Wife has left and filed for divorce

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"but what can I be doing now to show her that I will never be that abusive/controlling/oppressive husband again?"

You need to keep digging deeper as to why you behaved like that^^^^. There is nothing YOU can say that will change her mind. It is all about ACTIONS now. Someone told me early on that you can't talk your way out of something you acted your way into. Are you abusive/controlling/oppressive with others also?.

Rick, you're completely right. I feel like I'm on the right path in regards to joining the abuse program, consistently seeing my IC, etc. But I still need to figure out why I was so abusive before.

I think the root of my abuse/control issues is insecurity. I was afraid of my wife not loving me, of her disrespecting me, of her betraying me. I think I was always afraid of losing her, and so I often misinterpreted her actions and behavior as being disrespectful towards me. I don't know if that makes sense.

Sometimes I'd try to talk with my wife about our issues, but she would completely ignore me and shut me out without saying a word. When this happened, I would often lose my temper, so I think a big reason why I lost my temper was my inability to deal with my wife's emotional shutdowns.

Also, due to my insecurity, I had a hard time dealing with my wife's sexual past, even though it wasn't that bad. So when she did something rude to me, I wouldn't react just to the rude action but to all the resentment I already had about her past, and this would set me off. And then over time, there'd be more and more resentment in my heart towards her based not just on my feelings about her past, but all the other negative interactions that built off of the way I dealt with her past. And this resentment would then blow up when my wife was sarcastic or would be rude or stay out till 3 AM, for example.

It [censored] to realize all this. I wish I had controlled my emotions better. I never wanted to hurt my wife or blow up at her, ever. I would often apologize afterwards, but I never saw the emotional wounds that I caused in her. She wouldn't tell me. She loved me too much, I think, to fight back or to open up about how I was hurting her. And I think overtime she became afraid to tell me.