Today I wanted to talk with you about the (HUGE) effect that our varying state of mental wellness, or our mood, has on our relationships.

In a nutshell, I want to show you how your thoughts about someone create an emotional state that you project onto that person, irrespective of what’s really happening.

The premise here is that if your thoughts towards someone are kind and loving, you feel good and you feel loving towards them. If, however, your thoughts are critical and disapproving, you feel critical and disapproving towards that person.

Imagine that, in the above paragraph, we were talking about one and the same person, let’s say a romantic partner. You can probably accept that you have felt this set of contradicting emotions towards the same person, on different occasions.

You’d probably also argue that it is because the person, that you love, sometimes does stupid things, and that’s why sometimes you feel critical or disapproving towards them.

BUT the way you feel is never because of what someone else does or doesn’t do. The way you feel is ALWAYS caused by the thoughts you are thinking at the moment.

So you may say “ok, but my critical thoughts were triggered because of what he/she did”. Which would make sense. But here’s where the MOOD stuff comes in. This is something I learned from Dr. George Pransky, and it can be a game changer in relationships.

Your mood influences your thinking. Completely!

And there are no exceptions to this!

Here are two scenarios that illustrate this. I’ll use the female perspective here, but change it up to suit your relationship:

#1. You wake up in a lovely mood and go to work. Everything seems to flow beautifully throughout the day: people are extra nice and smile to you, there’s no traffic, the sun is warm and you just feel happy.

After work you come home and your partner is already there. One look at him and you know he’s not in a good mood. You calmly ask something of him, like the familiar “could you go get some milk please?” and he starts barking at you that he’s tired, he never gets some rest, he can’t read his newspaper in peace… (LOTS of cliches and stereotypes here, I know!)

Because you’re still in a high mood, you think “he must have had a really bad day at work” and you dismiss his harshness. You’re still feeling good and you understand that your partner isn’t himself right now, so his reaction doesn’t phase you.

You don’t take it personally. It’s not about you, it’s about him.

#2. Let’s go through the exact same scenario as above but, this time, you wake up in a terrible mood. You couldn’t sleep at all and you feel tired. Throughout the day you keep feeling worse, getting more aggravated. People around you seem very happy and carefree, which just irritates you even more! No traffic is good but the jerk in front of you doesn’t seem to know where the freaking accelerator in his car is! Even the sun is hitting you in the eyes! (LOL, this was fun to write! 😉 )

When you get home, you ask your partner to go get some milk and he starts barking at you. At this point, because of your low mood, you’ll make all sorts of meanings and come to all sort of (faulty) conclusions about what is happening. Conclusions like “he doesn’t respect me”, “I’m the one who has to do everything”, “why do I put up with him”, “maybe this is over” and all sorts of negative thoughts.

You take what he said personally and you may even bark back, starting a fight. This is now about you and what he did to you. But what happened in reality was just a clash of two bad moods!

From that low place, both of you defaulted to learned reactive patterns, which imply low levels of caring and understanding (of self and each other). With that lack of understanding, the two of you blamed the other one for what happened and for being triggered to feel the way you felt. When in truth, each of you was already predisposed to react badly because of the mood you were in.

Actually, you ONLY reacted the way you did BECAUSE of the low mood you were in.

When we’re in a high mood we see everything through that high lens: everything is cute, quirky, unique, good and we have a deeper understanding and compassion for the other people we interact with.

It’s only when our own mood is low that trouble can occur. We lose the deeper understanding and compassion towards others and start reacting from our old ways of insecure behavior.

If you want to go deeper into this, I strongly recommend getting Dr. George Pransky’s “The Relationship Handbook”. It’s a brilliant book that will deepen your understanding of your reactions towards other people, and it will help you get what we’re covering here in a much deeper way!

So, next time you react to someone, pause for a second, and then notice in what kind of mood you were in before. If it wasn’t a happy or peaceful mood, you can tell yourself that you’re seeing things from a low perspective and dismiss the conclusions or meanings you were making about the situation.

This “mood” understanding can help you turn around ANY relationship in your life, not by changing other people’s behavior, but by changing your understanding of where that behavior is coming from.

That doesn’t mean you condone and accept behaviors that go against you, but the mental meanings you previously made won’t be there anymore, and YOU will be free to make empowered choices instead of reacting from old patterns.

And you CAN do this!

PS: If you feel that you have a loooooot of baggage in your relationships that you want help with, then I invite you to come join us in the (Em)Powered Love Program and we’ll help you clear that baggage so you can be free to live a weightless and loving life from now on. ♥