Dr. Jennifer Freyd coined the term DARVO in 1997 inside a research paper on betrayal trauma, published in Feminism & Psychology. The acronym appeared near the end of that paper, describing a pattern she kept observing in how abusers responded when held accountable. For years it stayed mostly in academic circles, read by a small group of trauma researchers. Then the internet found it.
Millions of people immediately recognized the experience DARVO describes: raising a legitimate concern and somehow ending the conversation blamed for everything. The word traveled because the experience was already everywhere.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Three steps, and each one does a specific job.
What DARVO Actually Means
DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrongdoing may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The perpetrator 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.
The first step, denial, goes further than a simple “I didn’t do it.” It plants a seed: nothing happened, and if you think it did, something is wrong with your perception.
Gaslighting, making someone doubt their own sense of reality over time, is the soil DARVO grows in. DARVO is a specific tactic deployed in the moment of confrontation that turbocharges gaslighting. Gaslighting is the slow erosion of someone’s certainty about what’s real. DARVO compounds that erosion precisely when a person finally tries to name what happened.
As Freyd herself wrote about what abusers do when confronted: “I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credibility.. the offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed.. The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.”
Why It Works, Even on Bystanders
One of the most unsettling research findings isn’t what DARVO does to the person it’s directed at. It’s what it does to people watching from the outside.
In one experiment, researchers presented participants with accounts of abuse followed by a DARVO response versus a control response. Exposure to the DARVO response was associated with less belief of the victim and more blame of the victim. The person using the tactic became more credible in observers’ eyes. The person raising the concern became less so. Bystanders didn’t see through it, they were moved by it.
That confusion is the point. The denial sounds plausible. The attack lands because everyone has done something wrong at some point. By the time the reversal arrives, onlookers have already started wondering whether the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
The Three Steps Up Close
Deny: This stage goes well beyond a flat-out “no.” The denial is structured to do three things at once: minimize or erase the abusive behavior, undercut the credibility of whoever raised the concern, and reposition the perpetrator as the wronged party. The denial rewrites the event before any real conversation can take place. If you can’t agree on what happened, you can’t address it.
Attack: The attack rarely looks like a direct confrontation. Suddenly, the conversation about what you raised has become a conversation about your mental health, your history of overreacting, your motives for bringing it up at all. You came in with a grievance and now you’re defending yourself against an entirely different set of accusations. The goal is to pull you off-topic and keep you there.
Reverse: The reversal is the most disorienting stage because it takes a legitimate grievance and turns it against the person who raised it. They came forward with a real concern about real harm, and now they’re being cast as the aggressor. This is the moment where people often go quiet. Defending yourself against a reversal means arguing about who the real victim is, and doing that out loud can look exactly like the kind of drama the accuser claimed you were causing.
DARVO Gaslighting: What the Research Confirmed
Although some previous research had examined the individual elements of DARVO, the 2017 study by Harsey, Zurbriggen, and Freyd was the first to directly examine DARVO as a unitary concept and to investigate how it relates to feelings of self-blame among victims.
Analyses from that study revealed that DARVO was commonly used by individuals who were confronted, that the three components of DARVO were positively correlated, supporting the theoretical construction of DARVO, and that higher levels of exposure to DARVO during a confrontation were associated with increased perceptions of self-blame among those who raised the concern.
The person who did the right thing, who named a harm, who tried to hold someone accountable, walked away blaming themselves. Not because they were weak. Because the tactic is specifically built to produce that outcome.
Who Uses It, and Whether They Know They’re Doing It
This is one of the more complicated questions in the research. DARVO is often described as a deliberate strategy, but that framing can be misleading. It’s a strategy that some people use, consciously or not, to deflect blame, discredit the person they hurt, and protect themselves from consequences.
The “consciously or not” matters. Someone with a deeply entrenched pattern of avoiding accountability doesn’t necessarily sit down and plan a DARVO response. For many people, denial is an automatic reflex when faced with shame. The attack comes from panic. The reversal comes from a genuine, if distorted, sense of being wronged. None of that makes it less harmful. But it does mean that calling someone a “DARVO abuser” and expecting them to recognize themselves in the label is usually not how this resolves.
DARVO is often associated with individuals exhibiting narcissistic traits or narcissistic personality disorder when confronted about harmful behaviors. But it also shows up in people with no diagnosable personality disorder, in family systems where blame-shifting has been normalized for generations, in workplaces where admitting fault is punished, in friendships where one person has never been asked to take responsibility for anything.
