Parental Bullying: How Childhood Trauma Amplifies Workplace Abuse

Family dynamics can profoundly shape an individual’s vulnerability to later harm. Fifty percent of female targets of workplace bullying in my doctoral study first experienced psychological abuse by their mother and father. They did not have one abusive caretaker, but two; some had siblings who followed suit (Hecker, 2024). This article explores how complex childhood trauma, particularly parental bullying, can amplify susceptibility to abuse in the workplace.

The Lasting Impact of Childhood Abuse

The consequences for children who experienced abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them are harrowing and include delayed or stunted emotional or physical development, feeling deficient or defective, inability to know their strength, hypervigilance, need for verification of self, memory problems, somatic symptoms, and complex relational trauma (Felitti et al., 1998; Herman, 1992; Levine, 1997; NCBI Bookshelf, 2001; Siegel, 2012). Dissociation becomes habitual, severing mind from body as an escape from unbearable pain and fostering a “false self” that erodes authentic emotions, self-esteem, and relational security—heightening vulnerability to adult workplace bullying. For deeper neurobiological and somatic insights, see The Anatomy of Harm: How Abuse Impacts Your Brain, Body, and Psyche.

PTSD and Complex PTSD: What is the Difference?

What I am describing here is not a collection of random symptoms or simply a case of anxiety or depression. It is the imprint of trauma on a developing nervous system and psyche, a pattern that belongs in the broader landscape of post‑traumatic stress. Classic post‑traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) grew out of work with war veterans and survivors of clearly identifiable, time‑limited traumatic events such as accidents, assaults, disasters, or single episodes of violence (American Psychiatric Association, 2022; Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 1989, 2005). It highlights symptoms like intrusive memories and flashbacks, nightmares, startle responses, avoidance of reminders, and a nervous system that keeps oscillating between hyperarousal and shutdown (American Psychiatric Association, 2022).

Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman (1992) first proposed the diagnosis of complex post‑traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) to describe the profound and cumulative effects of prolonged, interpersonal, and often childhood trauma. Complex PTSD refers to what happens when the source of danger is not a single event outside of the person, but an ongoing pattern of abuse, neglect, or terror within attachment relationships, frequently beginning in the family. CPTSD has since been formally recognized in the World Health Organization’s ICD‑11, but it is still not listed as a distinct diagnosis in the DSM. As a result, many people are still treated only for symptoms such as anxiety or depression, while the underlying developmental trauma remains unnamed and unaddressed. When your first bully was a parent, the injury is not only to your nervous system, but to your sense of self, your emotional world, and your capacity to feel safe with other human beings. This is what I mean by complex PTSD.

How CPTSD shapes identity, emotions, and relationships

In complex relational trauma, three dimensions of a person’s inner and relational life are especially impacted, shaping how they experience themselves, their emotions, and other people.

Sense of self and identity
When children grow up with parents who are frightening, demeaning, neglectful, or chronically unavailable, they cannot hold love and anger at the same time. To protect the attachment relationship, they begin to shut down their anger and aggression and turn it against themselves. Over time, they start to see themselves as bad, unlovable, or fundamentally defective. This is the beginning of shame, self‑hatred, self‑judgment, and self‑rejection that I describe as a distortion of the sense of self (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2005). This is one of the central identity wounds in complex PTSD and sets the stage for the splitting of the good and bad self. For many survivors of complex relational trauma, especially when abuse began very early in life, there is no clear “before” self to return to. Their path is less about recovering a prior identity and more about discovering and building a sense of self that was never fully supported in the first place.

Emotion and nervous system regulation
Every infant is endowed with a healthy life force and the capacity to protest, to cry, signal distress, and communicate that something is wrong (Levine, 1997; Siegel, 2012). When protest is met by attuned caregiving, the child can return to baseline and learn that feelings and needs are safe and manageable. When protest is ignored, punished, or met with rage, the child’s nervous system escalates into anger and fear without completion. To stay attached, children then have to shut down their anger and cut themselves off from their own feelings. Later in life, this shows up as chronic anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms, and an inability to trust their own emotional experience (Felitti et al., 1998; American Psychiatric Association, 2022). When this pattern repeats over the years, the nervous system learns that protest and anger are dangerous, which makes it far more likely that, as adults, people will endure mistreatment in silence at work rather than trust their own signals that something is wrong.

