Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or CPTSD, grows in the shadow of repeated neglect, emotional abandonment, or prolonged exposure to unpredictable environments. What distinguishes CPTSD from PTSD isn’t just the memory of what happened, but how it reshapes a person’s sense of self and their day-to-day reality.

At its core, the symptoms of CPTSD defy tidy labels: emotional flashbacks, a deep well of toxic shame that seeps into one’s self-regard, a reflex toward self-abandonment, the endless loop of a punishing inner critic, and a pervasive undercurrent of social anxiety. Each of these is less about the specifics of past events and more about how those events, year after year, became part of everyday life.

Perhaps the most confusing part is the emotional flashback—a shorthand for intense regressions when an old wound is pressed and we’re thrust back, emotionally, into a state of fear, isolation, or despair. These experiences don’t arrive with vivid images; instead, they flood the system with painfully familiar feelings: shame, terror, alienation, sometimes grief so deep it feels impossible to name. These flashbacks aren’t all-or-nothing; some pass within minutes, while others linger for days, impacting every interaction and every thought.

In dealing with CPTSD, it helps to remember that these symptoms aren’t a personal failing. They’re the remnants of surviving what was, at one point, an unlivable situation. In the words of Judith Herman, one of the pioneering voices in this field, “Complex PTSD describes the syndrome that follows prolonged, repeated trauma when escape is not possible.” It’s a condition of adaptation—a testament to what it means to endure.

But what creates these unlivable situations in the first place? While complex trauma can stem from various sources—war, captivity, institutional abuse—one of the most common yet least recognised origins lies within family systems themselves. When the very people meant to provide safety and nurturing instead create environments of chronic instability, manipulation, and emotional violation, they become the architects of complex trauma.

The people who create complex trauma construct entire ecosystems designed to maintain their centrality and our compliance. Understanding these systems is important, not because we need to diagnose anyone, but because recognising the patterns helps us navigate them with less damage to ourselves.

These ecosystems operate on a simple premise: our autonomy is a threat to their stability. Every expression of independence—financial, emotional, or relational—is treated as betrayal, ingratitude, or evidence of our fundamental selfishness. The system works by making our needs conditional on their approval and our reality subject to their revision.

Watch out for the gift-debt cycle: help offered freely, then weaponised retroactively. “We gladly helped pay for this” becomes “after everything we’ve done” becomes “you owe us.” The gift was never a gift—it was an investment in future control, though this was never disclosed at the time of giving.

Perhaps they covered educational expenses during your childhood years, presenting it as family support, despite it being what they’re legally required to do. Years later, when you establish boundaries or question their behaviour, suddenly those same expenses become leverage: “How can you treat us this way after we sacrificed for your education and upbringing?” The original context—their insistence it was freely given, their pride in providing it—evaporates. What felt like love reveals itself as a transaction with terms that were never made clear, interest rates that compound silently until the bill comes due at the most inconvenient moment.

Also notice their patterns of crisis redistribution: when we experience distress, it somehow becomes their emergency. Our depression becomes their trauma story. Our boundaries become their victimisation. Our need for space becomes their abandonment. The system cannot tolerate our pain existing independently—it must be converted into something that centres around them and their feelings.

For example, when you’re struggling with mental health challenges, somehow the conversation shifts to how difficult this is for them to watch, how your pain traumatises them, how they’re the victims of your depression. Your therapy becomes their crisis. Your need for healing becomes their emergency intervention project. If you create distance to process trauma, they frame themselves as the abandoned ones, recruiting others to validate how “unreasonable” your self-protection has become. Your recovery journey becomes background noise to their starring role as the wounded family member who “just wants their child back.”

They also tend to revise reality: what happened yesterday can be rewritten today if it serves their narrative. Debts are erased, promises are forgotten, our memories become “misunderstandings.” They don’t just gaslight—they constantly edit the past to maintain their innocence in the present.

Conversations that were crystal clear last week become “misunderstandings” this week. Promises made with witnesses somehow never happened. Harsh words spoken in anger transform into “difficult conversations” where you were both equally responsible. The timeline of events shifts like sand—what came first, who said what, whether something happened at all. They maintain multiple versions of history, deploying whichever serves the current moment’s needs, leaving you questioning not just what happened, but your own capacity to remember accurately.

