Why Conflict Makes You Feel Like You Did Something Wrong

Kaitlin Kesler
Feb 9
8 min read

Do you ever feel like you may have been the cause or to blame when someone around you is upset or irritated? Maybe you wonder, “What did I do wrong?”, even though they could have internalized something prior, and are now showing you that something has come up to the surface. Do you see how you tend to react to those situations rather than quietly try to understand the deeper layer beneath the surface? You can see that sometimes you may jump to conclusions or blame, but beneath you may sense that there is some deeper issue that is bursting at the seams within the both of you.

Nonetheless, even though you may be somewhat aware, you are holding this sense of tension inside. It eats at you until you react or do something else to keep yourself from thinking about the situation. You see and know that “If only I were to do something to take this feeling away that it would feel better to just go and do that thing”. You would rather do that than attend to the emotion at hand that you are feeling inside and what you tend to gravitate toward. Am I right? But it only pushes you away from the task at hand which is to look deeper into your emotions and see that they were never to be ran from at all. Instead, they are there to be seen, surfacing for you to see that “Oh, this is just something I am feeling right now and that’s okay, I can sit with it for a moment”.

Your mind may scan over things that you may feel like you had done wrong and play the scenario over and over again in your head. You may over analyze it or say that “Maybe it was me who ruined everything”. But you need to know that nothing was ruined. It was heightened into your awareness. If you would never have had this situation occur, something that stirs you so much, you would never have had the motivation to dig deeper into some sort of relief.

The only problem is that you have been attributing that relief to outside sources such as running, walking, journaling, mediation, yoga, self-care..etc. After the self-care, when you are in a better state, you may go and feel the need to apologize, because you are still trapped in the feeling that you don’t want your partner to be mad at you and you must escape it. You may think to yourself that you could say “I’m sorry that I got so upset” and that will make everything better. However, you must know that the situation was not necessarily your fault in the first place, you are just apologizing to try to keep the peace and make the emotion go away for good. This may set yourself up for the next situation to occur again.

Where This Pattern Comes From

It is one thing to be aware of your emotions and it is another thing to know where your emotions come from. “See it from another point of view”, they say, “see it from this view above”. If nothing happened after a stressful situation, then we would have nothing to do about it. There is nothing more prominent than something that gets your blood boiling. There is nothing more important that can prompt you to do internal work more than something that you want to escape or avoid, for good.

Our emotional safety seems to be tied to harmony. We always want to escape or avoid something that is out of harmony with us rather than deal with the issue at hand. We can try all we want to in order to make it go away, but somehow or another it keeps resurfacing. It keeps reoccurring again and again until we finally take a better look and say “Okay, I’m ready to try something different this time, I’m finally ready to stop running away”.

We may have learned to monitor the moods of others because they affect our own. Not only do they trigger us, but they cause our moods to shift, and that is bad news for us. We may think, “We are the happy go lucky people who people please in order to keep the peace around us. How dare you disturb our inner peace?” Not only does other peoples’ moods affect our own, but deep down inside we may fear a sense of disconnection, which equals a threat to our safety.

We were grown up to believe that we needed others around us in order to feel safe in ourselves. Not only have we grown up thinking that if we only conform people will like us, but thinking “I make friends if I decide to not be myself, and that is how I can keep them.”

We want to please others and concede to others’ beliefs about us because we want to keep the peace. We want to be liked, we want the attention and we want the love that can be provided to us from another person. Even though at some point it may stir us up inside when we find it so exhausting to put on the façade. At some point it’s time to take it down. But if we do, would we find ourselves in a place without any friends or our partner around us? The fact that we feel danger and a threat to our safety means a deeper sense of abandonment still lives within us. We have learned that it is safe to have people around us at all times and therefore disturbing the peace is a threat to those around us leaving. When you see that sense of abandonment lies within you and is not dependent on your external circumstances, that is when the shift ultimately becomes clearer.

