DARVO--what you need to know...

The acronym DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender” and perfectly describes how a narcissist behaves when caught and held to account. Never having come across it before, I was gobsmacked when I read up on it and realized just how well it describes the primary narcissist in my life, my (thankfully now-deceased) mother.

Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd, Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University coined the term in 1997 and in 2019 published a paper entitled “What is DARVO?” Freyd defines DARVO as “…a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing…may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior… The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim…into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser's credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”^[1]

It is no accident that a narcissistic parent uses this tactic. In 2017 Freyd participated in a peer-reviewed research study that reported that, ‘…DARVO was commonly used by individuals who were confronted…and higher levels of exposure to DARVO during a confrontation were associated with increased perceptions of self-blame among the confronters. These results provide evidence for the existence of DARVO as a perpetrator strategy and establish a relationship between DARVO exposure and feelings of self-blame. Exploring DARVO aids in understanding how perpetrators are able to enforce victims’ silence through the mechanism of self-blame.’^[2]

Broken down into plain English, this means that DARVO is a common ploy used by those who hurt us, a ploy used to throw blame onto us rather accept responsibility for the results of their actions. It also means that it works best on people who have been conditioned to feel responsible for things they aren’t really responsible for, people who suffer from toxic guilt, like many of us.

Interestingly, Freyd and a colleague, Sarah Harsey, in a new project (which is still under review) have discovered that the DARVO phenomenon goes further than just between the offender and victim. When they told the study participants stories of abuse and followed the story with a DARVO response, they found the participants less willing to believe the victim than people who told the same story but not given a DARVO response: the DARVO strategy actually works to discredit victims! Even more interesting, however, is that another study group was first educated about DARVO and when they were told a victim’s story followed by a DARVO response, the study participants found the victim more credible than the study participants who had not been previously educated about DARVO.^[3]

Education about DARVO, then, it important: it clues in the bystanders, be they flying monkeys or members of the justice system, to the ploy beforehand. For us, that means learning what DARVO is and educating ourselves as well as the people in our lives who are likely to hear DARVO responses from our narcissists.

Freyd’s paper does not mention the word “narcissist” but does specifically note that the DARVO response is a common tactic among sex offenders. The children of narcissists, however, will recognize the almost knee-jerk response of the narcissist to even the slightest hint of wrongdoing. The fragile ego of a narcissist cannot stand being wrong hence the narcissist’s rationalization and justification of everything she does. Narcissists, believing themselves perfect and infallible, cannot accept an accusation of wrongdoing—or even the possibility that she could do wrong—so she must justify and/or rationalize her beliefs and behaviours to make them appear right. One of the ways a narcissist does this is through DARVO: if something is the fault of someone else, then the narcissist is without responsibility.

Deny

The denial part of a DARVO attack may take more than one form: “It didn’t happen,” is one and, if the fact of the event cannot be denied, then “It wasn’t my fault” or “You weren’t really hurt.” My mother was the queen of DARVO attacks, attacks which, according to Dr. Freyd, “…can be violent and effectively abusive towards the accuser, with threats of legal action, attacks on credibility and so on.^[4]” At one point my mother actually said to me “If I don’t remember it, then it didn’t happen,” and nothing could budge her from that position. In situations she did remember, she would say “I don’t remember it that way,” or “You are remembering it wrong.”

Attack

The old adage “the best defence is a good offence” is at the core of a DARVO attack and it is not uncommon for the attack to have a third party involved^[5]. Narcissists will attempt to impress an observer of their innocence, especially an observer who the narcissist holds in high esteem or someone who has more power than the narcissist, like the police or a judge or a boss. An effective DARVO attack can see the narcissist’s victim up on charges and facing jail time, or professionally reprimanded. Or worse.

