This close to the experience it may be difficult to detach the emotions from the analysis of the experience and learn from it.  Detachment here does not mean not feeling the emotions you have only that you avoid attaching your sense of self to them. We have emotions we are not our emotions. We have experience’s we are not our experiences. (That can be a hard one to grasp, as its all to easy to define ourselves and or be defined by a single experience. )

You are not a ‘bad’ person because you feel bad or have done hurtful things to others. We all struggle and we all hurt the ones we care about most sometimes. Relationships are a crucible which will revel our best and worst qualities.  Shadow work (often projected onto the other) and mindfulness can help us separate the things that belong to us and the things that belong to our partner. Forgiveness, accountability, responsibility… are all tools that help us develop the ability to learn better, and learning better do better.

Sadly its a reality that it is often the pain of a relationship ending the pushes us to do the work that might have saved the relationship.

My experience and observations is that their is a tipping point when the past of a relationship becomes so heavy that only those where both those involved have truly learned to know themselves AND a have developed the art of Forgiveness AND have above, above average ability to communicate can over come. (Depending on those factors (and others) every relationship has a different tipping point that love, as understood in that experience, cannot over come. )  Love pushes towards life and growth, when the tipping point has been reached, LOVE may require a relationship to end if only to push us.

Their is a lot to unpack in your post, a lot that you might learn from. Keep writing. Keep a look out for your victim and villain story’s. These types of stories can shine a light on our own projections and fears, areas that might require work.

Other questions you might ask. Where in the relationship did you feel safe? Did you react or respond to you partner when you felt unsafe?  How so? How did your partner respond or react to you when they felt unsafe? Where your boundaries healthy ones?  How many of your boundaries were defined by fear and how many maintained by love? (Using the energy of fear and anger to maintain boundaries may be easier then using the energy of love. At least that has been my experience. )

I wish you well on your journey. Its sounds so odd… but LOVE opens the door to being able to be grateful for the very things you wished never happened.

From a interview of Stephen Colbert

“…he is the youngest of eleven kids and … his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10.”

“I learned to love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ”

Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.  I felt so guilty to be grateful’. But I knew it was true.

“It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can’t change everything about the world. You certainly can’t change things that have already happened.”

Consider that this is coming from a man who millions of people will soon watch on their televisions every night—if only there were a way to measure the virality of this, which he’ll never say on TV, I imagine, but which, as far as I can tell, he practices every waking minute of his life.

The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It’s our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”