Relational capacity and attachment

Because complex PTSD is usually rooted in relationships, especially with primary caregivers, it powerfully shapes how people relate to others (Herman, 1992; Cloitre et al., 2013). Some turn away from attachment altogether as a way to manage the early hurt, pain, and rage. Others recreate familiar dynamics with new authority figures. The very system that should have been a source of safety becomes a template of danger, and this template gets carried into adult relationships and workplaces. This is why so many survivors of parental bullying later find themselves in workplaces that feel hauntingly familiar; complex PTSD drives a painful pattern of relational reenactment, not because they choose abuse, but because their nervous system has been organized around surviving it (van der Kolk, 1989, 2005).

The Central Wound of Childhood Trauma: Being Unseen and Unprotected

A central aspect of childhood trauma is the profound experience of being unseen and unprotected. At the heart of this trauma is the child’s unmet need to be acknowledged and honored for who they truly are, and to feel that their very being is welcome in the world (van der Kolk, 1989). They often endured harm at the hands of one parent, while the other parent did not intervene to protect them. A fundamental aspect of childhood trauma is the devastating experience of lacking a competent protector. Children endure harm, often inflicted by one parent, while the other parent fails to intervene, betraying the child's trust through their silence or inaction. This betrayal compounds the trauma, embedding a deep wound of helplessness and abandonment. It creates a lasting internal belief that when vulnerable or fearful, no capable or caring person will come to their aid. This betrayal not only fractures the child’s sense of safety but also casts long shadows into adulthood, where individuals may again find themselves isolated, unsupported, and without rescue, especially in environments such as the workplace where bullying occurs or other similar dynamics. This mirrors organizational culture, where leadership and bystander behavior often allow workplace bullying to persist. Over time, not being seen and not being protected reshapes the child’s sense of self, so that they begin to experience themselves as unworthy of care, protection, or advocacy, a core identity wound that lies at the heart of complex relational trauma.

Children raised in abusive environments often develop a nervous system that becomes hypersensitive or ‘primed’ to detect and respond to abusive or threatening behavior. Because the parent serves as the child’s essential source of attachment and survival, the child adapts by psychologically splitting off or dissociating the abusive aspects of the parent. This necessity becomes starkly clear through Jennifer Freyd’s (2008) betrayal trauma theory. This necessity becomes starkly clear through Jennifer Freyd’s (2008) betrayal trauma theory. Betrayal blindness is a critical concept within this theory and refers to an unconscious strategy where the child remains unaware of the abuse to maintain a necessary bond with the abusive parent. Freyd (2026) explains:

If you’ve got a child with an abusive parent, that child has a job which is to bond with the parent... [ellipses for spoken pauses]. Bonding... is part of our biology through the attachment system that drives approach behaviors to connect and engage, experienced as the emotion of love. When facing an abusive caregiver, it’s way too dangerous to respond to mistreatment the way you would when fully empowered—which is to withdraw or confront—because a baby or young child cannot afford that; it’s the opposite of attachment engagement behaviors.

Betrayal blindness thus becomes “a way to survive that relationship because by not seeing the betrayal in its at all or in its fullness, the engagement, the behavioral attachment behaviors can continue” (Freyd, 1997). When protectors become perpetrators or fail to protect, as in the case of a nonprotective parent, the child faces an impossible bind. Full awareness of this betrayal would sever the child's lifeline of care and survival. It would also leave them without a caretaker to hold the dysregulation of such devastating awareness. The adaptation of splitting, hence, allows the child to maintain attachment despite abuse, leading over time to a form of desensitization to the harmful behavior. This adaptation does not remain on the level of coping alone. It becomes woven into identity, so that the child learns to disown their own perceptions, feelings, and needs, and to see themselves as the problem rather than the abuse. This is one of the ways in which complex relational trauma is fundamentally an injury to the sense of self.

Psychological Splitting

Psychological splitting is a complex defense mechanism with significant implications for understanding how children survive abusive or frightening caregiving relationships. Building on Sigmund Freud’s (1936/1966) initial exploration of defense mechanisms, he viewed splitting as a primitive psychological defense common during childhood development for managing complex emotions toward parents who both provide care and set limits. Anna Freud (1936) further described splitting as one of the earliest defenses, helping the child manage anxiety and preserve a sense of a lovable self when reality feels intolerable. Ronald Fairbairn (1952) further emphasized that when a child depends on a caregiver who is also a source of fear or humiliation, the child protects the attachment by ‘splitting’ experience into good and bad parts: the good parent and good self are held apart from the bad parent and bad self. Otto Kernberg (1967) elaborated on the concept, describing splitting as a motivated mental operation that helps individuals protect themselves against ambivalent feelings. Specifically, Kernberg noted that children use splitting to separate negative and positive representations, especially during separation-individuation (18-36 months).

