Was it really a toxic relationship?

Hello everyone,

I am new here. I am trying to work through a separation from my ex-husband that is pretty much ongoing since last June and I keep finding myself second-guessing my own feelings and thoughts - anybody else experienced this? I have initiated the separation after 8 years of relationship (6 years married with a son that we had together) and my ex is still actively trying to negotiate his way through the situation although I have repeatedly expressed my wish to end any form of a romantic discussion between us.

As a background, I have decided to separate as after a few conversations and some soul searching I have come to the realization that I have been living in a toxic relationship for way too long but her retrospective reactions to everything that happened makes me second-guess if I was wrong?

Our ideas about relationships have always been very difficult from the get-go. He is more of a traditional male/female stereotype person (man being the breadwinner and not participating as much in the household duties) while I was raised in a much more "free" background. We constantly argued over him not helping with our son / me doing something "not correctly" around the house / he had jealous outbreaks frequently. During our arguments, he always belittled me and made me feel like I can't understand the world as well as he does, whenever I had different ideas about something he was never willing to yield / he was always right and/or constantly mentioned that other people were putting stupid ideas in my head.

Although I haven't been going out pretty much at all outside my work (i usually ran from work to nursery) he frequently stayed out until early morning getting very drunk without letting me know then sleeping through the day (he did have day offs during the week without our son being around due to his work schedule but my day-offs were always dominated by our son and my ex's demands. Every single time we had a big argument he threatened to leave me and my son and leave the country so we would never see him again. He has never been a particularly affecionate person and he often got angry when I got emotional or cried. We also had issues with the physical aspect of our relationship. After we had our son he repeatedly expressed his frustration that we are not intimate often enough on raised voices and that I should take his frustration as a compliment because he could just easily go outside and have sex with other people. Although I have not had the need or want for it, we did get into a regular routine of intimacy due to these arguments that pretty much ended up in rather traumatic (from my perspective) experiences (biting back tears more often than I care to admit).

Regardless all the history, I do sometimes question myself if I have been overreacting the situation or my concerns were legitimate, especially because in conversations afterwards he is very apologetic and he doesn't quite understand what he was doing wrong / after explanation he feels awful. Regardless, I still have it sometimes to date when I feel like he is being manipulative with his emotions and words and that's why I am struggling to move on from the relationship (and to be completely honest I do feel like I am sometimes clinging to it for no good reason)

Am I going completely crazy here? If this was indeed a toxic relationship, why am I having doubts/cling to the thought of it? I am completely lost!