I’m so sorry, OP. Sounds like past trauma has moulded your present views and it's really sad. It’s a horrible situation for you.
Fwiw, I’ve been sexually assaulted and raped, and I had quite the tricky childhood but I still happily say hello to everyone. There’s a homeless guy who sits outside the station next to my work who I ended up catching up with every week, just from that one hello. He bought me a box of Celebrations for Christmas and wrapped it - I shared it with my team. He knew I was having a girl before we did, from the position of my belly. We talked about sparring techniques, our current dramas, his kids. I bought him bacon and mustard barms and tea with so much sugar and syrup in, you could stand your spoon in it. When he committed suicide a few weeks ago, I was in pieces…as were many others he also spoke to, who he had built relationships with.
He didn’t try to assault me. He didn’t stalk me. He didn’t try to rape me. He was just a guy…a guy with mental health issues that got the best of him.
If I’d let my past experiences dictate my present, I would never have spoken to him. Never known him. And I’d have been the poorer for it. I could say the same for the groundskeeper over the moors when I was doing a March-time solo unsupported 80mile trail run and tripped into a puddle at nearly midnight, killing my headtorch, phone and Garmin 🤦♀️. Being met with the barrel of a shotgun on his front doorstep was certainly unnerving but he helped me dry off, sat me in front of a fire with mugs of tea and chatted about disappointing parents with life choices for a couple of hours until my tech was restored. Or the man who was always a couple of stiles ahead of me on another solo run, who waited for me after a while and asked if he could walk with me and told me all about his life with his wife…whose ashes he had just scattered in their favourite spot. Or the ex-squaddie who was bivvying at one of my stopover points in the middle of nowhere - he’d lost his civvie job and decided to walk from coast to coast to try and find a job on the other side of the country and remember that he had worth, he could achieve things. Or one of the many, many others I have talked to in wild, remote places, or late at night on city streets, or walking through town or on the bus or anywhere else really.
My FIL before he died was a smoker who stood in his doorway for hours a day and would say hello to every person he saw - the man could talk to anyone and loved nothing more. There’s a guy in the town my mum lives in who spends much of his time outside his front door, rain or shine, and passes a word with every person who walks past. I would always say hello whenever I walked past as a teenager - he was lovely. Still is now 30 years later, as far as I can tell!
OP - you can let your past define you. Let your fear control how you view every person. What you went through sounds beyond traumatic and you have every right to listen to what it taught you.
I couldn’t do the same - my life would be infinitely less rich. I once listened to that fear and pulled away from someone…I had the same fears as you. He was part of a gaming guild I played in but we met up once in real life when he lent me a charger while I was down south and without one. But when I got the message that he wanted to talk to me, I ignored it due to those fears - I never even read the further messages. And it turned out what that person wanted to talk to me about was his cancer diagnosis. What he really needed was a non-judgemental ear. And I found out through his obituary.
Since then I’ve embraced every connection and sometimes it gets dicey but I have never, ever regretted it. I’ve only ever regretted the time I didn’t.