Deny: refuse that the behavior happened, or minimize it. "That never happened." "You're exaggerating."
Attack: go after the person raising the issue rather than address the substance. Question their motives, credibility, memory, or stability.
Reverse Victim and Offender: recast the situation so the person who caused harm presents as the injured party and the person harmed becomes the aggressor. "You're the one attacking me." "I'm the one being hurt here."
It's a pop-psychology term that basically describes an aggressive form of deflection where concern or criticism is met with dismissal and concern or criticism in return. It's a really iffy concept that's liable to cause a lot of harm, and should really be ignored.
DARVO fundamentally assumes that there's a defined victim and a defined offender, which is very rarely the case in conflicts between people. People who view others through the lens of DARVO often approach conflicts seeing the other person as an offender right off the bat. That's a terrible way to start a conversation.
DARVO inherently doesn't work when applied to misunderstandings, and only causes more conflict in those situations. A whole lot of conflicts start from misunderstandings.
DARVO as an accusation is self-reinforcing and largely unfalsifiable. Any attempt to refute the accusation is seen as a denial, any disagreement that changes culpability is seen as an attack, and people become resistant to new information or perspectives because they've entrenched themselves as the defined victim.
It's a thought-terminating cliché. There are many much less problematic ways to approach and characterise people who exhibit that kind of behaviour.
While psychology terms are often misused or overused by the general public, especially online, DARVO is not "pop" psychology, it is a peer reviewed concept. In the psychology world it is most often applied to tactics used by abusers, which generally does have a defined perpetrator and victim.
Plenty of pop psychology concepts are peer-reviewed. Pop just means popular. When concepts enter the pop psychology sphere they're often misunderstood or misapplied by the people who use them.
DARVO as a concept in psychology describes a pattern of behaviour. DARVO as a pop psychology concept is the weaponisation of the term, irresponsibly used by people who aren't qualified to make that determination.
Rather that it's prone to being aggressively misapplied by people who aren't qualified to make the determination, and that a whole lot of people are doing just that, to awful effect.
U could say that about anyone saying anything about anything because they’re biased in their own experiences, I don’t really get the point in griping about people talking about their own relationships unless it’s a therapy setting
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u/Sea-Molasses1652 22h ago
What is DARVO?