What happened with me is I could not deal with my emotions. I would get anxious about our relationship, and then seek affection, and feel spurned and rejected, get frustrated, and start acting passive aggressively. I wouldn't call my W names, I wouldn't physically approach her, but just that atmosphere of pressure was enough to set us down this path. I accept my role. Now I am at a place where I *can* deal with those emotions, I continue to learn and grow, and I feel really good about dealing with my issues.
As you might guess, this really resonates with me as well. WAW has mentioned a couple of times that she feels like I was gaslighting her, and was at times emotionally abusive - for basically the same reasons you laid out. Classic NGS stuff all the way down the line: anxious attachment, not being emotionally open, not communicating, not resolving issues..and on and on.
You're/we're doing the right things: we're accepting confronting our issues head-on, learning about them, doing what we need to do in order to not have them impact whatever comes next. It is true however that as much as we might beat ourselves up for not having these realizations earlier, it is not fully on us and so long as your sitch casts you as the abuser, I think you're right that those negative emotions and memories are going to overpower any thoughts of your positive contributions and qualities.
But it [censored], for sure. There's a great/brutal quote by Kierkegaard: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have." One of the biggest hurdles mentally is to not go back and think "Geez, if only I had read NGS earlier, things would have been so much better". That's just not the reality we face, there is no time machine.
And believe me, I'm typing that reply to you like a reply to myself as well. One day at a time, brother.
