I've been going through this with my W and my sense is that it is increasingly a real conflict for her - her statements seem difficult for her to spit out and when she does she is often in tears. She seems to need to rewrite the history in order to try and reconcile what she feels with what she knew to be true.
In some ways I've seen a progression, even over just three months. She started out talking about clarity, "a veil has been lifted and I see everything clearly now". She talked about needing to make a decision and seemed like D was a foregone conclusion. She seemed less like she needed to justify her actions and was more panicked... she described taking things from our house as leaving during a fire. It seems like it was pure emotional knee-jerk reaction.
Since then, she has slowly moved into more talk about being "confused" and "conflicted". She seems more upset when she is rewriting history, as though it pains her to do so. She often bursts into tears while justifying her position. In general she has gone from angry and bitter to sad (with flashes of resentment). I get the sense that the emotion is now conflicting more evenly with some sense of real memory and logic - and the only way to reconcile those two things is to start rewriting.
Does she believe what she rewrites? I can't know for sure. But I have corrected her on a few occasions (not about feelings, only hard facts) and it seems to really snap her out of it momentarily. She'll pause and have this, "oh, right, okay" look on her face before she searches for another way to justify - sometimes by wholesale rewriting and sometimes by blowing something tiny way out of proportion.
