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Tuesday, April 23, 2019

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

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.

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