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.

The Narcissist in your Head

I was not a rebellious teenager…at least not overtly. I was too afraid of my narcissistic mother to do anything other than slavishly follow the rules she set down to the letter. But observing the letter of the law is not the same as observing its spirit, and while I may have appeared to have internalized all of rules and so-called values, nothing could be further from the truth.

A lot of ACoNs find themselves shackled to beliefs and values taught to them by their narcissistic parents and feel pangs of guilt, fear, and/or remorse when they so much as contemplate violating them. Others, like me, give the appearance of compliance while secretly doing whatever they want within the strictures imposed by their parents. Some people actively rebel during their adolescence, but I don’t know many ACoNs who did that…I suppose most of us are so thoroughly bound up in the narcissist’s web by the time we reach puberty—and perhaps sufficiently controlled by guilt or intimidated by the N and her flying monkeys—that we are reluctant to stir up what we know will be a hornet’s nest of reaction.

Guilt was never an effective weapon for controlling me because I was very clear, very early on, that there was something really, really wrong with my mother, and I was extremely angry about the way she treated me. Her favouritism was so blatant that other family members even noticed it…but the one time I heard her called on it, she explained it away—I was an incorrigible child, wilful and uncontrollable, defiant and deliberately difficult, so I deserved the ill treatment I received and my brother, by contrast, deserved the special treatment he got. The only problem with that was that my brother was constantly in trouble at school, had poor marks, was in regular trouble with the local shops and neighbours for stealing, ran away from home and even tried to set the school on fire…all before he was 10 years old! I, on the other hand, was too petrified of my mother and her volatile temperament that I made great marks at school (I was even skipped a grade), did both my chores and my brother’s (because she would punish me for not “making” him do his), and seldom spoke in the presence of adults unless bidden to do so (“children should be seen and not heard”). My mother’s interpretation of what constituted a “good” child and what constituted a “bad” child was just a wee bit wonky…and I was pretty clear on that, too.

Since subtle things like guilt-tripping didn’t work on me (although guilt works very well when I have actually done something wrong), my mother used intimidation. If she came home from work and my brother’s chores weren’t done, she couldn’t use guilt to make me feel bad for not making him do his work: I was clear that I had no authority over him and that he was bigger than I was and that what she was expecting of me was wrong…you can’t wring guilt out of that kind of belief. On the other hand, if my father said “I am disappointed in you” because I brought home a poor mark or I forgot to feed the dog, the guilt would be all the punishment I would need—I can remember crying because I disappointed my father. My father, however, never expected me to be surrogate mother to a malicious sibling larger than me, nor did he expect me to be a perfect little automaton.

My mother never really tried to guilt me (not until I was well into my teens, anyway), she preferred more direct methods: intimidation, threats, and brutality, accompanied by verbal abuse administered at a high decibel level. For many years I believed that shouting and threatening mayhem was how mothers communicated with their younger children and wondered what was wrong with my aunt (who I now suspect suffered from prolonged post-natal depression) who spent her days at a dirty, cluttered kitchen table chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after cup of coffee while her children did whatever they pleased. I can remember my cousins engaging in behaviour that would have instantly provoked my mother into a towering rage, and my aunt only shrugging and lighting another cigarette. Aping my mother, even as a child I sat in judgment of my aunt, characterizing her as lazy and shiftless because she did not descend upon her children, belt flailing, howling like an enraged banshee.

Many (most?) ACoNs internalize the values of their narcissists, take them as their own, and then beat themselves up with guilt when they violate those values…even if those values are, objectively speaking, self-serving crap. Developmentally speaking, it is during adolescence that we are supposed to individuate, to take those values and mores of the previous generation, evaluate them, keep what we find valuable and jettison the rest, creating our own values and mores to fill the void. Some parents are not flexible enough for their kids to do this without conflict and rebellion ensues. And some parents are not only inflexible but intimidating as well and individuation may not occur as a result, and we go out into the world with our parents’ values and beliefs, not our own.

I think I came out with a combination of the two since I embarked upon my adolescent rebellion after I left my mother’s house and believed myself to be out from under her thumb. When I did something I knew my mother would find objectionable (like not cleaning my house) my feeling was not one of guilt but one of triumph…Take that, you old bat! It is MY house and I will keep it messy if I want! What took me years to realize—because I quite sincerely believed I was living my life the way I wanted—was that I had not left my control-freak narcissist behind, I had carried her along with me in my head and, instead of obeying and feeling guilty when I failed to measure up, I was rebelling and thumbing my nose at her with every choice I made that I knew she would not approve of…and getting an extra measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that she could not punish me.

But the truth is, I didn’t really like the messy house or the low-pay jobs or the flaky, exploitive men, I didn’t like always being broke, never having a larder full of good food, living on the fringes of society. My fear, however, was that if I embraced a conventional lifestyle, I would end up the puppet of someone like my mother and the only way to feel free was to consciously and willingly sacrifice some of the things I wanted…familial acceptance, respectability and a financially secure life…for what I wanted most: a freedom from my mother.