Beyond Personal Relationships: When Institutions Do It
Jennifer Freyd didn’t stop at interpersonal DARVO. She extended the concept to describe how institutions, organizations, governments, universities, corporations, use the same pattern when confronted with wrongdoing.
Institutional DARVO occurs when DARVO is committed by an institution, or with institutional complicity, as when police charge rape victims with lying. Institutional DARVO is a particularly aggressive form of institutional betrayal and, if common, is an indicator that an organization is not operating at its healthy potential. The pattern is recognizable across decades of public scandals: an institution denies that anything inappropriate occurred, attacks the credibility of those who came forward, then positions itself as the wronged party, burdened by false accusations, damaged by unfair scrutiny.
Sarah Harsey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University-Cascades. Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology retired from the University of Oregon and founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage. In a 2025 op-ed co-authored with Harsey and published in The Hill, Freyd argued that the same three-step pattern that operates between individuals can distort public understanding of accountability at a national scale, each component of the tactic layers manipulation with confusion, making it harder to perceive reality accurately.
The Risk of Getting It Wrong
Calling out DARVO requires care. While naming it can help counter its effects, the term carries a real risk of being wielded as a rhetorical weapon, sometimes wisely, sometimes lazily, and sometimes unfairly.
Not every denial is a lie. Not every counter-accusation is a reversal of victim and offender. Someone can be genuinely wronged and still be accused of using DARVO for saying so. A term that describes how perpetrators dodge accountability can itself become a tool for dodging accountability.
DARVO is offered as a potentially memorable and useful term for anticipating the behavior of perpetrators when held accountable, and for making sense of responses that may otherwise be confusing. Based on observation and analysis, the author hypothesizes that some sorts of denials and reactions such as DARVO are more likely when the perpetrator is guilty than innocent. But as Freyd has also been explicit about: the use of DARVO, even if statistically associated with guilt, might raise red flags but cannot be considered proof of any particular past action.
The research published in PLOS ONE in 2024, which developed a validated short-form measure of DARVO, found that DARVO use is linked to broader attitudes that excuse gendered violence. That connection matters beyond individual relationships. It also points to why precision matters, the more loaded a term becomes in popular use, the more important it is to use it carefully.
What to Do When You Recognize It
Recognizing DARVO in the middle of a conversation is hard. The tactic moves fast and hits the emotions first. By the time you’ve registered what happened, you’re already on the defensive.
A few things tend to help. The first is simply knowing what the pattern looks like, because once you can name the structure, you’re less likely to keep engaging with its content. You don’t have to disprove every accusation hurled at you during an attack. You can notice that you’ve been pulled off-topic and decline to follow.
Signs to watch for in yourself: conversations frequently leave you feeling guilty or at fault even when you were the one raising a valid concern, the other person deflects accountability and focuses on your perceived flaws or mistakes, you find yourself apologizing for raising a legitimate issue.
The second is documentation. In contexts where DARVO keeps repeating, a workplace, a family, an ongoing relationship, keeping a record of what was actually said and when is not paranoia. It’s the antidote to the “that never happened” phase of the denial.
The third, which is harder: accepting that naming the pattern doesn’t fix it. Research suggests that DARVO reactions are more likely when the perpetrator is guilty than innocent. Someone using DARVO is unlikely to change course the moment the tactic is identified. The value in knowing the term isn’t that it gives you leverage over the other person. It’s that it gives you clarity about what’s actually happening to you.
The Part That Doesn’t Resolve Neatly
The reason DARVO keeps spreading as a concept isn’t just that it’s useful. It’s that it names something people have been experiencing for a long time without language for it. The specific disorientation of walking into a conversation with a legitimate grievance and coming out of it somehow responsible for everything, that doesn’t need to happen repeatedly before it starts reshaping how you see yourself.
A growing body of research has confirmed that DARVO can significantly undermine survivor credibility and increase victim self-blame. Those aren’t abstract statistical outcomes. They describe what happens inside a person over time when their reality keeps being rewritten by someone they trusted.
Some of these patterns go back further than any individual relationship. DARVO shows up in families where one person has never been wrong, where generations of children learned to distrust their own perceptions because the adult in the room was always, somehow, the one who’d been treated unfairly. Naming the tactic in adulthood doesn’t undo that history. But knowing what was happening, what it was called, and that researchers have documented its effects with rigor, that tends to be where people start to trust themselves again.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.