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How do you set boundaries when there is no negative consequence for a particular person who repeatedly violates them?

I'll give an example of an old situation I never found a solution to (it's not current so doesn't need a solution).  My exhusband was a violent abuser during the ten years we were together.  When I escaped, I got a restraining order saying he wasn't allowed to come near my house, wasn't allowed to call me, etc.  Over the following three years, he found repeated ways to violate this boundary.  First it was through the legal system - he manipulated the family court into giving him shared custody despite the fact that we separated due to his abuse of our child.  And with shared custody, despite his multiple convictions for assaulting me, the family court also gave him permission to pick up our child from my house, and to make calls to my phone three nights a week to talk to our child. He used the court system to get past my boundaries - and I was stuck with if I didn't allow these things, I could be arrested for interfering with the family court's orders.

But that still wasn't good enough for him.   He would call me outside of the three nights the family court allowed him to call and he got away with violating that boundary because none of the local police would take enforcing the restraining order seriously.  With the police not enforcing the restraining order (and every legal avenue I tried to get the police to enforce it ignored), there was no other negative consequence for him.  Because of the family court order saying I had to give him my phone number to call our child, changing my phone number wasn't enough, and at the time, I couldn't afford a second phone so that one was just for him to call our child and switched off at other times.  And in regards to the coming to my house to pick up our child?  Well that was unavoidable, but again the police wouldn't do anything to stop him coming at other times and when it came to picking up our child, I tried to insist that he not be stoned on illicit drugs, but he got around that by if I didn't hand over our child to him, he would call the police and use them to say if I didn't over our child, he would have me arrested (yes they do that here), and no matter how many times I tried to point out to him that he was off his face on drugs, they just claimed that if he's not in possession of drugs and is operating a motor vehicle, there isn't a thing they could do to arrest him on the spot, and even though him being high was a violation of the family court order, the police just kept insisting that it was a civil matter, not a criminal matter and they couldn't (or more precisely, wouldn't) drug test him.

So for three years, until he got sick of the effort of seeing our child every second weekend, he constantly violated every boundary that me and my lawyers tried to put in place to protect my child and I.

Thankfully that was a long time ago, so is only an example of how someone can get away with repeatedly violating boundaries when there is no negative consequences that can be enforced (I mean, I suppose I could have resorted to illegal activities to stop him, but I'm not willing to do that sort of thing as that would have made me as bad as him).

Anyway, I'm currently in a very different situation, but still a situation where a particular person in my life keeps violating my boundaries but there is no negative consequence for them - no matter what I do, it has no negative effect on them, and the consequences for me are either bad or worse.  I can put in place boundaries and follow through on certain consequences when those boundaries are violated, but it still puts me in an even worse position than just putting up with the violation of boundaries and saying and doing nothing (which also is not a healthy long term option).

I so don't know what to do because this person goes out of their way to deliberately violate every single boundary I try to put in place (purely out of a desire to violate my boundaries, not even this person having a particular problem with most of the individual boundaries). I don't want to publicly go into details, but please accept that removing this person from my life is not possible at this time (maybe one day, but not currently - just like the situation with my exhusband and not being able to remove him from my life unless he chose to leave it, or until our child reached their 18th birthday - I was stuck with him, thankfully after 3 years of trying to mess with my life and our child's life, he walked away - possibly but highly unlikely with my current boundary violator).

How can I come up with ways to stop someone violating my boundaries that doesn't end up making things worse for me and my family?  What if there is no way to stop someone that doesn't make things worse?  (and it's a very real thing - several women in my town have been murdered in the last few years by family members or expartners after trying to put boundaries in place to protect themselves or their children - the reality is, sometimes putting boundaries in place can be more dangerous than not).

I don't want to stop trying to put boundaries in place to protect me and my family, but I'm out of ideas as to how to that won't make things worse.  I also can't face not trying to put boundaries in place.  Why is it that some people take so great pride in going out of there way just to get past others boundaries?

Over the last 15 years, I've had dozens of labels slapped on me but no single psychiatrist seems to agree with any other.  The majority of psychologists and other mental health professionals all agree I have bipolar 2 (severe depressive episodes triggered by hormones, generally pregnancy, that last months or several years when nothing is changed but that get better within weeks of finding a new medication that works,  with many years with no depression in between, and averaging about one hypomanic episode a year ago since starting medications), and PTSD.  Oh and I also have been formally diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and ADHD.

