By Jeremy, an Ex-Christian Scientist group editor/writer. This is the third of three posts. For all other posts related to this, please see the tag Ex-CS Survey 2016.

You’ve probably read the first two installments about our survey, and wondered, what more is there to say? Well, there’s a bit. In 2014, the author of the blog Emerging Gently ran a similar survey, albeit with a smaller number of respondents. We were wondering what similarities and what differences were there between the two, and what (if anything) did that say to us. With the permission of the author of Emerging Gently, here’s a comparison of their survey and ours.

Compiled by the editors of The Ex-Christian Scientist. This is the second of three posts. For all posts related to this, see the tag Ex-CS Survey 2016.

In the first post on our 2016 survey of former Christian Scientists, we focused on the answers to a number of multiple choice questions. While these pointed up a number of identifiable trends among former Christian Scientists, it’s the answers to what we’ll call ‘essay’ questions that dig into some of the personal stories, reasons why people have left Christian Science, and some of the common threads between different people’s experiences. While all of us who’ve left Christian Science have our own unique perspectives and paths that led us out, there are still a lot of common experiences, emotions, and sometimes traumas that we’re processing.