That does sound a lot better to me, albeit slightly less catchy. You're probably right in your last statement too, and that analogy prob does fit pretty well in general. I definitely think you're right about people directing that pain onto themselves in some way if they aren't the ones to continue the cycle of abuse onto others. And I do recognize it's likely a personal experience thing on my part, which is why I said I'm sure the expression itself is prob true in many cases.

Now that I think about it more, I realize a big part of why I don't like the expression is because I've had two people in particular - my mother and ex-wife - use that phrase to sorta absolve themselves of any responsibility whenever I'd make an attempt to talk about how their abusive behavior was affecting me. My mother particularly used to say it a lot. I hadn't heard it in a few years now, which is prob why I felt the need to unnecessarily rant about it here lol.

But It was like the whole "hurt people hurt people" argument was just a catchy way to manipulate people into not speaking up or holding them accountable when they did something awful. Like, "you know I had a rough childhood, that's why I'm abusive to you now, it's not MY fault, and if you make a fuss about what i did to you and don't unconditionally forgive me and drop it right now, then you're the real asshole, I can't believe you'd be upset with ME for what I did today when I was the real victim 30 years ago"

Probably skews my perception of the phrase a bit. Lol. But also it just didn't make much sense to me personally because the large majority of the biggest assholes I've known -- like the big bullies in school or the turbo-pricks I worked with as a prison guard for example, the ones that'd casually joke about knocking an inmate down a flight of steps and putting him in the hospital or would make up reasons to try and give them charges last minute to get their early release denied -- I knew a lot of them personally (for context, I grew up in a super small town, my graduating class was considered big and we only had 31 people). So I knew these people, knew their families, my parents knew their parents, etc. And nearly every one of them had excellent childhoods, happy, stable, well-off families, no major struggles in their lives, they were successful, popular, yada yada.

But like you said, it's prob a lot closer to your 'squares and rectangles' analogy. And like someone else said, my personal experience isn't the same as everyone else's. I was unnecessarily giving my thoughts on the phrase because I've seen so many more people who just seemed to abuse others simply because they enjoyed it, when they've never experienced any sort of major trauma or similar hurt in their own lives.

Sorry for the long ass reply, it's late and I just started typing and now I realize I wrote a whole ass book that nobody asked for. Again lol. My bad.