A particularly insidious variant is narrative inversion—when they reframe our attempts to understand or articulate our experience as evidence of our supposed manipulation. Suddenly, our recollections become “stories we tell,” our pattern recognition becomes “creating drama,” and our efforts to make sense of confusing interactions become proof that we’re the ones twisting reality. They weaponise the very language of psychological awareness against us, suggesting that anyone who notices patterns or tries to understand what’s happening must be the real manipulator.

When you point out inconsistencies or try to discuss repeated patterns, you’re accused of “living in the past” or “creating narratives.” Your attempts to understand and share become evidence of your supposed manipulation. If you mention how their words affected you, you’re “twisting what they said.” If you try to protect yourself based on past experience, you’re “holding grudges.” The very act of having a coherent memory or recognising patterns becomes pathological in their telling.

Nevertheless, these systems maintain themselves through predictable tactics. There’s triangulation—using third parties to validate their version of events or apply pressure when direct manipulation fails. These third parties act as “flying monkeys” who call to tell us how hurt they are, how we should apologise, and how we’re being unreasonable.

When direct confrontation fails, suddenly relatives or family friends you rarely hear from start calling with “concerns.” They’ve been “filled in” on the situation—their version, naturally—and now feel compelled to intervene. These well-meaning intermediaries relay messages about how much pain you’re causing, how you should be the bigger person, how family harmony depends on your capitulation. They become unwitting agents of pressure, convinced they’re helping heal a “misunderstanding” when they’re actually participating in a coordinated campaign to override your boundaries.

Then there’s the emotional terrorism—the strategic deployment of crisis, illness, or breakdown whenever we assert independence. Not every crisis is manufactured, but notice the timing. Notice how our attempts at boundaries coincide with their emergencies.

The timing is rarely coincidental. Your decision to skip a family gathering coincides with a sudden health scare. Your announcement that you need space triggers an emotional breakdown that requires your immediate attention. Your attempts to establish independence are met with crises that reframe your self-care as selfish abandonment. The message is clear: your autonomy threatens their stability, and their survival apparently depends on your surrender.

There’s the leverage inventory—everything we’ve ever shared, needed, or struggled with becomes potential ammunition. Our vulnerabilities are catalogued for future use. Our past mistakes become permanent evidence of our character, while their harmful actions are temporary lapses that require our understanding.

Past struggles with anxiety become proof of your “oversensitivity” when you express discomfort with their behaviour. Childhood difficulties become evidence of your “troubled” nature, while their role in creating those difficulties is forgotten. Mistakes you made years ago are preserved like precious cargo, ready to be deployed whenever your character needs discrediting, while their recent harmful actions are dismissed as isolated incidents that don’t define them. The scorekeeping is entirely one-sided—your errors compound with interest, while theirs evaporate with time.

One of the most insidious aspects of narcissistic family systems is how they recruit society itself as an enforcement mechanism. The cultural mythology around family—"blood is thicker than water," “we only get one mother,” “family is everything”—becomes a weapon wielded against anyone who dares to prioritise their safety over family loyalty.

When someone doesn’t love or respect their narcissistic parents, they encounter a predictable chorus of social judgement: “But they’re your parents!” “They did their best!” “You’ll regret this when they’re gone!” “Family is family!” These responses aren’t just misguided—they actively enable the continuation of harmful systems by making the victim responsible for maintaining the relationship regardless of the cost.

Society operates on the assumption that parent-child love is natural, inevitable, and unconditional. This myth serves narcissistic systems perfectly because it makes the absence of love a failure of the child, not a consequence of the parent’s behaviour. When someone says they don’t love their parent, people assume there’s something wrong with them—they’re ungrateful, damaged, or simply haven’t tried hard enough to understand.

But love isn’t a biological imperative that transcends behaviour. Love requires safety, respect, and reciprocity to flourish. We cannot love someone who consistently undermines our reality, violates our boundaries, and treats our autonomy as a personal attack. The expectation that we should love them anyway is not compassionate—it’s a demand that we prioritise their comfort over our own sanity.

“We need to forgive them for our own peace” becomes another tool of social pressure. But forgiveness, when demanded rather than freely given, becomes another form of compliance. True forgiveness can only happen when the harm is acknowledged, changes are made, and safety is established. Premature forgiveness—forgiveness without accountability—simply enables the continuation of harmful patterns.