It was years before I realized that my sacrifices were in vain because I carried my mother around with me in my head just as surely as those who fear putting a foot wrong because of misplaced guilt, guilt created by a controlling parent. The only real difference between me and them was that they felt guilty whereas I felt angry and rebellious. Truth be told, we both carried our narcissists around with us in our heads and we both lived our lives in response to them, one of us trying to measure up, the other thumbing her nose rebelliously. But neither of us were free, we merely responded to our captivity in different ways.

It was a long road to acceptance that I was still being controlled by my mother, even though she was hundreds of miles away and we had not spoken for years. I had learned to live reactively, so any time anyone around me did something, I reacted to them, rather than being pro-active myself. This left me open and vulnerable to abuse as it put me always in a defensive position: someone acted, I reacted, usually defensively. The realization that I approached life from a victim’s perspective was what finally woke me up…victims react to what is done to them, victims rebel against injustices, because victims accept the idea that those who victimize them are superior, are right, have authority. And the only way I was going to stop being a victim was to stop acting and thinking like one.

It doesn’t matter if the narcissist in your head controls you with guilt or if you are rebelling against her: it only matters that the choices you make in your life are somehow tied to that narcissist, whether it is to obey or to defy her. It doesn’t matter if your narcissist is dead or alive, next door or half a world away, once you have internalized the narcissist’s values and accepted that the narcissist is the arbiter of right and wrong in your life (even if that acceptance is subconscious), you continue to be controlled by her, only by proxy—and you are the proxy holder.

Changing it was no more than a matter of establishing a new habit…the habit of reflection. I had to do what I should have been doing in adolescence: examining the beliefs, values, mores of my narcissistic mother and deciding if they were worth keeping or if I could do better independently. It was tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to assume that if she believed it or practiced it, it was wrong and had to be tossed out, but I realized that was more of that mindless rebellion. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and narcissists may have some values or notions that are worth keeping.

In the beginning I had to reflect on just about everything…first I had to determine if a belief or attitude was mine or my mother’s and I had unwittingly adopted it. Then, once I determined who initiated the belief, then I had to re-examine it to determine if it was valid for me in my present circumstances. At first it was arduous, time consuming, and fraught with frustration. It is difficult to look at something you have believed is right for your whole life and to toss it out. But messages inculcated into us by self-serving narcissists, no matter how deeply believed, can be very, very wrong and self-destructive. You aren’t useless, hopeless, ugly, inept, a loser, born to fail—these are beliefs that serve the narcissist because it makes her look good, feel good, by comparison. When you adopt these beliefs as your own, you may be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy…or you may be setting yourself up for a lifetime of stress, trying to prove to yourself that you are none of those things. Either way, the narcissist that has taken up residence in your head is controlling you, not you.

Feelings are clues. If you feel guilty or uncomfortable or repelled, you have a clue that something needs examining. When you examine it and you find that it stems from your childhood and your parent, you then have the opportunity to choose. Believing something does not make it a fact: the fact that your narcissist believes you are selfish doesn’t mean you are, it merely means that she believes you are selfish by not subordinating yourself to her. The fact that she was an authority figure in your youth does not mean she must be an authority figure for your whole life—as an adult, you are supposed to be your own authority, setting your own values and boundaries and rules, and taking responsibility for what you believe…because what you believe influences how you feel.

My journey into adulthood, for that is what this really is, involved dumping some sacred cows, truthfully examining cherished beliefs and letting some of the go. It also involved reinforcing some beliefs…consciously accepting values handed to me by authority figures because, in re-examining them, I found them to be of value.

Yes, it takes time and it takes effort. But coming to the place where you are now, being controlled by the narcissist in your head, believing yourself to be less than what you really are, restricted by dictates of a person whose only interest in you is her own needs, didn’t happen overnight. Expecting decades of abuse to be resolved in a few weeks or months of effort on your part is unrealistic and bound to disappoint.

Procrastination doesn’t help, either. The longer you put off self-examination, the more firmly that narcissist is entrenched in your head, and the worse you feel about yourself…which makes it all the more arduous to sort it all out. The sooner you start, the sooner you are finished.

The objective is to be your own person, for good or for ill, and you cannot do that while you carry around the values and beliefs of persons who had only their own best interests at heart. You have to re-evaluate all of it, come to your own values, values that work for you without exploiting others in the process.

The good news is that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Eventually, you learn to recognize a conflict without a lot of deep evaluation and dismissing unhealthy mind sets can become as easy as brushing away a fly. As you get better at it, the conflicts become more obvious as do the healthy alternatives.

When you stop thinking of yourself as a victim, others no longer perceive you that way. Not everyone will be happy with that, of course, and some of them may even try to intimidate or guilt you back into your role. But when that happens, instead of being afraid or alarmed, you can view it as proof that your hard work is paying off: as you shrug off the shackles of the narcissist in your head, the narcissists may go into a panic, trying to keep you as their go-to person for Nsupply. They will reveal themselves by either punishing you (silent treatment, threats, spreading lies about you) or by becoming as manipulatively seductive as they know how (guilting, gifting, promises you know they won’t keep). You will see, by their own actions, who is happy for you learning to stand up and be your own person and who feels threatened by it. And this is valuable information because before you can devise effective strategies to combat the Ns, you first must know who they are.

There may be a price to pay for your mental and emotional health, but I guarantee you, it is nowhere near the price you continue to pay while that narcissist sits inside your head.