People enter individual therapy for a wide variety of reasons, from those looking for mechanisms to help them make the most of their life to others who are trying to come to terms with the often traumatic events that are part of so many lives.
Unfortunately, there are also cases where someone is seeking therapy due to the actions of someone else, such as those who are current or previous victims of abuse.
Abuse victims are subject to various forms of control, including manipulation, and two of the most commonly discussed manipulation tactics are gaslighting and the acronym DARVO.
Understanding both of these and how manipulators deploy them as a control tactic is essential for many people to understand and start to unpick what are often long cycles of abuse and empower them to resist their effects.
Understanding DARVO
The acronym, originally coined in 1997 by psychologist Jennifer Freyd, is short for:
- Deny.
- Attack, and
- Reverse Victim and Offender.
It is typically a three-step strategy used by manipulators and abusers to reverse an accusation that could cause them to face accountability for their actions, and cause either an abuser or other bystanders to reconsider their view.
It is often used in cases of domestic physical and psychological abuse but can also occur in other walks of life such as an employee at a company blowing the whistle on unsafe working practices.
Denial can be an outright statement that actions and events that clearly happened did not occur, or can be more subtle.
In the whistleblowing example above, denial by a boss or manager could be outright stating that the unsafe practice didn’t happen, it’s not a big deal or that it was a minor lapse in judgement that is not worth reporting.
This can overlap somewhat with the concept of gaslighting, where a person’s reality is questioned to such a degree that they no longer completely trust the evidence of their eyes and ears.
Attack is any technique used to deny the accuser’s credibility, which often takes the form of the “tu quoque” (also you) logical fallacy.
Manipulators will often use any means they have at their disposal to discredit their accusers, from questioning their motivations, attacking their mental health and mental stability and often digging into their past and present actions.
In this workplace example, an attack could be claiming with or without evidence that they should have reported it sooner, that they are culpable or have done workplace actions that are as bad or worse. It could even extend to threats of litigation or termination.
The final element is to reverse the roles of victim and offender, where the abuser or manipulator argues that they are the wronged party in this situation, which can happen in many different ways depending on the circumstances of the original abuse.
It can be arguments of self-defence, that these accusations are a malicious attack designed to ruin the abuser’s life, that they are knowingly lying to hurt them or that anything they did was in self-defence.
In our workplace example, the final part of this would be an outright accusation that the whistleblower’s actions were malicious attempts to use lies to bring down the company with the manipulator claiming victimhood.
The credibility of such a reversal is largely immaterial and is not consistent with either the facts or the power dynamic at work, but the aim is to bully, guilt and threaten the victim into silence.
However, once you understand how DARVO works, it is far less effective and harmful.