Perhaps the most damaging response is the assumption that abusive parents “did their best” and therefore deserve understanding rather than accountability. This phrase erases the deliberate choices involved in narcissistic behaviour. Spending someone’s savings isn’t an accident or a limitation—it’s a choice. Gaslighting them about their own experiences isn’t a parenting mistake—it’s psychological manipulation.

These social responses serve to isolate CPTSD survivors further. Already struggling with self-doubt from years of gaslighting, they encounter a world that tells them their perceptions are wrong, their boundaries are cruel, and their self-protection is selfishness.

Over the years, I have learned that narcissistic systems cannot tolerate accountability—they can only deflect it. If I were to address these behaviours with the people who created them, the response would be entirely predictable.

I would be accused of turning people against each other—as if a person’s own lived experiences were somehow my manipulation rather than reality. Or someone would be accused of turning me against them—as if I needed someone’s interpretation to understand what I witness firsthand. Both responses serve the same function: they erase the possibility that the perpetrator’s behaviour itself is the problem.

This deflection is not accidental. Narcissistic systems survive by making accountability impossible. Every attempt to address harm gets converted into evidence of the victim’s disloyalty or the outsider’s malicious influence. The actual behaviour disappears from the conversation, replaced by meta-arguments about who is influencing whom.

But when multiple people who care have seen how these interactions affect us, how they drain our energy and undermine our confidence, it’s harder to gaslight us. The problem is not that we have somehow corrupted each other’s perception; the problem is that reality is finally being witnessed and validated by people who care about our wellbeing.

When someone has spent years being gaslit, having external witnesses who can say “yes, that really happened, and no, it wasn’t normal” is incredibly threatening to the people who benefitted from their isolation and self-doubt. The witness doesn’t need to do anything except observe and remember—but that alone disrupts the system’s ability to rewrite history.

Direct confrontation with people who operate from narcissistic frameworks is often counterproductive. They do not engage with criticism in good faith because the system itself cannot survive honest examination. Instead, confrontation typically results in escalation, victim reversal, mobilisation of flying monkeys, and reality distortion where the confrontation itself becomes evidence of our unreasonableness.

Writing about these patterns publicly serves multiple purposes that direct confrontation cannot. It validates the experiences of others who recognise these dynamics. It provides language for people who lack words for their own experiences. It creates a record that cannot be gaslit or revised. And it refuses to engage with the system on its own terms—terms that always favour the people who created the harm.

Let me be clear: when someone escapes a narcissistic family system, they are not the villain in this story. The people who create these systems often genuinely believe they are the victims. This belief is part of the system itself—not evidence that they actually are. When abusers claim victimhood, we are not required to validate their narrative at the expense of the people they harmed.

This is indeed one of the most sophisticated aspects of narcissistic systems: how the actual perpetrators genuinely feel victimised by their target’s resistance. The parent feels wronged when the child sets boundaries. The family member who gaslights feels hurt when their victim stops sharing vulnerable information. This emotional reversal is not evidence of their innocence—it’s evidence of how completely they have internalised the logic of their own system.

But the survivors can break these cycles. It requires relentless self-examination, the courage to face our own capacity for harm, and the commitment to choose differently even when the old patterns feel like instinct. I have hurt people I love using the same tools that were used to hurt me. I have also learned to catch these patterns, interrupt them, and slowly build new ways of relating that don’t require anyone’s diminishment.

The work is not glamorous. It involves apologising for real harm, not just for misunderstandings, and making real changes. It means giving up the comfortable illusion that our pain justifies our impact on others. It requires building tolerance for other’s pain without making it about us, for their healing without controlling its timeline, for their reality without editing it to suit our needs.

Most importantly, it means recognising that love is not a ledger. Care does not create debt. Our histories may explain our behaviours, but they do not excuse them. And the people we claim to love deserve better than becoming the repositories for our unhealed trauma.

If we recognise ourselves in these patterns—either as someone who survived them or someone working to break cycles we inherited—know that our reality is valid, our boundaries are necessary, and our healing matters more than other people’s comfort with our choices. The architecture of inheritance can be dismantled, but only by those willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of learning to build something different in its place.