Donald Kalsched (1996) deepened this understanding within a Jungian archetypal framework, portraying splitting and dissociation as the psyche’s innate response to overwhelming trauma that threatens the coherent self. He writes, “The psyche’s normal reaction to traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene of the injury. If withdrawal is not possible, a part of the self must be withdrawn, and for this to happen, the otherwise integrated ego must split into fragments or dissociate” (pp. 12-13), a process that encapsulates the vulnerable “personal spirit” (e.g., the innocent, feeling core) to shield it from annihilation. This self-care system initially preserves life by hiding unbearable pain in unconscious compartments. Yet, it evolves into a potentially demonic force, manifesting as inner persecutors or repetitive defenses that sabotage adult relationships and reenact trauma.

Taken together, these perspectives show that splitting is not only a way to manage unbearable affect, but also a process that fragments and distorts identity. The child preserves an image of the “good” parent by locating badness, danger, and unworthiness inside themselves, a hallmark of CTSD.

Reenactment

A child who split off abusive aspects of their parent might later exhibit similar behavior with other authority figures, particularly those who resemble their parent (van der Kolk, 1989). Understandably, targets of childhood maltreatment look for safe places and believe those to be outside of the home, a friend’s house, school, recreational club, or university, and, later, the workplace.

Trauma reenactment, or repetition compulsion as initially described by Freud (1936/1966), refers to the unconscious psychological drive to repeat or recreate aspects of past traumatic experiences in an attempt to gain mastery or resolution (Herman, 1996; van der Kolk, 1989). Childhood trauma survivors often find themselves attracted to relationships that echo earlier abusive dynamics, perpetuating cycles of emotional pain and disappointment. This unconscious pattern involves recreating familiar but harmful relational dynamics, driven by a deep psychological need to make sense of or master past trauma. However, because these patterns are rooted in unresolved wounds, they frequently result in repeated emotional suffering and relational dysfunction.

In the context of CPTSD, these reenactments are not evidence of weakness or poor judgment, but the predictable outcome of an identity and attachment system shaped by betrayal and splitting. People return to what is painfully familiar because, at a deep level, they have learned to expect themselves to be the one who is hurt, not the one who is protected.

Retraumatization

After having endured significant hardship in childhood, it is profoundly heartbreaking that many survivors experience bullying again in adulthood, especially in workplace settings. This cycle can be viewed through the lens of complex trauma, where early adversity sensitizes the nervous system, lowering thresholds for stress reactivity and vulnerability to subsequent trauma (van der Kolk, 2005; Courtois & Ford, 2009). As one participant in the study poignantly described, they felt as if they had “moved from one viper’s nest to another,” illustrating the lived experience of adult retraumatization that mirrors childhood victimization. The workplace thus can become a stage for the re-enactment of unresolved trauma, perpetuating symptoms such as hypervigilance, helplessness, and dissociation (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995; Herman, 1992).

From a psychodynamic perspective, retraumatization often activates early object relations dynamics and unresolved attachment injuries, leaving individuals retraumatized by similar relational patterns—perpetrators replicating the roles of abusive figures, and victims re-experiencing feelings of powerlessness (Kohut, 1971; Main & Hesse, 1990). This understanding is critical for developing trauma-informed workplace interventions that acknowledge these deep-rooted psychological vulnerabilities instead of pathologizing victims.

Seen through the lens of CPTSD, adult retraumatization at work is best understood as an echo of earlier identity trauma, not as a character flaw. The task of healing is therefore not only to change external conditions, but also to slowly revise the internal templates of self and other that were forged in the original traumatic relationships.

Psychological Mechanisms Seen in Perpetrators of Bullying

The complex dynamics of bullying and abuse involve deep psychological mechanisms that affect both perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators often project their own insecurities and negative self-perceptions onto their targets (Freud, 1936/1966). This projection serves as a defense mechanism, allowing the perpetrator to externalize and attempt to destroy aspects of themselves they find unacceptable (Klein, 1946).

Perpetrators often exhibit a compulsion to repeat the behavior to lessen inner suffering. The concept of repetition compulsion, first introduced by Freud (1920/1955), suggests that perpetrators may repeatedly engage in abusive behaviors as an unconscious attempt to manage their own internal distress. This cyclical behavior can lead to significant psychological harm for the victims, particularly in the workplace, where the constant exposure to abuse affects their emotional well-being and productivity.

For individuals with complex trauma histories, these patterns are especially damaging because they confirm an already fragile sense of self as unworthy and reawaken earlier experiences of powerlessness and shame.