For the narcissist to effectively take the role of victim, it is most effective to name an alternative perpetrator. In a real-life case a male friend of mine met (in a restaurant so that there were witnesses) with a women he had broken up with a month earlier. From his descriptions of her, I guess her to be a narcissist and the last six months of their relationship was marked by frequent rows about her intransigent lying. She finally stepped over the line and he dumped her. But he had lent her a considerable sum of money during their year together and he wanted it back so he invited her to come to a busy coffee shop to discuss repayment of those loans.

During their meeting she continually shifted the subject from the money she owed to her personal travails, ending each of her pity-party monologs with a plea of poverty. He, well aware that she was trying to distract him from the subject of repayment and elicit pity for her dire straits such that he would forgive the loans, suggested she borrow the money from her current boyfriend. She responded by throwing a drink in his face. After she had calmed down, however, and thinking she was stranded three miles from home, he had the bad judgment to offer her a ride home, which she accepted. While in the car he continued to try to convince her to pay back the loans on her own, saving them the effort of Small Claims Court. But shortly before they arrived at her residence, she lost her temper again and physically attacked him. At the end of her tantrum he was bleeding from two deep scratches: one on his neck, the other on his hand as he shielded himself from her clawing at his face—she did succeed in shattering his glasses. She then began destroying the interior of his car, screaming invective and condemning men in general, ultimately ripping the rear view mirror from its mount and throwing it at his head. But the mirror was still attached to the car by its data cables and rather than impacting his head, it reached the end of its tether, bounced back, and hit the windscreen and breaking it.

He, of course, called the police and she admitted to the arresting office that she broke his glasses and damaged the car. She was arrested on the spot and spent two days in jail waiting for her bail hearing. After a few hours in jail she appealed to my friend to drop the charges so she could be released from jail but he refused unless she agreed to pay for the damages to his car and repay the loans. She refused and she spent two days in jail before she was finally granted bail and her freedom.

Reverse Victim and Offender

Imagine my friend’s surprise when, the day after his ex made bail, he was called by the police and told that a charge of rape had been lodged against him.

It was DARVO. When he got to the police station they told him the charge was actually sexual assault—or sexual harassment—they weren’t sure yet which. It was immediately apparent to him that his ex-girlfriend, unable to justify his wounds and the damage to his car any other way, had charged him with sexual assault. According to her, she threw the drink in his face because she was offended when he suggested she prostitute herself to get the money she owed him (her interpretation of his suggestion that she borrow it). The police declined to give specifics of the supposed sexual assault but, in mediation over the charge a few months later, she refused to withdraw the charges against him unless he forgave not only the loans he made to her, but the cost of repairs to his car which, because it was a German luxury brand, were not going to be cheap. She couldn’t say that the assault didn’t happen—he had the injuries (and a security video from the restaurant) to prove it did. She couldn’t say the damage to the car didn’t happen—the condition of the car and a hefty repair estimate proved it did—and she admitted it to the arresting officer. So, she reversed the victim and offender and made herself his victim, charging him with essentially molesting her in the privacy of the car en route to her residence and claiming that was the reason she injured him and damaged the car: she was attempting to escape a sexual assault.

Her accusations were so absurd that anyone who knew anything about DARVO would have been instantly suspicious. He said “…borrow the money from someone just like you borrowed it from me…”; she reported he said “…you can get the money by sleeping with other guys…” She said, in writing, “He wouldn’t stop the car so I broke the windscreen…and his spectacles.” Somehow the police found this reasonable and credible enough to file charges against him, somehow the prosecution found this reasonable and credible enough to set a trial date. And when he finally was able to get a copy of her written accusation, he found out that her “sexual assault” allegation consisted of “…he touched me on my thigh…”

Once the senior prosecution staff was shown the allegation, the charges were withdrawn, but not before untold damage was done to my friend, emotionally, financially, and even professionally. And despite having the charges withdraw by the prosecution as having no merit, she still tried to use the fact that he was arrested for sexually assaulting her as her justification for injuring him and damaging his car.

