The exact process that cheaters go through is explained. Item by item. And why, in the end, cheaters know what they have lost.
In short, unless they are a psychopath or have a narcissistic disorder, your cheating partner will know what they lost. No one can hide from the truth, no matter how powerful their mechanisms are (self-deception, self-justification, belittling the partner, etc.). The truth is undefeated and always comes out in the end, no matter how much we deny it.
And yet it moves, said Giordano Bruno, standing against the world and the most powerful forces then – church.
How To Make Your Ex Regret Leaving You
Let’s start with the hypothesis that you were an exceptional partner and gave your cheating partner everything they wanted and needed.
However, they cheated on you, and you broke up. Now, you sit at home and wonder if your partner may be unaware of what they had. Did you make a mistake by giving them everything when they didn’t even notice? Should you have given them something else? Are they now happy to be rid of you? Are they living happily with someone else? Is it possible they are so uninterested? Will they ever regret what they’ve done?
Thoughts swarm, and you can’t find the answer to the question: do cheaters know what they’ve lost because there is no clear sign they do?
Here’s the Answer- Yes.
Cheaters know what they’ve lost, but things work like this:
1. Someone cheated on you, and you were fair to them.
2. They were caught. They defend themselves, deny it, blame you, lie, cry, leave you…
What Cheaters Do When They Get Caught
3. This doesn’t change the fact that you were an exceptional person to them.
4. They still know you are a good person for them, but they must deny it to themselves. They must do this because:
- They messed up.
- They lost you.
- Their whole life changed.
5. This is too painful for their ego, and they have to preserve ego. The ego tries in every possible way to align our inner world with the outer one. If we’ve done something terrible, the ego will always find justifications for us and use every possible mechanism to prove we aren’t that bad. For instance, it will find reasons why we did it. It will claim people didn’t understand it right. It will assert that the problem isn’t with us but with those people (even with the hurt ones), etc. The role of the ego is to maintain our self-respect and a good image of ourselves.
6. The mechanisms used to save the ego are different:
- Rationalization: My partner doesn’t provide me enough support anyway.
- Denial: It didn’t happen the way you think; it was something else.
- Minimization: What I did wasn’t that bad.
- Negation: The person refuses to acknowledge what they did.
- Projection: The partner probably wants to cheat on me, so that’s why I did it.
7. We use these mechanisms abundantly and daily. The goal is to maintain a good image of ourselves, even if we deceive ourselves into thinking the partner is insignificant and they are to blame for everything that happened.
8. However, we have a certain amount of energy we wake up with in the morning and use during the day. That energy has to go to life’s necessities. Our inner world is a huge energy consumer.
📌 Remember, when you experience intense emotions, you have no energy left afterward. It’s like someone drained it out of you.
We obviously use our energy for life, dealing with both external challenges and the challenges of our inner world.
9. We use that energy, among other things, to maintain these mechanisms (the lies we tell ourselves).
10. When that energy is spent due to everything happening during the day, we can no longer maintain those mechanisms, and the truth comes to light.
The energy can be spent in the morning when we still have many other things consuming us. We have problems at work, face something else that is exhausting, etc. Or it can be spent in the afternoon or evening.
Usually, on regular days, it’s spent in the evening, and that’s why, the last two hours before sleep, we become exhausted, sad, and sentimental. There’s no more energy for mechanisms that improve our image of ourselves and our world. The image becomes truthful, real, and vivid (though not completely real, there’s so little energy left that not even basic optimism is sustained).
Do Cheater Feel Guilty or Remorseful
11. The truth stands right in front of us. Naked and as it is.
12. And in that truth—you were an exceptional partner.
14. Whenever energy drops during the day, the naked truth pops out. As soon as we’re not focused on self-deception.
15. This happens most intensely in the evening (energy spent) and at night, usually manifesting through bad dreams.
📌 To be clear, people don’t have bad dreams just because they cheated on someone, but because of all the conflicting situations within themselves. If we know we lost someone who was good to us, it creates an inner conflict: Am I really such a good person?
16. The only way this doesn’t happen is if the person is a narcissist or a psychopath. So choose: either the person is a psychopath, or they know what they lost.
📌 Narcissism and selfishness: Some cheaters don’t realize the significance of their loss because they are too focused on their own needs and desires. This makes them incapable of understanding what they lost, but the focus is on having a narcissistic and selfish person in front of them. Is it really worth lamenting that such a person, who doesn’t see others’ worth, doesn’t see you? These people are certainly not able to recognize other people’s worth
17. The essence is that the less energy we have, the less we can deceive ourselves and tell ourselves stories about how it doesn’t matter that we lost a good person.
18. This process repeats endlessly. As long as really challenging life situations occur, the person has to spend energy. When those happen, we are left unguarded and faced with the straightforward truth that we lost a good person.
📌 As people get older, their energy declines more.
📌 This remorse applies to all mistakes we make in life, not just cheating.
19. After that comes a period of suffering that can stay with us forever. I lost perhaps the best person I met in my life.
There’s no more self-deception, rationalization, minimization of the loss.
20. At this moment, the person can no longer deceive themselves. If they’ve realized they lost a good and valuable partner, now they can’t deny it anymore. Only briefly, but the truth is now burning and clear before them.
21. None of this implies that the person will tell you that they know what they lost and regret it.
22. You may never discover that the person regretted or realized what they lost.
This response answers many important questions: Do people regret hurting someone? Do they know when they’ve wronged someone? Why don’t they show regret? Do you ever miss cheaters?
Is It Worth Staying With a Cheater?
What’s interesting and ties well into this topic is that:
Cheaters often become aware of what they lost only after losing it. While they have it, they can’t compare their lives with those without it.
Again, the reason for this is the mechanisms within us. We have a short memory of life without that person, successfully deceiving ourselves that the person didn’t bring much into our lives.
But when we lose them, reality comes very forcefully into our lives, and then we can admit to ourselves what that person brought into our life or go through all the steps from 1 to 11 that I listed. And so in a circle.
But that doesn’t change the truth—that we had a great partner and now can no longer enjoy the benefits they brought to our lives.
How to Keep Your Dignity in Relationship
Cheaters can enjoy freedom equally or even more than a partner, no matter how exceptional they are.
I often mention that people are selfish beings and will always take the most for themselves. For some, it’s having a good partner and mutually loving and helping each other; for others, it’s having a lot of freedom. We are genuinely different.
If your partner belongs to this second group, no matter how much they see you as an exceptional partner, and that they are sorry for losing you, your cheater might still value the freedom they gained more.
Sometimes, reflection (studying one’s feelings and thoughts) takes a long time.
People need different things to understand themselves. Sometimes, they need experiences with other people, sometimes challenging life events, and sometimes self-analysis.
For instance, when people face new challenges or shortcomings in other relationships, they realize they have a good person by their side.
The only way for a cheater to improve their life is to admit the truth to themselves and perhaps to that person.
Of course cheaters (and people who make mistakes in general) can spin the cycle: I was wrong – but I have a better excuse for myself. This cycle is a huge consumer of energy, and it is not sustainable.
But they can do a better thing.
The cheater can say to themselves: Yes, I made mistakes and lost the best person I had. This brings relief in that the person no longer has to fight themselves and the truth. It’s not much, but it’s a lot compared to how much energy they invest in the fight.
Another benefit is that only when we tell ourselves where we went wrong can we have a starting point for not repeating the same mistakes and not doing the same thing to ourselves in the future. This way, we might not get the old partner back, but we might save a new one.
PS. This is also the only way to get back the old partner. Dee
