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This is a really helpful way of looking at it, thanks Blueberry. (Also, I love your username - blueberries are great! And so are you.)

Hey Jazzy, I don't really have enough knowledge or experience to contribute to this thread. I'm just here to say that I've listened and I wish the best of luck to you. 

I'd echo DecimalRocket, I'm in a very dissociative place right now, so just reading the forum and writing fairly simple replies is almost too much for my brain, but I really like your post - the summary bit at the end is particularly encouraging and reassuring at the moment. I like the formatting too. Thank you for writing all this up, I hope it helps you as much as anyone else.

Mostly what I been doing is just trying to get through the ending of my marriage. It's so hard to try to work through anything while still being abused by wife.  She gaslight me so much, even now as she's making huge strides to get the next chapter of her life started.  She got a good job starting in January already. 

Really makes me feel like being passed on, left behind, overlooked.

We're here for you, Andyman - I know the feeling of being invisible, though that's not quite the same as what you're experiencing currently... I'm sorry you're going through this. You still matter, you still have worth, you still have value, regardless of whether or not someone else stays or leaves.

Maybe also interesting, maybe not     In my daily working language, there is a word-for-word translation of CPTSD but people also say one nice long word that would be: "disorder subsequent to trauma" in English. 

That is interesting Blueberry, I'm always curious about languages. I have many I want to learn, some I am learning but dissociation/EFs/high stress put them on the back-burner. Maybe over Christmas I can get the books out again.  It sounds hopeful that that language has a word that neatly packages up the concept, like some people who speak it have perhaps come to an understanding of it that is lacking in other cultures, if that makes sense? I mean, I doubt having one word means that there is a higher level of understanding about it, but it's a nice idea. I like how concise it is, too.

A lovely boyfriend and a generally peaceful life are good. And by the way, there's no point forgiving if people
don't acknowledge what they've done, apologise, and demonstrate that they'll never do it again.

I really agree with this, I spent so long forgiving, forgiving, forgiving and wondering why the pain never got better. I always felt I had a moral duty to forgive, or else I would be as bad as them - FOO used this and would emotionally/spiritually blackmail me into forgiving them by making apologies that had as much integrity, remorse and care as a rock. They never meant a word of it, and I could feel it - but they had said the words, so how could I argue that somehow the apology wasn't an apology? I think I could muster a case for it now, but certainly not then.

Pete Walker talks about the unhelpful effects that come from too-early forgiveness that is given before processing and grieving has taken place... that really helped me to feel validated and justified in not forgiving the unbelievably cruel things FOO did. I think early forgiving can sometimes be another way of fawning or avoiding the pain, a way of going into denial. It was like that for me at least.

As for whether or not there is a cure, I think as Blueberry said, there will always be problems that people without CPTSD don't experience, but that doesn't mean we can't experience a happier, healthier life. To poorly paraphrase something my one good FOO-member read recently, CPTSD isn't a sentence to a non-life, it's a valid life, just with an uneven bumpy rocky road. We can all slowly recover who we really are, and learn to thrive - not all at once, in every area at once, without any cloudy days or wind or rain, but we can get there. One step at a time, with a lot of self-compassion and acceptance - things that many of us were denied when we should have been given them by others.  We can get there. We can thrive. We just need to accept the times when we don't without crushing down on ourselves, as hard as that can be.

Hello, (first post here so am a bit nervous) I haven't left CS, but I was brought up in something that appears to have drawn a lot of inspiration from it.

Either you die (which I did not) or you take medication, and get the message from the church that you are at fault for your own illness because you didn't pray enough, love God enough, and trust God enough.  Or, in today's language, you weren't enough.

What I and my good family members experienced was quite like that, sadly.   But they did it a lot with mental health as well as physical. I'm glad you got through and survived such a cruel situation.

For the purposes of research, I highly recommend the book 'The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology'. It was written by a BBC journalist who worked on a Panorama documentary about CS, only to end up on the receiving end of the unpleasant and intimidating tactics the CS use against anyone they feel threatened by (so practically anyone who tries to leave them or ask them questions). He spoke to a lot of ex-members about their experiences and had multiple weird run-ins with the leader of the whole thing.

Edited to add links to a couple of interesting articles, this one is about the book: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4061/book-review-the-church-of-fear-inside-the-weird-world-of-scientology

And this one is a good review of a new documentary about the church: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/28/going-clear-the-film-scientologists-dont-want-you-to-see