The victim of a narcissist may find DARVO to be difficult to grasp. Certainly my friend was baffled when, in the eyes of the police, he went from being the victim of an assault to the perpetrator of one in the blink of an eye. The police sided with his attacker because she was a woman recounting a sexual assault and nobody bothered to subject her story to the same critical examination they gave his. Ultimately the prosecution withdrew those charges, yes, but not until he had suffered, in his words, “five months of hell” that ultimately put him on anti-anxiety meds. The fact that he was the real victim did not stop the narcissistic ex from turning the tables on him and having the police and courts dance her merry tune for over five months until someone took a look at her accusations with fresh eyes—and without her there to whisper blandishments in his ears—and saw what was really going on.

Not all DARVO attacks are this dramatic but they can be if the narcissist perceives it to be worth it to her. But the fact is, narcissists use DARVO whenever it will suit their agenda. Being narcissists, they don’t care if the accusations they make are true or not, and they don’t care what kind of consequences you suffer, either…my friend’s ex would be happy if she was just exonerated and not convicted of assault and property damage—but if he went to jail for three years for sexual assault, she wouldn’t feel the least remorse. Instead, as a narcissist, she would feel vindicated and that he was getting just desserts for not giving her what she wanted. Most likely, however, the narcissist in your life will use DARVO to excuse a tantrum or a petty, spiteful action or to escape responsibility for some misdeed. My mother denied every ugly, mean, destructive, and cruel thing she ever did to me, telling me that even if my accusations of her maltreatment were true, I was only getting what I deserved. And that included stealing my children for her brother to adopt.

Just as that horrible woman accused my friend of sexual assault to give herself a plausible reason for assaulting him and destroying the interior of his car, with no care for the consequences he might suffer, including the loss of his professional career and his freedom, so do narcissists employ DARVO to exonerate themselves, with no sense of responsibility for the consequences you might face if they are believed. In fact, malicious malignant narcissists like my mother and my friend’s ex- actually find a sense of triumph and personal satisfaction in your suffering because they feel validated and that you are getting just payback for the wrongs they perceive you have perpetrated against them by not giving them what they wanted.

It’s called DARVO, it is effective, and it is devastating to its victims. Spread the awareness—and be prepared.

1.     Freyd, J.J. (2019). What is DARVO? Retrieved April 20, 2019 from http://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/defineDARVO.html

2.     Harsey, S., Zurbriggen, E., & Freyd, J.J. (2017—published Open Access). Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma, 26, 644-663.

3.     Freyd, op. cit.

4.     DARVO. Changingminds.org. Retrieved April 21, 2019 from http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/darvo.htm.

5.     Ibid.

Volition

According to the dictionary, “volitional” means “with deliberate intent.”^[1] Volition, then, means intentional—on purpose—deliberate. It is a word that is inextricably linked to choice and is very, very important.

When my youngest child was in school, he was very challenging, behaviourally. He had a high IQ and numerous learning disabilities (diagnosed by a specialist), and his behaviours were sometimes peculiar: he would take a toy from another child by force—sometimes even hurting the other child in the process—and half an hour later be hurt and bewildered when that child refused to play with him. This behaviour started in preschool but didn’t improve as he grew older…even in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grade, he continued behaviours of this nature and nothing seemed to get him to understand the cause and effect involved.

Because of his well-documented learning disabilities, he was in special education and I kept in close contact with his teachers and the school psychologist (who, at one point, claimed my son couldn’t be learning disabled because of his high IQ). He became very manipulative which sparked disagreements between me and the staff: I could see what he was doing, they couldn’t, and because I wouldn’t join them in excusing his behaviours, I was accused of being a “non-nurturing mother.” The year he entered fifth grade he was still writing in block print and doing math at the second grade level because he had convinced the staff that he had forgotten, over the summer break, all of the things he had learned the previous year. As a result, he was able spend at least two school years without doing any real work as the teachers fell all over themselves to find ways to re-teach him—and this time retain—the things they believed he forgot.

