DARVO

DARVO is a manipulation tactic used by psychological abusers. It stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Once you unpack the patterns of one abusive person, it seems like they all operate from the same playbook—you start to see it everywhere. This isn’t just a pattern that plays out interpersonally, it can also be seen systemically and on a global scale. Imperialism, capitalism, and oppression of all kinds persist through these very same patterns and require very similar work to heal. The effects on the victims of this kind of control dynamic are familiar, if not identical, regardless of the context (whether micro or macrocosmic). 

Thanks to being raised by people who never learned to meet their own needs—who obtained love by force, coercion, and manipulation—my idea of love was intimately intertwined with abuse. I repeatedly and almost exclusively chose people who were volatile, selfish and treated me more like an accessory or an extension of them, instead of an individual with my own wants and needs. They saw my ability to love as a weakness to be exploited. And they did just that. Leaving these relationships always left me feeling confused, heartbroken, and like a shell of my former self, which was, tbh, a shell of a shell of a shell already. 

Extricating myself from these situations was usually harrowing, to say the least. I was met with smear campaigns, denial, deflection, gaslighting, anger… I had to lose everything, or almost everything, to get away. Whether I was discarded or walked away, the refusal of the other person to take any responsibility left me grappling with my sense of reality; wondering if I’d asked for it.

As I started to heal and research these types of dynamics, I started seeing the same patterns happening in the world politically. “History belongs to the victors” is a great example of DARVO. We see the past through the lens of the people with the power. It takes a concerted effort to look beneath the chosen narrative to see the truth. The state of the world, much of the generational wealth of the world, wars and genocide, and fascism, are founded on the mass marginalizing (aka systemic abuse) of communities of color, oppressed religions and cultures, queer people, disabled people, elderly people, children, and women. Anyone who wasn’t able to access power (decided by the people hoarding the power) was considered less than human. Part of the goal of propaganda is to dehumanize the “enemy,” so they become easier to kill.

The way we have been taught about protests, uprisings, revolutions, colonization, slavery across the ages, across the globe, and even genocide is rarely from the standpoint of the victims, but of the perpetrators. Even the way that the younger generations buy into conspiracy theories denying the holocaust is an example of the effectiveness of the DARVO technique. Or the way people back Israel’s genocidal narrative about Palestine without looking more deeply into the situation.  The lens of the white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy is thick. To see past it, you have to want to, you have to unpack it from moment to moment. It’s pervasive. It distorts everything. 

I was taught all through my public school education in Virginia that colonization was a good thing! That we owed industrialization and the “modern, civilized” world to the brave explorers who discovered land that already had people living on it, tending to it, with cultures rich with tradition, beliefs, and languages. We were taught that being colonized was good for them. Christian missionaries to this day think they’re really doing something good for humanity when they travel the world inflicting their belief system on people who didn’t ask for it. Erasing the humanity of someone is one of the worst things you can do to them—reducing them to property, to a problem, to a wayward soul to be saved. It’s fucked!!

“That didn’t happen. Or if it did happen you deserved it” is the mantra of DARVO. It protects perpetrators of harm from ever having to take responsibility. This is why healing from abuse is so often a solitary endeavor. Looking for closure or confirmation usually just ends up in more denial. Smear campaigns serve to cloud the waters, so it becomes difficult for people outside of the situation to be able to tell who’s causing harm. It serves to further isolate the victim and enable the perpetrator to access more energetic supply from people rallying to their side. Some people are prone to always align themselves with power. Others tend to gravitate to the underdog, intuiting when someone is being hurt. 

Getting away is a blessing, no matter how messy the way out is. Even if it means losing everyone. Even if it means you look like the bad guy. Unpacking and healing internalized biases that perpetuate harm to historically marginalized communities is loving work. It will only serve to liberate you, too. People obsessed with power benefit from others unable to see how they obtain and maintain that power. This white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal system rewards high conflict, selfish, low empathy people with status and money, enabling them to exploit and control to their ego’s content. 

A future where love is the law is available to us, only if we arm ourselves with knowledge—if we see the patterns and hone our discernment. Only if we learn to move differently than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to before. Let honesty, integrity, softness, empathy, and consideration lead the way. Things can be so much better—if we let it. 

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