Hey all, been struggling with something recently and I guess I just wanted to ask this as confirmation that I just need to stop stressing over it so much, one way or another. My ex and I had a very messy start to our relationship. I won't go into too much detail, but he didn't treat me the best and at one point or another he recognized what he was doing wrong and made a real effort to change. We're actually on great terms now (broke up solely due to becoming long distance and not anything related to this), but something that really bugs me about how he used to be is just that I want to understand why he treated me that way at all. I feel like I don't really have any closure. I recently tried asking him if he remembered why he did a few specific things, and he claimed that he had completely blocked those memories out. He believed me when I said these things happened (my memory of a lot of it is very clear), but couldn't really say anything other than he was sorry and knows that he was terrible. I am honestly willing to believe this, but I'm curious if this is a known phenomenon? Most of what I've looked into in regards to repressed memories is about trauma survivors, and not so much people who are guilty about how they were in the past. I should probably add that we were in high school at the time, and most of what was really bad was about 5 years ago.

Tl;dr: Trying to understand why someone I care about hurt me at the start of our relationship, person genuinely regrets what he did but claims he can't remember a lot of it himself. Can this happen?