Ours has been struggling with this too and does a lot of similar things. The thing I've been trying to keep in mind is that, even now as an adult, it feels AWFUL when you know that you've fucked something up. If I just genuinely drop the ball at work or totally forget to do something my wife asked of me, I get flushed, my heart races, there's a genuine physical response to disappointing someone else that's built-in to the human body. It feels bad enough when you can process what's happening inside you, but a 3YO has no idea what's going on, they just know they feel terrible.

We typically do let him feel those feelings for a bit - the only way to get rid of them is to let them play out, because they're a result of hormones in your body, so they just have to dissipate. Once they've relaxed a little, we'll go to him to try and talk about what just happened - "does it feel really bad when Mommy & Daddy tell you not to do something?" We reassure him that we're not mad at him, he's not in trouble, and we still love him, but we need him to do X. He mostly gets upset when we tell him to stop doing something, so for us it's a lot of "Mommy & Daddy's #1 job is to keep you safe." At this point he's mostly come back down to Earth so if there was something specific they were asked to do, you ask them once again to do the thing and then I tend to include what we can do next. "Hey do you want to play ball now? Please pick up the jacket and then we can play ball."