I knew that he was faking the math—forgetting how to carry and borrow numbers—but I wasn’t entirely sure about other things he claimed to have forgotten or to be unable to do. The teachers told me he “couldn’t” learn to write in cursive—I wasn’t so sure. He liked drawing so, one Saturday morning I took out my calligraphy pens and taught him how to print using calligraphy. He took to it like a duck to water. The next morning I showed him how to connect the individual calligraphy letters into cursive…he was ecstatic. On Monday he went to school and showed off to his teachers both his calligraphy and his cursive, learned over a single weekend.

It then occurred to me that in order to help him most effectively, I first had to be able to determine which of his educational stumbling blocks—and his behaviours—were volitional and which were not. It seemed to me that the approach to volitional behaviour and non-volitional behaviour had to be different, something that the school psychologist and I butted heads over, repeatedly. If a person chooses and executes a behaviour, they can be motivated (at least theoretically) to choose a different, perhaps more acceptable, behaviour. Rewards and consequences can be brought to bear in an effort to motivate change. Modern laws and criminal procedures and penalties are based on the idea that criminal behaviour is volitional and can therefore be altered.

Non-volitional behaviour, however, cannot be expected to respond to rewards and consequences. Certain mental illnesses, for example, conditions like Tourette’s or Parkinson’s, even brain injury, can cause objectionable—but non-volitional—behaviours. My oldest son has a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from being mugged and one of the residual effects is emotional volatility over which he has little control: he can control his behaviour but not the instant leap from calm to agitated and angry—his brain was damaged (and he has obvious physical signs of brain injury) and it no longer functions normally and some things that were volitional when he was 20 no longer are.

Why is this important, knowing the difference between what is volitional and what is not? Well, taking my oldest son as an example, knowing that he literally has no control over his temper zooming from calm to agitated in under three seconds helps me: I do not expect him to control it because I know he can’t, I do not get frustrated and angry with him for not behaving the way most of us behave because I know that is not an option for him. I don’t expect him to have the same table manners as others because he literally needs two hands to manage a fork: his right hand to hold the fork, the left to steady the tremor in his right so that the food stays on the fork and gets to his mouth. My expectations of him have changed to match what he is able to do rather than be frustrated or upset with him because he “won’t” eat with one hand, because when he laughs he makes an explosive sound like a barking seal, or because he has become clumsy and often knocks into things with his awkward gait. Knowing what he is not capable of allows me to keep my expectations reasonable and within the realm of reality.

With my younger son, however, things were not so easy. I remember saying to that school psychologist “His understanding of people and their feelings is almost autistic. He doesn’t seem to ‘get’ the simplest of human actions and reactions. He seems genuinely hurt when that other child, the one he hit ten minutes ago and took a toy from, doesn’t want to play with him—he doesn’t seem to understand the causal link between his behaviour and being avoided or rejected by the other children…” And she responded by telling me that he could not be autistic because he had a high IQ and he could speak in complete, coherent sentences…and he spoke a lot. Autistic children, she told me, are intellectually deficient and seldom speak—and when they do speak, they are likely to be incoherent or unintelligible.

Dr. Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician, first described the condition in 1944: Dr. Asperger, a paediatrician, noted four boys who showed ‘…a lack of empathy, little ability to form friendships, one-sided conversation, intense absorption in a special interest, and clumsy movements...,’ all symptoms my son displayed. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), however, did not recognize Asperger’s as a specific, identifiable condition and nor did it publish diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1994,^[2] fully fifty years after Dr Asperger recognized the condition. This came much too late for my son who was 21 when the condition became officially recognized. But with a set of symptoms in hand and the clarity of hindsight, it was easy enough to identify his condition as Asperger’s syndrome. But I had already come to the conclusion that, while having his condition was not volitional, the behaviours he exhibited were.

