Surprised By The Callousness Of A Former Love Partner?

Josh and Rachel, both in their mid-twenties were together for a year and a half.
During that time everyone who knew them would describe them as really intense and into each other. Texts, e-mails and phonecalls would fly back and forth many times a day. They seemed inseparable.
Then one day, they argue. Nothing major, just the kind of stuff couples fall out about from time to time. Friction caused by different perspectives and different needs.
Rachel expected a cooling down period then a resumption of where they had left off.
Josh cut off emotionally and went looking elsewhere to meet his needs. He approached people on facebook and a dating site.
For Rachel it was as if Josh had a personality change. Where was her loving Josh? The man she had shared so many personal exchanges with? What really surprised Rachel was the sheer callousness with which Josh acted. It’s as if he didn’t care one jot for her, (‘his Rachel’s) feelings. How could he be so un-loving so quickly?
Clients, like buses, tend to come in threes. Recently I’ve seen three similar demonstrations of such callousness. I use the term callousness to refer to a person who can seem extremely callous in the pursuit of their emotional needs. There is a similar pattern in all three cases.
In my book ‘Take Charge of Your Life With NLP” I use the metaphor of the inner child to apply to the emotional self, and inner adult to refer more to the logical, rational self. The inner child, just like a real child, contains a wealth of emotional aspects and facets, but occasionally one aspect will dominate the limelight more than others. So we have the ‘hurt’ inner child (an adult who goes around projecting the hurt they experienced in the past); the ‘angry’ inner child (an adult who goes around taking offence at any slight hurt). And we have the ‘callous’ inner child.