"I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place."
That's... not really true. The rest of your advice is sound and good, but there are bad people in the world that do bad things. There's also normal people, and between normal people, there's friction. Almost everyone I know who is successful in business has been burned a couple times, and you just need to learn from it. Certainly the original poster did some things wrong via contracts, relationships, etc, but it's also quite possible that he was just dealing with some rat bastards. There's a lot of them in the world, and unfortunately, you usually start by working with them. Established people typically only work with people with a great track record, so when you don't have one, you're usually working with someone else who doesn't have one. So you've got a 1 in whatever chance that a random person is a donkey chance that you're working with a donkey.