However, as I said, general psychiatrists seem to find me too hard and give me a different label each time.  My current psychiatrist who I've been seeing nearly three years now has said I have MDD (possibly bipolar 2 but won't diagnose me with it until she sees me hypomanic which is never going to happen as I only see her every few months when not depressed and my hypomanic episodes only last 1-2 weeks), and CPTSD.  I have repeatedly asked her why she thinks I have CPTSD and all I get is vague answers and her changing the topic (which is quite annoying since it's several hundred dollars out of pocket per visit to see her which is something I really can't afford when I have chronic physical health problems that are costly and I can't work).  She alludes to "emotion regulation issues", but when I ask what that means, she just alludes to my three major depressive episodes (over the last 20 years) as meeting the criteria for the emotional regulation problems of CPTSD which we all know if that were the case, then EVERY person who has ever been through a trauma and has had more than one major depressive episodes would also be labelled as having CPTSD and that's obviously not the case.

I mean, I don't dispute I have regular PTSD.  I am plagued by nightmares and flashbacks of some things that happened around 13 years ago.  I can't sleep at night because I'm too scared of the nightmares, certainly places, people doing certain behaviours, certain activities etc cause flashbacks.  There are some places I'm too scared to go.  I quit my dream job two years ago because of witnessing an incident at work where someone did to a client something that was done to me 13 years ago.  And I live with the shame of quitting instead of speaking up for the poor woman who I witnessed be abused.  I hate myself for dissociating when it was happening, watching every single tiny detail but not being able to get help, not even being able to move, but at the same time, not being able to look away either.  And I hate myself for not speaking up after and running away and quitting instead - and then when I was finally able to speak about what happened to anyone, still being too scared to report what I witnessed because I know it wouldn't help the woman as no one would believe me (especially as she didn't report it) and secondly it was my word against a dozen other highly respected people, and it would look like I was just making the complaint in response to not getting my job back when I finally had the courage to re-apply for it (it's one with openings every 6 months).

There is no doubt I have PTSD with dissociation.  But I really don't think I have CPTSD.  I've never been formally tested for it (all the SIDES, SIDES SR and other testing that can be done).  My only "emotional dysregulation" problems are having had three episodes of depression, all hormone related, two of them pregnancy, and the occasional hypomanic episode - and I come from a family of people with bipolar.  There are several of the 6 criteria (or 7, depending on whose criteria you use), for CPTSD I don't meet.  Basically, the only criteria I meet are the ones that overlap with regular PTSD with dissociation (I should add, I only dissociated during my two postnatal depression episodes, never at any other time and my guess is that is related to the fact that the postpartum period is a trigger for my PTSD symptoms as my oldest child's birth was the initial cause of my PTSD - we both nearly died due to severe medical negligence - and it was the trigger for a cascade of events that led to the even more damaging couple of events that caused the severe PTSD).

My psychiatrist has admitted she's not a trauma expert, but I know professionally the majority of psychiatrists who work in this town (it's not very big, and please don't ask me how I know them as I'm not comfortable putting that much detail on the internet) and the view of every psychiatrist I know here is that if you have PTSD as an adult and ever been abused as a child, then you have CPTSD (and sadly the majority of them believe CPTSD and BPD are the same thing - they are completely utterly clueless).

I feel like my psychiatrist is ignoring my actual issues in favour of the ones she deems me as having because according to her, I have CPTSD so I "must" have particular issues (I'm so over a mental health system where instead of observed symptoms leading to a diagnosis, instead people are giving a diagnosis first, based on the psychiatrists "gut" - yes I have had several say they actually base their diagnosis on their gut feeling the diagnostic criteria for mental conditions - especially in regards to BPD and CPTSD, and once they have given someone a label based on the psychiatrist's "gut feeling" they then deem that the client must have particular symptoms and therefore try to treat the person for those symptoms whether the person actually has them or not).    The whole thing is silly.  When I had antenatal depression last, I was absolutely massively terrified of going through labour again because of oldest child and I nearly dying.  I was suicidal because I felt like suicide would be preferable to going through labour again.  I didn't want to die but I was scared.  So I sought help and tried everything I knew of.  Every therapy out there.  I tried EMDR (which I used to think was a really weird therapy and must be just placebo and no way it could genuinely help anyone other than those gullible enough to fall for a placebo).  And the funny thing is, it worked.  It worked amazingly.  For my PTSD symptoms anyway.  Did nothing for my depression which needed an antidepressant, which my GP and I wanted me to be on, but the medication specialist I was seeing while pregnant was against it, especially with all the medications I was on for physical health problems (he later apologised and said he should have put me on an antidepressant while pregnant).

But when I started seeing my psychiatrist a few months later before I got treatment for the perinatal depression, and my PTSD was back even worse because something that happened to my baby in hospital a few days after birth triggered my PTSD very badly (but hey, at least I not only survived labour, but I actually wasn't even bothered by all the things that went wrong medically, I was just full of happy expectations), she was all like you have CPTSD, EMDR never helps people with CPTSD, etc.   I dearly wish I could have afforded to go back to the psychologist I was doing EMDR with but having been off work the last few months of my pregnancy, my maternity leave being unpaid, and quitting my job after witnessing the event I mentioned above,  I couldn't afford EMDR.

