Unpacking DARVO

In today's podcast episode, I want to discuss DARVO, explain a little bit about what it is, uh, how to see the signs that somebody is using DARVO, this technique, this manipulative tactic, uh, this abuse tactic, and ultimately what to do if you are a victim of someone who has been using DARVO to exploit.

To begin, DARVO is an acronym, and it stands for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.

So it is a psychological manipulation tactic frequently used by narcissists, abusers, and perpetrators to, uh, uh, essentially evade accountability and shift blame back to the person who is confronting them.

Now, how it works is as follows.

Uh, the, the term, uh, DARVO was coined by a psychologist, Dr. Jennifer Freyd, in nineteen ninety, and the sequence un- unfolds as follows.

First, you have deny.

The perpetrator denies the wrongdoings ever took place entirely.

Uh, they may use gaslighting to make the accuser doubt their own memory of the events.

And number two is attack.

Instead of addressing the accusation, the perpetrator attacks the accuser's credibility.

They may minimize the victim's feelings, call them dramatic, or claim that they are just making up or fabricating the story entirely.

And then reverse victim and offender.

This is where the perpetrator flips the role, and they portray themselves as the true victim.

They position the accu- the original accuser as the actual abuser or wrongdoer first forcing the victim into a defensive posture.

Now, perhaps what makes this form of abuse so insidious and so dangerous is that the narcissistic abuser has often been doing this for the longest time.

It's perhaps something they learned in childhood from a, from a parent who used DARVO, and very often they believe that they are the victim, and because they're so essentially surrendered to this narrative, they can be very convincing in their argument, [clears throat] excuse me, that they are in fact the, the, the, the victim.

It's also a very extremely subtle form of abuse and very hard to detect when you're not looking out for it.