionally and see how the other is doing.
Important to make a distinction, though: it helps to have a "called" timeout, not just "avoiding each other". If you make it an explicit, even formalised cooldown period, then it can help to establish a common basis of understanding, intent and expectation. Otherwise, it's very easy for cooldown time to turn into stewing-on-it time, and you come out swinging rather than looking to reconnect.
Sometimes a "we're just pissing each other off right now and need to get out of each other's hair for a bit" is just what my relationships have needed to stay healthy. (Whether I realised that at the time or not.)
[Brought to you by $Me Learns Things the Hard Way.]
What do you do when your partner and yourself are both in the "everything pisses you off" cycle of your respective mood swings? Feedback loops suck!!!
That was the cause of 90% of the fights between my sister and I when I was growing up. Mild irritation would be picked up on, reflected and magnified until it escalated. It's happened occasionally in relationships since, too - usually when my partners and I have had different, incompatible stress-coping strategies.
The best thing I've found, seriously? Time out. Even for adults. Activities of pretty much any engaging sort that you can do alone and not bother each other with for a while. If it helps, agree to check in after a while / occasionally and see how the other is doing.
Important to make a distinction, though: it helps to have a "called" timeout, not just "avoiding each other". If you make it an explicit, even formalised cooldown period, then it can help to establish a common basis of understanding, intent and expectation. Otherwise, it's very easy for cooldown time to turn into stewing-on-it time, and you come out swinging rather than looking to reconnect.
Sometimes a "we're just pissing each other off right now and need to get out of each other's hair for a bit" is just what my relationships have needed to stay healthy. (Whether I realised that at the time or not.)
[Brought to you by $Me Learns Things the Hard Way.]