When my son was about 10 or 12, he came home from camp with chicken pox (this was before the vaccine was available). It was a mild case—very few bumps—but, typically, it itched like crazy. I put calamine lotion on the spots to soothe the itching and made compresses of witch hazel he could daub on the worst spots but, like mothers everywhere, I advised him not to scratch because that could cause infection or scarring. Having chicken pox was not volitional: scratching the lesions was. The urge to scratch was powerful, but sufficient willpower—an exercise of choice—can result in no scratching.

And there it is: having chicken pox, or Asperger’s—or NPD—is not volitional. The people who have these things did not get them by choosing to have them nor can they get rid of them by choosing to be shed of them: having these conditions is wholly non-volitional. But—and this is a big but—that does not mean that behaviours related to these conditions, and many more, like BPD or AsPD—are non-volitional. Quite the contrary: the fact that my son learned cursive when it was presented to him in a format he liked (something fun like art) rather than a format he did not like (as work, like schoolwork) indicates he had a choice; the fact that he didn’t scratch the chicken pox on his face after he learned that scratching could scar him but continued to scratch the lesions on his arms and torso indicates he had a choice and he exercised that choice selectively, just as my mother could be the perfect mother in front of people who had some kind of power—like judges, social workers, or the school nurse—and then beat me black and blue just moments after escaping their scrutiny. This shows that those behaviours are a choice, volitional, not an irresistible compulsion of the disorder. My son chose to give in to the urge to scratch, but to do it selectively—he had control over that urge. In my mother’s case, she demonstrated that she knew right from wrong, she knew there were potential penalties for doing wrong, and she chose to commit the wrong in such a way that she was unlikely to be caught.

It can be very tempting to excuse our Ns on the basis that they have a disorder and, because we don’t share the disorder, it, we cannot tell what is volitional in their behaviour and what it not, and the compassionate thing to do is to excuse all of their behaviour because we cannot tell what they did through irresistible compulsion as part of their disorder and what was volitional. We are sensitized to being blamed for things not our fault and, being empathetic and kind-hearted, we would rather excuse a wrong than wrongfully place blame.

But that is where we go wrong. We assume that because the condition is non-volitional so is the behaviour. But in many instances—narcissism, for example—this is not the case. Being a narcissist is not volitional, but a narcissist’s behaviours are. If my mother could treat my brother well, excuse his misdeeds, spend money on him, give him permission to attend events with his friends and just generally coddle him, she was fully capable of doing the same with me. If she could choose to punish me for not making my brother do his chores, she had an equal ability to choose to punish him for not doing them rather than me. Would it be easy? No—what is easy to do is what she had always done, to put the blame for her behaviour on someone else so that she could continue to look faultless…. Was she even capable of treating me well? Absolutely. She acted like a sweet, loving mother in front of her own parents and famly, my teachers, doctors, even judges, because it was in her best interests to do so, because, for that brief moment in time, she wanted to.

And therein lies the crux of the matter: what the narcissist wants is the deciding factor in any choice a narcissist makes. The condition of narcissism does not include compulsive behaviour that the narcissist cannot resist or an inability to recognize right from wrong. It doesn’t deprive the narcissist of the ability to tell socially acceptable behaviour from unacceptable, either. For them the idea is that they are above such things—that it is ok for them to flout the values of their culture and society, but not for anyone else to do so. And so a narcissist commits her behaviours aware that others will disapprove but believing those others to be wrong because Ms. Narcissist is above such things as adhering to the cultural norms. In the mind of a narcissist, their wants come first, ahead of the needs—and often even the rights—of others.

The narcissist’s behaviour is wholly volitional: he knows what the society considers to be right but he believes people who adhere to those social mores are weak, predictable, and foolish. He deviates because he wants to, because he believes he is entitled to, because he is “too smart” to be held back by the limits the rest of us abide by. And if someone is hurt by his behaviour, well…that isn’t his concern or responsibility. Where you or I might suffer pangs of guilt for hurting another, the narcissist, devoid of empathy, is unmoved by your pain.

