1The person you love and the person who frightened you are one person, and you are not obliged to decide which of them is the real one. Both were in the room.
People tend to collapse this in one direction or the other. Either the frightening one is the truth and every kind thing was an act, or the kind one is the truth and that night did not really count. Holding both is harder, and it is the only version that allows honest accountability, because someone can own what they did without having to accept that it is the whole of who they are. Nobody is exempt from this either. Push anyone far enough and there is somebody in there they have not met.
Islamic evidence
Anyone who does evil or wrongs his own soul and then asks God for forgiveness will find Him most forgiving and merciful (Quran 4:110). The deed is called what it is, and the person is still addressed as someone with a way back.
“Yet anyone who does evil or wrongs his own soul and then asks God for forgiveness will find Him most forgiving and merciful”
Qur'an 4:110
Psychological evidence
A cluster randomised trial with 1,345 children tested a whole school approach built on mentalisation, the skill of reading what is going on in another mind, against psychiatric consultation and usual care for reducing aggression and victimisation. That such an approach was worth testing at that scale reflects how central this capacity is thought to be. It was a school trial with children, so it speaks to the idea rather than to what happens between adults at home.
Fonagy P, Twemlow SW, Vernberg EM, Nelson JM, Dill EJ, Little TD, Sargent JA. (2009). Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · doi
Review detail
Why it works. A person can face what they did when facing it does not require giving up their entire sense of themselves.