Can people have secret agendas hidden from themselves?

A married friend of mine is having an affair with a married man she met online. Very soon into the affair, she left an email to me on her computer screen describing the affair. She left the screen on as she went to do something and her husband found it.

He finally agreed to go to counseling, something she had been wanting him to do for years. A week or two later, she left her secret “lover” phone on the bed as she was getting ready to go to work. Her husband saw it and was upset, of course. He asked her what her lover had that he didn’t have.

One of her complaints had been that he never wanted sex with her. All of a sudden, he starts wanting sex every night. She keeps on reassuring her lover by telling him he is better than her husband.

Finally, after her husband put a lot of pressure on her, she told him she had cut off contact with her lover. But she kept on contacting him. Just before a vacation, her husband caught her on her “lover” phone. As a result, she cancelled a meeting with her lover and erased a special “photo shoot” she had just made to send to her lover.

Why does she keep getting caught doing basically stupid things? Could she be using her lover as a way to get her husband to rekindle his interest in her? Could she do this without even knowing this is her motivation?

I’ve been telling her to dump the lover and focus on her husband all along. She loves her husband, and I think she’s fooling herself about the lover. But she claims to love the lover more than she loves her husband.

Ok, this is a bit fictionalized, but it is based on situations of people I know. Still, I want to know if it is believable to say that a person could have a secret agenda hidden from themselves. Why would you believe it? How could such a thing occur?