The greatest obstacles to healing and growth following intimate betrayal—abuse, infidelity, or deceit—are also the cruelest because they seem so unfair. Guilt is a primary example.
In hidden and overt ways, guilt permeates the initial hurt of intimate betrayal and insidiously undermines recovery. It affects all areas of life, especially other family relationships.
The reason that those who suffer intimate betrayal are likely to experience overt or hidden guilt has less to do with personal psychology or relationship experience than with the evolved function of guilt in close relationships. Most evolutionary anthropologists agree that early humans would not have survived without strong emotional bonds that made them cooperate in food gathering and predatory defense. Not surprisingly, modern humans are endowed with highly developed, pre-verbal, pre-rational, automatic reactions to behaviors that threaten emotional bonds. Guilt is primary among these.
In close relationships, guilt acts as a distance regulator. Get closer, and guilt disappears; put up walls, no matter how justified, and it strengthens underground.
The evolutionary function of guilt has nothing to do with moral judgments of right or wrong. So we cannot moralize our way out of it. Neither........