When the Workplace Becomes a War Zone: Understanding C-PTSD from Sustained Workplace Abuse

C-PTSD from Workplace Abuse: Signs, Symptoms, and How to Heal

“It’s not that you’re too sensitive. It’s that they kept stepping on the same wound.”

For many of us, work isn’t just where we earn a living it’s where we spend most of our waking hours, form our identity, and define our sense of contribution and belonging. So when the workplace becomes unsafe not just frustrating, but chronically destabilizing  the psychological cost can be enormous.

This week, I came across a video on Complex PTSD by Dr. Nicole LePera (The Holistic Psychologist) that breaks down trauma responses in a way that feels incredibly relevant to what many of my clients experience especially those who've survived long-term workplace abuse, mobbing, or covert gaslighting. If you’ve ever felt broken after a toxic job, or struggled to trust yourself again, this is for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqLwoHV4i1s

🌪️ What Is C-PTSD and How Does the Workplace Cause It?

C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) doesn’t require a single catastrophic event. It forms from repeated exposure to emotionally unsafe environments where power is abused and survival means suppressing your needs, voice, or even sense of reality.

In the workplace, this might look like:

• Being micromanaged to the point of paralysis

• Being publicly criticized or humiliated in meetings

• Having your work constantly undermined, questioned, or stolen

• Getting inconsistent expectations or feedback designed to make you fail

• Facing exclusion, triangulation, or sabotage from coworkers or leadership

• Being forced to justify your worth daily or punished for asking for support

  
  

Over time, these experiences erode your nervous system’s ability to stay regulated. Your body starts to live in survival mode, even long after the job has ended.

Trauma Responses You Might Be Mistaking for “Personal Failures”

If you’ve come out of a workplace like this, you might find yourself:

• Freezing when asked for feedback or unable to advocate for yourself

• Fawning — over-explaining, over-pleasing, or overworking to “stay safe”

• Hypervigilant — waiting for the other shoe to drop even in healthy workplaces

• Disconnected — from your creativity, your body, your sense of joy

• Ashamed — blaming yourself for what happened or struggling with imposter syndrome

• Avoidant — afraid to take on new opportunities in case you get hurt again

  
  

These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive survival mechanisms brilliant responses to unsafe conditions. But they can linger long after the threat is gone, especially without support or language to name them.

What You Can Do Now

1. Watch the video

   Dr. Nicole LePera’s C-PTSD video is a gentle, empowering starting point. It explains trauma responses in a way that feels validating and actionable not pathologizing.

   
   

2. Learn your patterns

   Are you a fawner? A freezer? Do you shut down, explode, or try to fix everything to feel in control? Learning your dominant trauma response is key to undoing it.

   
   

3. Recognize workplace trauma for what it is

   If this happened at work, you’re not imagining things. The workplace can be a trauma source — and healing includes acknowledging that.

   
   

4. Stop blaming yourself

   Abuse tactics often leave targets questioning their memory, competence, or even their worth as human beings. Learning to separate criticism from conditioning is part of recovery, and part of what I will teach you to recognize during coaching.

   
   

5. Start building new safety

   Whether through boundaries, coaching, therapy, body-based work, or supportive community, your nervous system needs to learn that not all environments are like that one. That you are safe now. That you get to choose differently.

   
   

Final Thoughts

I created Growth and Grit Studio because I saw how many smart, capable, driven professionals were being torn down by systems that punished their humanity. If you recognize yourself in this post or in the video know this: you are not broken. You adapted.

Healing is possible. And you don’t have to do it alone.

📥 Want support? Browse my [Tactical Coaching Tools] or reach out for a 1-on-1 session.