My father always just supported what my mother was doing. And my mother tends to move on from fad to fad pretty quickly. I'd say outside of a few really hysterical outbursts over the years, I never really felt unsafe. The best modern analogy I can put is like being with somebody who watches Fox News all day and listens to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck in the car on the way to/from work and gets all spun up over whatever the issue of the day is and every once in a while throws a hissy fit about the end of America or whatever.

Same basic mechanism and response, just different subject material.