DARVO is an acronym for
Deny, Attack, and Reverse
Victim and Offender.
It is a manipulative communication tactic and a defensive strategy used by abusers, often those with narcissistic tendencies, to evade accountability when confronted with their wrongdoings.
Coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd in the 1990s, DARVO is a “calculated narrative shift” that flips the roles of victim and perpetrator.
The Three Stages of DARVO
Deny: The covert abuser denies the abuse took place, minimizes it (“it wasn’t that bad”), or pretends they don’t remember.
Attack: When confronted with evidence, the abuser attacks the person raising the concern, discrediting their character or calling them “too sensitive” or “crazy”.
Reverse Victim and Offender (RVO): The abuser positions themselves as the true victim, claiming the actual victim’s efforts to hold them accountable are, in fact, an attack on them.
DARVO and Its Relationship to Narcissism
DARVO is frequently used by individuals with narcissistic personality traits because it acts as a protective shield for their fragile ego and inflated sense of self-importance.
Avoidance of Shame: Narcissists have a low tolerance for shame, criticism, or accountability. DARVO allows them to deflect these uncomfortable feelings immediately.
Need for Control: It allows the narcissist to maintain control over the narrative and the relationship, forcing the victim into a subservient role.
Perpetual Victimhood: Many narcissists see themselves as victims in all situations, making the RVO step a natural extension of their worldview.
Gaslighting:
DARVO is a form of gaslighting. By forcing the victim to doubt their own memory and reality, the narcissist maintains power.
How an Abuser Obfuscates Their Role to Pretend to be the Victim
An abuser uses DARVO to warp the perception of the victim—and any bystanders (family, friends, or courts)—making the actual victim feel responsible for the abuse.
Weaponizing the Victim’s Reaction: If the victim reacts to the abuse with anger, the abuser will call that anger “aggression” and claim to be threatened.
Martyrdom/Emotional Appeal:
They may use dramatic emotional displays, saying things like, “I can’t believe you’d treat me this way after everything I’ve done for you,” causing the victim to feel guilty and apologize.
Spreading False Narratives:
Abusers often proactively tell friends and family that they are being harassed, discrediting the true victim before they can speak up.
Triangulation:
They recruit bystanders to support their “victim” story, placing the true victim in a position of isolation.
“Legal” DARVO: An abuser may file lawsuits—such as for defamation—against the victim, using the court system to officially reframe the situation and intimidate the survivor into silence.
Long-term Impact on the Victim
Repeated exposure to DARVO can cause the victim to feel constantly on edge, develop anxiety, and experience severe self-doubt (trauma-related confusion). It often leads to the victim apologizing to the abuser for the abuser’s own hurtful behavior.
Systemic transformation and achieving equal human rights requires moving beyond temporary fixes to address the root causes of inequity. It is a long-term process that demands shifting mental models, changing structures, and transforming power relationships. The process starts with self-reflection, education, and collective action, utilizing a human rights-based approach to ensure that rights are embedded in everyday practices and organizational structures.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
…::” I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems,
but I was wrong.
The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation (aka: empathy). And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
~Gus Speth
“Power-Over” (coercive control) is the opposite of empathy.
According to psychologist David Matsumoto and his colleagues, combining feelings of disgust with contempt and anger is particularly destructive. World leaders who generate these three emotions at once can engender zealous violence against the targets of their dehumanizing military or vigilante gang campaigns while seeing the problem as someone else’s fault.
see also: https://empathymatters.org/now/schaden-freude/
The insula is an underestimated brain area because it acts as a crucial hub, integrating bodily sensations (interoception) with emotions, cognition, and decision-making, linking our inner world to external reality. Often called the “fifth lobe,” it’s vital for self-awareness, feeling feelings (like hunger, pain, or disgust), emotional regulation, and learning moral/social rules, yet its deep location made it historically overlooked, though modern neuroscience now reveals its central role in mental health and addiction.
Maps and interprets internal body states (heartbeat, gut feelings) and brings them to conscious awareness, forming subjective feelings.
Generates emotional feelings, linking bodily states to emotions like disgust, fear, or empathy, and helps regulate them.
Influences choices by integrating feelings (somatic markers) with cognitive processes, helping us learn what’s rewarding or risky.
Involved in attention, working memory, and initiating intentional actions, connecting feelings to motivation.
Helps learn social norms, right/wrong, and evaluate social cues, impacting trust and interpersonal behavior.
Deep within the brain, beneath the frontal and temporal lobes, making it harder to study.
Its extensive connections to sensory, emotional, and cognitive areas make it hard to study in isolation but essential for linking systems.
Underactivity is linked to issues like addiction (craving recall), anxiety, and impaired empathy, while its role in homeostasis is crucial for overall health.
In essence, the insula is the brain’s “feeling center,” translating our body’s signals into conscious experience, guiding our decisions, and shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world, making its underestimation a significant oversight in understanding human experience and disorders.
For Rogers, empathy is sensing the client’s inner world “as if” it were one’s own, including the felt meanings and emotions, while still knowing it is the other person’s experience, not one’s own. It involves carefully communicating this understanding and checking back so that the client recognizes their own experience in what is reflected, which helps them feel deeply understood and facilitates change. (via acceptance)
Within Carl Rogers’ person-centered framework, a therapist’s own unarticulated inner experience, or internal incongruence, would be the potential source of PROJECTING feelings or biases ONTO the client.
