Am I exaggerating?

When I see people's very negative reactions to my description of a specific incident in my marriage or when I get asked was he a narcissist or when people comment that he must have been a "jerk" or a "dickhead", my first reaction is to question whether I exaggerated the incident.  Even today, after over a year of distance and processing, after seeing through his manipulations, I still believe he wasn't that bad.

And so there is this internal battle trying to figure out where perception meets reality that maybe still gives him some benefit of doubt.  How much is my mind hallucinating to try and make sense of something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me?  How much has he gaslit me into his re-written version of our relationship?  It doesn't help that although I have now realized how much happier I can be without him, I wasn't unhappy in the marriage.  You would think if it truly was bad, I would have been miserable or at least unhappy.

I try to ground myself in contemporaneous writings I've found in journals, e-mails, letters, calendars, etc. but that is still my perception and it's hard to understand how big the gap might have been between perception and reality in those moments I made those notes.  I also try to ground myself in the concrete consequences to my physical health and how it has improved over the last year, something that has been quite dramatic, but can I truly pinpoint that to a specific cause?  Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

I hate the self-doubt.  I hate the struggle trying to figure out where I fall on the spectrum of how much I might have normalized some horrible behaviors vs how much I might be exaggerating how bad it was.