DARVO
12th April 2015
Have you ever marveled at how your abusive wife, girlfriend or ex is able to do and say the most hurtful, underhanded and contemptible things and then portray herself as the innocent victim? Have you ever wondered how she is able to convincingly accuse others, usually her victims, of the abusive behaviors and attitudes of which she is actually guilty? Wonder no more, the answer may be DARVO.
Dr Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD of the University of Oregon identified DARVO in the 1990s at the tail end of the repressed sexual abuse memories hysteria. In spite of its dubious origins, DARVO is a helpful concept with broader applications than Dr Freyd seems to have originally intended. Freyd writes about DARVO in conjunction with her work on betrayal trauma, which I discuss on the original Shrink4Men blog. According to Dr Freyd’s webpage:
“DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, 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 or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”
DARVO seems to be a combination of projection, denial, lying, blame shifting and gaslighting. Dr Freyd notes that other observers have identified the same phenomena using different terms. My male clients experience this behavior when they try to hold the abusive women in their lives accountable. It also seems to be common behavior in most predators, bullies, high-conflict individuals and/or abusive personality-disordered individuals. DARVO especially seems to occur in high-conflict divorce and/or custody cases.
A better description of the ‘progressive’ mentality I’ve never seen.