Why You Take Responsibility for Their Emotions

Empathy is a way in which we may become hyper sensitive to the emotions of others. When we talk about empathy, we are talking about taking on other peoples’ emotions as your own. They have always been living inside of you, waiting to surface at one point or another. They have been waiting silently until the perfect time, like when your partner decides to take out his anger on you. They wait for the time when you get into a confrontation with somebody and leave the room because you are so emotionally overwhelmed and angry.

This hyperawareness of other’s emotions does not have to be a bad thing. It is a strength. It is a way for us to inform ourselves of the emotional states of others and a way for us to gain a deeper understanding as to how others may feel. It can allow us to detect danger and it can allow us to be ready to flee a dangerous situation. However, this not only lands when we need it during survival, it happens during everyday occurrences with other people. This may in fact keep us in a state of fight or flight because we are always “on edge” or sensing if something bad is going to happen naturally. Imagine if you were always on edge, waiting for somebody to explode with emotions, which is an actual trigger of danger for you.

The control over the environment ensures your safety because it allows you to avoid a state of survival mode. You have been trying this entire time to avoid your emotions and the emotions of others so you would not feel a threat to your safety. We avoid feeling things that threaten our safety and we avoid the feelings of others that feel like a threat to our safety. We may think that if we could only fix the emotions in others, we can keep ourselves regulated. If you are always feeling a threat to your safety after emotions arise, then you can see how that would affect your own thoughts, emotions and behaviors. You not only escape through attempting to fix the situation (i.e., apologizing) but running to the next solution or quick fix to make the emotion go away all together.

The Self Abandonment Pattern

We only tend to leave ourselves when we feel a lack of something. It can begin to feel like we always need someone, something or to somehow make ourselves feel better to keep us from feeling weak or abandoned. Think for a moment that maybe you are no longer accommodating yourself, but accommodating those around to make them stick around. You may start to see that you are relying on them to regulate you, comfort you, or tell you the things that you want to hear so that you can feel important and loved.

If you didn’t need those external things, what could you let go of? Maybe you wouldn’t need to over accommodate or focus solely on them for love or attention. You wouldn’t need to abandon yourself and put your needs behind someone else’s. You wouldn’t need to walk on eggshells to prevent someone else from getting mad at you because you were only trying to survive. You would not have to wait for their approval. What if you could see that you were in fact the one who was the one calling for their attention each and every day, without giving attention to yourself? Or to see that you were in fact capable of providing yourself with exactly what you needed?

What Changes with Integration

The revelations were deep inside of you waiting to surface. They were surfacing now because you can no longer wait around for the next solution or quick fix to avoid or escape your emotions. That avoidance and escape is only allowing the situation to resurface again and louder until you finally come to the conclusion that it was never meant to be avoided in the first place. They were here to help you find inner peace within, the thing that you have been waiting for all along. They cannot help you stop the environmental triggers completely, but they can help you find a way to protect yourself from within, rather than relying on external methods and “keeping the peace”.

You were never meant to abandon yourself; you were meant to look at yourself fully, just as you are. Like any of us, you would have rather avoided them because you were only trying to survive. You were only trying to witness what you wanted to in order to feel safe. You were jumping to solutions and fixing every problem that surfaced just to keep yourself above the water. But what if the problems could still exist, even just for a moment without becoming drowned? We can trust ourselves to stay with our emotions instead of trying to fight them or avoid them. We can grow and evolve without giving our power away to everyone, everything else, and every other circumstance in our environment.

If this pattern feels familiar, you are not alone, and you are not stuck . My work is to help you allow yourself to be fully seen. It is to help you break free from the patterns that you have picked up along the way, that have been holding you back in an endless loop. This is the deeper work I guide you through in my book “From Shadow Into Light”. It is a compassionate guide to understanding your emotional patterns, integrating them and finally experiencing the relief that comes from true inner safety. You can find the link to my book here: