When a woman betrays a man - she feels no guilt.
The she starts to hate the one she left :

He did nothing wrong. No cheating. No violence. No cruelty.
One day she simply walked away — toward someone else,
a new life, “something better.” For a while, it felt easy.
Then something shifted.

She started getting angry. At him. At the man she’d left behind.
She began searching his past for proof of his fault — and she found it.
Invented it. Remembered it. Inflated it. Because that’s easier.

Gottman calls this cognitive rewriting of the past: a process
where someone retroactively constructs an enemy out of a partner
they themselves hurt. The mind protects itself —
and turns the one who caused the pain into the one who suffered it.

This isn’t weakness. It isn’t malice. It’s a mechanism.
It runs automatically, without permission. And the deeper the inner pain — the more convincing the rewritten version of the past becomes.

From the inside, it sounds like this: “He was cold.”
“He never understood me.” “I was suffocating.”
The longer it goes on, the more real the story feels
— because it gets repeated, over and over, until it becomes truth.

Meanwhile, the man is searching for what he did wrong.
And he can’t find an answer. Because he was rewritten
into the villain without ever being part of the process.

Psychologists have found that people who cause pain
often experience shame more intensely than those
who were hurt. Shame is unbearable — so it transforms into anger.
Like a blown fuse: the system protects itself at any cost.

loriktal1971