Rogers emphasized the therapist’s core condition of congruence (or genuineness) as essential for therapeutic personality change.
Congruence means the therapist’s inner and outer experiences are aligned. The therapist is aware of their internal feelings and, if appropriate and helpful to the client, is transparent about them within the relationship.
Incongruence for a therapist would be having internal feelings (e.g., judgment, frustration, personal reactions) but hiding them behind a “professional façade”.
When a therapist is incongruent and not fully aware of or processing their own internal, unarticulated feelings, those feelings could implicitly or unconsciously influence their interactions, leading to a form of projection or an inability to offer genuine empathy and unconditional positive regard. This might manifest as subtly guiding the client, making interpretations, or signaling judgment, which would raise the client’s defenses and hinder their self-exploration.
Therefore, self-awareness and, when therapeutically relevant, the appropriate articulation of the therapist’s experience (transparency) are key in the Rogerian approach to avoid imposing the therapist’s own internal world onto the client.
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Carl Rogers did NOT advocate guessing or imposing a feeling label from a pre-set “LIST” if the speaker had NOT conveyed that feeling, either in words, tone, or clear implication. Instead, he emphasized tentatively reflecting the feeling that seems present in the speaker’s actual message, and then checking its accuracy with the speaker.
Rogers on active listening
Rogers described the listener’s task as grasping both the facts and the feelings in what is heard, not inventing or supplying feelings the speaker has not expressed. He contrasted this with more interpretive approaches that project meanings and dynamics onto the speaker, which he warned can increase defensiveness and inhibit real expression.
Feelings reflection, NOT guessing
In Rogers-style reflective listening, the listener attends to the “total meaning” of the message, including tone, posture, and other nonverbal cues, and then responds especially to the feeling component that is actually manifest in the communication. When the listener reflects a feeling, it is meant as a careful, non-evaluative hypothesis about what the speaker is already expressing, not a speculative guess pulled from an abstract list of emotions the speaker has never indicated.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-active-listening-what-did-c-D42hS8shTk29OFWloNGtzA
https://lifebuilderscounseling.org/wp-content/uploads/activelistening.pdf
https://r.jordan.im/download/psychology/arnold2014.pdf
Active listening does not necessarily mean long sessions spent listening to grievances, personal or otherwise. It is simply a way of approaching those problems which arise out of the usual day-to-day events of any job.
https://wholebeinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/Rogers_Farson_Active-Listening.pdf
How does Rogers distinguish empathy from interpretation of feelings
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-rogers-distinguish-em-K4NQMqWGR3K8H3YI8hsSGA
Rogers treats empathy as an accurate, moment‑to‑moment entering of the other person’s experiential world, and he contrasts this with interpretation, which adds meanings or motives that go beyond what the person is actually expressing. Empathy stays close to the client’s “internal frame of reference,” while interpretation moves toward the helper’s theory, assumptions, or inferences about what the client really feels or means.
What Rogers means by empathy
For Rogers, empathy is sensing the client’s inner world “as if” it were one’s own, including the felt meanings and emotions, while still knowing it is the other person’s experience, not one’s own. It involves carefully communicating this understanding and checking back so that the client recognizes their own experience in what is reflected, which helps them feel deeply understood and facilitates change.
How interpretation differs
Interpretation, in contrast, involves the listener offering an explanation, hidden meaning, or deeper feeling that the client has not clearly expressed, often drawing on diagnostic or theoretical ideas. Rogers warned that this kind of interpretive stance can make the client feel analyzed or judged, increase defensiveness, and shift the focus away from the client’s lived experiencing toward the therapist’s concepts.
Key elements of the distinction
Empathy tracks the client’s explicit and implicit meanings and feelings as they emerge, staying within what the client is actually communicating.
Interpretation goes beyond that communication, proposing “what is really going on” psychologically, even if the client has not signaled it.
Rogers framed effective helping as privileging empathic understanding and accurate reflection over interpretive moves, especially early in the relationship.
The fundamental attribution error is the psychological tendency to overestimate the role of personality and underestimate the role of situational factors when explaining another person’s behavior.
For example, one might assume a coworker who is late is lazy, without considering that they might have faced a significant traffic jam or a family emergency.
How it works
Internal vs. external factors: We tend to attribute others’ actions to their internal characteristics (like their personality or beliefs), while overlooking external, situational pressures (like a bad day or a stressful environment).
Self vs. others:
We often make this error when observing others, but we are less likely to do it to ourselves because we are more aware of the external circumstances influencing our own actions.
Impact on judgment:
This bias can lead to unfair judgments, strained relationships, and misunderstandings because we are not considering the full picture of what is influencing behavior.
Example
Observing a driver: You see a driver swerve and assume they are a “jerk” or a “bad driver”.
Considering situational factors:
However, the fundamental attribution error occurs if you don’t also consider that the driver might be rushing to a hospital or dealing with a sudden medical emergency.
** Workplace scenario:**
A manager might believe an employee’s missed deadline is due to incompetence, without considering the possibility of insufficient resources or unclear instructions from the company.
..::”Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of people who are oppressing them.
Assata Shakur
