that's a fine line to walk! terra veers over when certain mental weather makes zir edgier than average and i've learned to be gentle in pushing back - "you're being sharp, love, you didn't mean that" - instead of "hey! stop it! that hurts!" which is where i started in those interactions. (those types of sharp come with an extra helping of "are you mad at me?" around some sort of routine thing - we're chatting online and work and i vanish for 20 minutes to do a work thing and i come back to "are you mad at me" and that has become my signal for a lot of information about zir internal state. almost never am i actually mad before/after one of those happens).