The guilt you or I might suffer as a consequence of unacceptable behaviour is uncomfortable to us and, as we mature emotionally, we learn to avoid that pain by avoiding behaviours that trigger our feelings of guilt. Narcissists don’t feel guilt so they don’t have the built-in mechanism that keeps our behaviour in check: self-imposed guilt for wrong doing of any kind. You would feel guilty if you ate cookies that your roommate bought and did not say they were to share: the fact that you didn’t buy those cookies would be enough to keep you from eating them because you would know that, since you didn’t buy them, they aren’t yours. The narcissist, however, would eat your cookies and do it without a moment’s guilt. She might even blame you: “Was your name on them? So how was I supposed to know they were for you? If you don’t want people to eat your stuff, put your name on it.” This actually sounds reasonable until you recall that she knew they weren’t hers because she didn’t buy them, and why should you have to put a label on your own food in your own home when it is easy enough to know if she bought something or not?

Narcissistic behaviour is volitional. It is also disrespectful. It does not always have a malicious or nefarious intent, but the behaviour is done without any consideration for the feelings of those who will be affected by it. Narcissists live in a self-constructed delusional world where up is down, red is black, right is wrong and good is bad…until it serves them to change it. They may cast you in the role of antagonist when the truth is, you are only expecting them to show you simple respect.

For narcissists, life is a one-way street—their way. They “…need other people’s validation that their delusion is true. To achieve that, they create preposterous, slanderous, manipulative narratives where all of that is true and try to convince others of it. And since many people are unwilling and unable to look into the truth behind it, the narcissist can find that validation they so desperately crave and even act out their revenge fantasies… As a result, sometimes people get seriously hurt: socially, financially, emotionally, or even physically. But the narcissist doesn’t care about that. In fact they are often glad, because in their narrative the target deserves it by being “evil,” so whatever happens is justified.

“Of course not everyone can see the truth when listening to the narcissist but it’s quite evident looking from the outside or if you have enough psychological insight and experience.”^[3]

Make no mistake—a narcissist’s behaviour is volitional. She doesn’t think about the damage it might cause because she doesn’t care—in the coolest, cruellest, most oblivious sense of the phrase, she does not care. Just as you may not care that sweeping your floor disturbs the path an ant has laid down for his buddies, the narcissist does not care that her choices may cause harm to others. Just as the disruption of the ant’s path was not your intent when you chose to sweep the kitchen, but your sweeping disrupted it anyway, so the narcissist may not have the intent of hurting you, even though her choices had that result. And, if someone tells you later that you disrupted an ant trail to your pantry before the ants could follow the trail and swarm your cupboard, you will not feel remorse for your behaviour—well, the narcissist will not feel remorse if she is later told that you were damaged by the choices she made because she feels entirely justified in what she did and if you got hurt, well, too bad for you but it’s not her fault…she literally does not care.

A narcissist will make choices that advantage her and she will make those choices without any consideration for how they might affect others. She will have no remorse or guilt for any damage you might suffer as a result of her choices…she may even justify her choices in such a way that you are blamed for the consequences of her choices. But be clear: a narcissist chooses her behaviour and she chooses it to advantage herself to the greatest degree possible. Her behaviour is volitional, calculated to advantage herself with no consideration as to how it will hurt others, because she doesn’t care about anything or anyone outside of herself and her own advantage. And for you to think otherwise, for you to doubt the volitional nature of her behaviour, only validates her and makes it possible for her to continue.

1.     https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/volitional

2.     https://www.medicinenet.com/asperger_syndrome/article.htm#what_is_aspergers_syndrome

3.     https://blogs.psychcentral.com/psychology-self/2018/07/narcissist-delusion/?fbclid=IwAR2iCW4rqoPAbiI7LS9IM8qXwsSuo8rVYFIzOk33cUR71Gtbq2bEELopfdQ#.XBM_rGhFWHM.facebook