Emotional Liability & Self Awareness
- Supriti Parajuli
- Sep 24, 2025
- 4 min read
When Love Meets Our Storms
There are days when everything feels calm, almost deceptively so. The laughter flows easily, the touch feels warm, and for a moment, you let yourself believe that this peace will last forever.
Then, without warning, the storm rolls in. It doesn’t always make sense—why irritation turns into rage, why silence feels unbearable, why the smallest noise or word cuts deeper than it should. In those moments, it’s easy to believe the storm is stronger than you are.
What I’m learning, though, is that love is not about avoiding storms. It’s about what we do inside them. Sometimes we walk away to cool down. Sometimes we hold on tighter, even when our hands are shaking. Most times we fail, and then we try again.
I think the hardest part is realizing that being human means we are both the calm and the chaos. That volatility doesn’t mean we’re broken; it just means we’re still learning how to carry our weather without destroying what’s around us.
Maybe love isn’t measured in how perfectly we avoid mistakes, but in the quiet return—the choice to come back, to soften, to apologize, to listen. To believe that the person beside us can see both our storms and our sunlight and still stay.
The Cost of Unawareness
When we move through life without noticing what’s happening inside of us, the smallest things can undo us. An unspoken word, a delayed text, a change in routine—without awareness, these moments can feel like attacks.
When we react without understanding, we risk hurting the very people we love most.
This is why emotional intelligence matters. Not as some buzzword or self-help slogan, but as a survival skill for our relationships and for ourselves. The very first step is awareness: to pause long enough to notice what’s rising within us. Is it sadness? Is it fear? Is it shame? To name it is to begin to have power over it, rather than letting it have power over us. It will take maybe 10 times, 20 times: you'll get into an argument or end up hurting their feelings, you'll make mistakes. The biggest thing is: learn from the previous mistake, even if its something small. Do something different the next time to break that cycle. Obviously you don't want to purposely harm the person and label it as a "mistake", it has to be unintentional, and you HAVE TO notice what you did was not the right thing to do.
Dr. Jordan Peterson has an exercise that may be able to help with situations like this one.
Name your mistake, then spend some time defending yourself as to why you may have reacted like you did. "
I let myself suppress my emotions and then I blew up in front of my partner. My defense is that I didn't know how to process my emotions properly and was overwhelmed."
Then think about how you were guilty.
"The problem wasn't even my partner, yet I ended up blowing up on them anyway. They took the hit when it wasn't even their fault."
Then think about what you could have done different, and then what you WILL do moving forward. "
I could have explained how I didn't understand what I was feeling but I didn't feel good... I could have used any of the 5-6 chances my partner gave me to just talk about what was on my mind..."
"I WILL be more aware of who is around me the next time I feel like this. I WILL ask my partner for their help instead of pushing them away. I WILL take some time to talk to them about what is on my mind instead of pushing everything away."
I want to add another thing to this exercise because I feel like a lot of us that grew up in pressurized environments often tie our mistakes to our self worth and it becomes this dangerous loop. To counteract that, I think also thinking about what we did WELL in these situations helps us out: "I did step out of the room when I felt my anger rise. I did some breathing exercises by myself. I came back in and apologized for lashing out. I did take accountability for my actions and am actively working on not repeating the same mistakes again. I am working on and learning more about how I can process through my emotions before they build up"
The tricky thing about this is that you shouldn't use these as excuses or justification for your actions. They are only to be mentioned when you feel yourself tying your mistakes to your identity. You MADE a mistake, you ARE NOT a bad person. Its a bad day, not a bad life. Accountability and active work are key.
The feeling I mentioned earlier where we tie our actions to our identity falls under the emotion of shame. Shame has a way of cutting deeper than almost anything else. Shame doesn’t just tell us, “You made a mistake.” It whispers, “You are the mistake.” That’s why it can feel like a direct hit to our identity. When shame takes over, every misstep feels like proof that we’re unworthy of love, of belonging, of being accepted.
The "antidote" to shame is self-compassion. When we realize that having an emotion doesn’t make us broken—it makes us human. That the very act of slowing down, noticing, and naming what we feel is the beginning of freedom. I'll talk more about shame in another post, its a long one.
Hopefully this helps you to understand and realize that mistakes do happen, and they actually end up affecting the people closest to us: partners, parents, children. Which is also where a lot of childhood wounds come from. If you are wanting to break that cycle, the first step is to even recognize that you did make a mistake. Then, its best to learn about it: read books, watch videos, etc. Then, take active steps to make sure you're learning from your mistakes. Its a long process, it won't happen overnight. You also might lose people along the way, not everyone wants to be a part of that journey with you. Most of the time, its something you have to face alone. Also, I think the hardest part (for me at least) of all this is to live with the fact that you hurt someone close to you, and that can easily trigger the shame cycle. It's a fine balance between total self-loss and absolute self-inflation.
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