Hey @Have Hope

still taking time here, sorry. I'll respond to your post first.

OK to clarify I didn't mean anything about abuse is normal. What I meant is trauma involves the inability of integrating the experience in your psyche / emotionally / mentally etc. Because of how MUCH it's NOT normal, the experience, exactly. If abuse caused the trauma, same applies. So it takes a long time to process and integrate things in your normal sense of reality, like being able to accept it yeah. Accept that things happened like you said in your post. And then when you can do that then forgiving is like a "normal thing" too, sorry I still didn't find a better way to word that. But it's like, I meant that if you are able to deal with the experience then forgiveness could also be naturally following from it. I don't know, I haven't got to that point if I even can or should.

You speak of your responsibility and role and ignoring the red flags, your initial gut reactions etc. Tbh I think in hindsight it's too easy to say that we should've done all this and that all this was our responsibility and role in the abuse happening. I don't agree with that/I don't think that way though. I think that abuse involves manipulation and disorienting of the person being abused, so of course they can't pay attention to what they'd normally pay attention to. It's a very different place to be in, it's not the same mindset as when looking back to it later. I hope that made sense.

Of course, you do still have a responsibility, which is, learn from the experience and avoid it in future, yes. But I don't think there is any responsibility or role in the previous events. You may have made mistakes, but that happens to every human being. With mistakes all you can do is learn from them and try your best to not do them again. But you can't blame yourself for having made mistakes. Now if you did do something knowing full well that it's a bad idea then you do have responsibility for that in retrospect... but that's not the case with being abused. And recognising that abuse happened, it actually is already taking a stance that you are not to blame for what happened. Or what happened would not be called abuse.

So... I am glad that you got past these bad experiences. These guys definitely sound crazy bad. The first one sounds like he had a lot of psychopathic traits yes. Maybe the second one too, but you did list a lot of psychopathic traits for the first one (besides narcissism: being a pathological liar, stealing, impulsive, irresponsible life style).

You say the lessons for you are 1) love yourself enough 2) to not ignore the red flags. I agree, good lessons. I think in my case it would be, things like (not a complete list), consider my own emotions first over other people's emotions, and face all the bad traits of people ie. be willing to integrate them into my image of their person. (I do see bad behaviour in the moment but integrating them into the character of the person is another issue. Previously I would only do it for very obvious ones, and I was not aware of which other ones are also red flags.) This might be the same things you talked of, in another flavour.

I don't think I fully understand the part about forgiving oneself or forgiving the abusers. When (about 2 years ago...after about 1 year of No contact) I thought of how the romantic one had unsatisfied needs they tried to fulfill, would that count towards that?

Also, releasing the pain of the experiences... yeah it's like you don't want the pain, it's the last thing you want, and the one thing you most want to know is HOW to get rid of it. That's at least how it's been in my case. But of course it takes a long time of processing through it all, all the experiences, putting the puzzle together, getting free of the manipulation bubble, finding and dealing with the emotions, etc...