One thing I can’t stand is being in a relationship with somebody who is prone to mood swings. It’s stressful living with different versions of the same person. You just never know what to expect from them one day to the next. Said one woman who was living with her moody boyfriend, “I have to wait until he gets up every morning to find out what kind of day I’m going to have”.
You never know what will trigger a person with a tendency toward mood swings. Perhaps they had a bad day at work. Maybe somebody pissed them off. They could have simply gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. People who are easily thrown off balance can wreak havoc on your nerves. Your knee-jerk reaction is to think “What could I have possibly done to set him/her off?” or “What can I do to make it better?” Your first instinct is to jump in there to try to fix whatever is wrong — but you can’t. You need them to snap out of it so that you can relax and be happy again but don’t get hooked on this emotional roller coaster. This is just the way some people are and it has nothing to do with you. If they try to blame it on you, it’s a form of gaslighting designed to make you feel guilty and second-guess yourself.
People like that can be on top of the world one day and everything could be so wonderful that you want to pinch yourself to make sure you aren’t dreaming. The next day, they could be so miserable that you walk around in pain, confusion and knots in your stomach as you bang your head against the wall trying to figure out what might have caused such a drastic change in their behavior. Don’t bother wasting your mental and emotional energy. You’ll never figure them out.
Those who have the tendency toward mood swings are never in stable relationships. They shut down on their partners for no reason at all. Then in the wake of the trouble they caused in the relationship, they go overboard trying to make things right. They leave heartfelt voicemails and text messages, full of apologies and tearful promises to do better, claiming that they don’t know why they do the things they do. They may tell you that they never loved anybody as much as they love you, that it would kill them if they lost you and that they hate themselves for acting this way. We happily accept their attempts to make things right, telling ourselves that we need to be more patient and understanding; we’re relieved that everything is back to “normal”, for the time being, anyway — until the next episode.
It’s frustrating because there’s no rhyme or reason to this behavior and no indications to know when it’s coming. It just comes out of left field without warning or notice. You begin to live in constant anxiety, never knowing what to expect from one day to the next. You go out of your way not to rock the boat and you get angry with anybody who sets them off, knowing that you’ll be the one who gets the brunt of it.
I once knew a guy who I’ll call Joe. Joe was easily thrown off balance by the slightest shift in his day. It could have been triggered by the fact that his favorite team lost a game, road rage, a bad day at work, an unexpected expense or something else that didn’t sit well with him. Even something relatively minor could ruin his day. When he got into a funk, he would retreat to another part of the house, sulking and isolating himself from his live-in girlfriend for days at a time while she tiptoed around him trying not to say or do anything that would ruffle his feathers. I believe he derived secret satisfaction from the power he had to make her walk on eggshells. He was taking his foul mood out on her, trying to bring her down with him because he was having a bad day.
The worst thing you can do is to handle such people with kid gloves. You’re teaching them that you’ll coddle them during their silent temper tantrums and it encourages them to continue using that manipulative tactic to keep you on edge and jumping through hoops to pacify them.
This relationship eventually ended and Joe went on to another relationship with a very different type of woman. They were only seeing each other for about a month when she got her first taste of his mood swings. She was over his apartment while he sat there in a silent funk. Instead of trying to cajole him out of his foul mood, she said to him, “You’re obviously not with it today, so I’m going to leave you alone to deal with whatever is bugging you”. She gave him a light kiss then out the door she went. She ended up getting together with a few of her friends. They ordered pizza and sat talking well into the night. Finally she went home, checked her cell phone and noticed several text messages and missed calls from Joe. She figured it was too late to bother getting back to him and she went to bed. First thing next morning, he was calling her again, upset because he couldn’t reach her all night. She told him that being with him when he was acting that way was bringing her down and she needed to get away from his negativity. He was upset that she didn’t stick around to “support him”. She said “I didn’t even know what your problem was, so how exactly did you expect me to help? Life’s too short to sit around in misery”. Guess what? His mood swings miraculously disappeared because they caused trouble for HIM. While it generated concern and pampering from his previous girlfriend, it created distance from his current girlfriend because she refused to be around him when he acted that way.
Somebody else’s attitude and overall frame of mind is never about you. You didn’t cause it. You can’t control it. Don’t feed into it; otherwise it will control you.
Mood Swings