DARVO: A Common Manipulation Tactic to Deny Accountability

When confronted, perpetrators often employ a tactic known as DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), a term coined by psychologist and researcher Jennifer Freyd (2024). Through her work on betrayal trauma, Freyd noticed that abusers consistently follow a familiar script: first, they Deny what happened (e.g., “You’re making that up.” “I never did that.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”); next, they Attack the person bringing it up (“You’re so sensitive and always misinterpreting everything.” “You’re just trying to cause drama.” ); and finally, they Reverse Victim and Offender—turning the tables, insisting they are the ones being mistreated (“I can’t believe you’re treating me like this.” “Why are you attacking me? Now I’m the one who feels wronged.”). The inability to take ownership of their behavior keeps the unacceptable behavior projected onto the target, and the vicious cycle of abuse continues. This echoes betrayal blindness from childhood, where a child with an abusive parent, whose survival depends on bonding via the innate attachment system, cannot afford confrontation or withdrawal, as these oppose approach behaviors fueled by reciprocal love; instead, not fully seeing the betrayal preserves the essential relationship (Freyd, 1997).

DARVO is especially insidious because it not only confuses and silences actual victims but can also mobilize others to support the abuser, making it even harder for the truth to come out. In families, a parent might deny emotional neglect and accuse their child of being ungrateful. In romantic relationships, someone addressing harmful behavior may end up apologizing for raising the issue. At work, human resources might back a perpetrator and label the real victim as the troublemaker. For survivors of complex PTSD, DARVO can feel eerily familiar, recreating the early dynamic in which truth, perception, and pain were denied, and the child had to split off their own reality in order to preserve crucial relationships. Furthermore, DARVO is intrinsically linked with betrayal blindness: in employment, fully seeing employer mistreatment risks status loss, so blindness maintains the status quo.

Research has documented the use of DARVO and its role in perpetuating harm across interpersonal and institutional contexts, especially among those with histories of childhood abuse (Freyd, 1997, 2008, 2024; Freyd & Smidt, 2014). Many targets of workplace bullying find that leaving the abusive environment is their only recourse, often resulting in self-imposed isolation and a diminished ability to trust others and themselves (Siefert et al., 2006).

A Call to Action

If you have experienced workplace bullying and repeated ongoing abusive or neglectful caretaking in your past, it is crucial to seek trauma-based professional therapy. Research indicates that individuals who experience victimization in childhood, such as abuse or neglect, are at increased risk for revictimization and adverse psychological outcomes later in life, including vulnerability to workplace bullying (Widom, 2000; Einarsen & Mikkelsen, 2003). Furthermore, longitudinal evidence demonstrates that individuals who were bullied during childhood continue to experience higher levels of psychological distress well into adulthood, with increased rates of depression, anxiety disorders, suicidality, and poorer social and economic outcomes at ages 23, 45, and 50, compared to those who were not bullied (Takizawa, Maughan, & Arseneault, 2014). While not all individuals with such histories will experience these challenges, appropriate support and intervention can foster resilience and promote recovery.

Complex relational trauma, often described as complex PTSD (CPTSD), results from chronic exposure to relational trauma such as abuse, neglect, or betrayal during childhood, including preverbal stages, and can lead to symptoms that go beyond classic PTSD. These include not only affect dysregulation, dissociation, relational difficulties, negative self-concept, and somatic complaints, but also a pervasive injury to identity, to the felt sense of “who I am” in relation to others (Cloitre et al., 2011; Courtois & Ford, 2016). While this article focuses on parental bullying and caregiving relationships, complex trauma can also develop in other inescapable contexts of chronic stress, such as prolonged illness, disabling medical conditions, chronic poverty, or homelessness, particularly when adequate support and protection are absent (Courtois & Ford, 2016). For those with early or preverbal trauma, traditional cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may have limited effectiveness, as it relies on language and cognitive processing, which can be inaccessible when individuals are highly dysregulated, dissociative, or have impaired executive functioning. In such cases, establishing safety and physiological regulation is a necessary foundation before processing trauma through verbal or cognitive means (Courtois & Ford, 2016).

Recommended approaches for complex trauma typically follow a phase‑oriented model, beginning with safety and stabilization, proceeding to trauma processing, and finally reintegration (Courtois & Ford, 2016). Evidence‑based and emerging modalities include Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR, with adaptations), adapted trauma‑focused CBT, the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), attachment‑based and relational therapies, and depth‑oriented psychotherapy (Courtois & Ford, 2016; Heller & LaPierre, 2012; Heller & Kammer, 2022). Somatic Experiencing® has also been used to address complex trauma, particularly early and preverbal trauma (Levine, 2010; Maass et al., 2019).

Seeking treatment with a clinician who is thoroughly trained in trauma and complex PTSD can help address the lasting impact of early victimization and reduce the risk of ongoing psychological harm.

© 2024 Dr. Kerstin Hecker. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced, distributed, or used in any form without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations with proper citation.

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