The psych did badger me into doing DBT, because she kept going on and on and on for a year (long after my depressive episode was over, and even my PTSD symptoms like nightmares and flashbacks were nearly gone, and the only real problem I was having was being too scared to go near things that reminded me of the original trauma, including a certain type of people who remind me of the original perpetrator).  But just like the previous two times I had done DBT (both times I actually believed it would help and it didn't), it didn't do a thing.   The only people I had anything in common with were the psychologists running the group.  I was the only one there that didn't have a drug or alcohol addiction, I was the only one there who didn't have a problem with impulsiveness, I was the only one there who didn't have an anger problem, and so on.   Everyone else in the group kept talking about how hard and challenging it was, how it was teaching them so much, my only thoughts were "This is so boring and irrelevant to me and my symptoms".

The thing is, when I'm not depressed (I don't see hypomania as a problem - if it weren't for the damage to my physical health in overdoing things, it wouldn't even be an issue at all), the only really issues I have can be clumped into my asperger/ADHD problems (social anxiety, being disorganised, difficulty focusing for long periods, etc) and "regular" PTSD symptoms of nightmares, flashbacks and massive avoidance of things that remind me of the original trauma (eg quitting my dream job to run away from a single reminder). 

I feel like my psychiatrist is focused on all these CPTSD related treatments like DBT for symptoms I don't have and never have had, that do nothing for my "regular" PTSD symptoms that are an ongoing problem.  Why am I posting about this now?  Something happened 6 weeks ago that reminded me of the original trauma and I'mback to being totally unable to sleep at night because I'm too scared to sleep because of nightmares, but lying in bed awake means I'm left drowning in flashbacks.  I'm too scared to leave the house in case something reminds me of it, but at the same time, being at home is a torment because what happened 6 weeks ago, happened at home.

I've made more frequent appointments with my  psychologist (because she is actually mostly affordable), who is being very supportive.  I've booked into seeing her weekly (I hadn't seen her since before this event happened 6 weeks ago as I cut back my visits with her because I was doing well, and then not long after it happened, I went to stay with family for nearly a month as I couldn't cope with being in my home at all at first).  But I'm back to seeing her weekly now.  So far, she's only just "debriefed" me on what actually happened 6 weeks ago.  The appointment this coming week, we're going to discuss how we're going to tackle things - both the recent trigger and how to deal with the symptoms I'm having now, and also longer term to work on trying to prevent the nightmares and flashbacks from coming back, although given the severity of the trigger, I'm not actually sure there is anything that could prevent it.  I'm trying to avoid too much detail, but when someone has been a survivor of a very violent event,  I don't think there is anything that could prevent PTSD symptoms from re occurring when surviving another violent event.  But anyway, we're going to work on that.

But the thing is, I'd like my psychiatrist to be on board as well, to stop pushing therapies I've tried and didn't work, to stop saying therapies that have worked in the past are irrelevant and not going to help (I'm 99% sure they would help, but at this stage my budget doesn't allow them anyway), and to work with me on what we can do to deal with the symptoms I do have.  And I feel as long as she's hooked on the CPTSD diagnosis, she is ignoring my actual symptoms.  I mean, I'm not ruling out that I have CPTSD, but I really don't think I do.  And it's a lot easier I think to get her to focus on my actual symptoms if CPTSD is ruled out altogether.  I mean my symptoms are my symptoms no matter what label is thrown at them, but psychiatrists are stubborn creatures and it's a lot easier to get help for  particular symptoms when you have the label they associate with those symptoms.

So in my very long winded way, what is the definitive differences between CPTSD and regular PTSD with very clear definitions, so that 1. I can know for myself whether it's CPTSD or regular PTSD (I have read so very many books on CPTSD and am yet to find a simple answer to this question) and 2. if it points towards what I'm already pretty sure of (that I have regular PTSD with dissociation at times, not CPTSD), a way to explain it to my psychiatrist who is not a trauma expert (and thankfully at least acknowledges that).  Ultimately it shouldn't matter what the label is, but it does matter because my psychiatrist is not thinking along the same lines as my psychologist and me and it's kind of interfering with the success of therapy.  And quite simply, I just want the nightmares and flashbacks to stop without me having to leave my home - I have a mortgage and can't afford to sell and get another in the current market and the ridiculous thing about where I live, mortgages are less than rents so selling is really not an option.  So I desperately need something that works for my house now being a trigger for my flashbacks and nightmares which really needs my psychiatrist and psychologist thinking the same way.

Anyway, apologies for the long post.