DARVO as a lifetime affliction

​I’m learning a lot from AI. 

I ask AI questions and follow up with more. No matter how long winded I am -it listens to me. I really recommend it. It’s very flattering -but my life has left me utterly immune to that flattery. Maybe not…I know it’s just written into the AI programming. Hopefully the info is solid. My son says it’s trash “confirmation bias” channel so there we are. 

The other night AI shared that the reason I was in such recent mental confusion and pain was because I was experiencing DARVO from my separated spouse. I was explaining that in a forced marital separation-abandonment with no contact or explanation of his infidelity I had been emailed and accused of saying “disparaging things.” Not actually in person or directly to his face, or in person to anyone else, nor on a text, by phone, or email, stagecoach, pony express, rocket, letter-as I am really known to speak my mind very directly to others, but instead disparaging by what I’d chosen to “repost”/story (for 12 hours) on Instagram -which he never in a million years would have read, understood, or cared a fig about previously. And wouldn’t be now save a “flying monkey” situation. (Also a pleasing new term.) I’d be choosing a heck of a method if I did that to say something to topple a reputation. I was reposting content like this. Or this. Or this. Certainly this. This. This. Besides let’s just FACE it- his own on-going choices damage him so much actually in his real life- it astounds me. 40 years of my efforts to build a life with a person and help our family -plus support decent careers seems destroyed completely.  Using this posting method perhaps is a new code for only the select few aware of it-or those that might think of it- “Sarah’s sending smoke signals tonight on her insta reposts and stories-hurry and see.”  I actually thought I was saving my reposts to a personal private findable archive of them when the content resonated with my current situation, so I could see it again-content I certainly didn’t create-over making my few Instagram friends see it. Additionally I thought my instagram was private but apparently it wasn’t.  It was combed by someone who he stated “constantly” shows it to him.  My terms are troll and sock puppet but I can employ flying monkey more accurately. I literally have no desire to do that kind of coded messaging about anyone on my Instagram.  I’m more of a direct in person- person.  I’d prefer my spouse just speak to me. Will not.  I think the behavior of the whole experience of why and how I’m separated -that I’ve experienced -is the real and actual disparagement and it’s of me actually -let me be clearer-I’m just in the aftermath of the tsunami. Paying the price of being a bystander.

And I was confused about why talking about my betrayal trauma would or could be seen as about hurting a good person doing righteous and good always, decent, fair, upfront things. True blue. 

This was all I’d heard from him period-despite making it clear very critical situations exist in my survival which won’t be spoken to and I hear absolutely nothing about. In one day I lost all info. And access to a person who is now living with an affair partner apparently in their home. Post on insta and it’s Path e news. So…Utterly confusing and out of order and stunning. 

But AI went on to explain what this is. L

This silence and now the sudden six emailed accusations. It named it DARVO. Since it is new to me -over reflecting in the present situation risking more accusations of disparagement for sharing out these facts- I looked back at my childhood. 

Was it there? What does DARVO mean there. What was lived. In situations maybe being echoed here and now. Pattern recognition. Maybe.  Everyone should be skilled at dealing with it, DARVO, and I’m not.

  My father was a narcissist. My own dad. Not just my opinion. Diagnosed. I figure if this is a common behavior method to that mental health disorder then he’d exemplify it -but like much of today’s terminology and understandings -my frame to understand would be different than those folks growing up now. I did not grow up in an age of instant available resource media. No terms like DARVO.  We might see a movie and shift towards new understandings culturally. Or read a novel. So much is different now including the instant info with its brevity -and thus often mass over simplification and stunning generalizations of complicated situations and issues. Shared rapidly culturally defining media. And rapid availability of information. Maybe not ordered and categorized and academic but always right there. It’s changed life.  I will break in here and share what I read on DARVO now to try to bring in my thoughts about what that means to me. I think it’s important to try to clear my confusion and trauma (and I noticed in group dynamics in teaching DARVO in certain job settings too- I’ll also mention that in a coming post. Look for “DARVO in my teaching life.”)

Here’s what AI told me.  

First definitions… “ DARVO is an acronym that stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It is a psychological manipulation tactic used by people—such as abusers, narcissists, or people caught doing wrong—when they are confronted about their bad behavior. [1]

Instead of taking responsibility, the person flips the script to make themselves look like the victim and the actual victim look like the bad guy. [1]”

Looking at childhood….

What happened to me was in my teens my parents divorced. My father had spent several years highly critical of my mother and demonizing her every single day-largely to two sympathetic women at work and to her face constantly. No moment for her was just ok. No good times with him. No restaurant dates, no music clubs, no drives, no gifts, no pettiness was too small for him (Dad grew up in severe poverty in East Tennessee in the depression to a 16 year old mom who fell apart by 20 but who had to cook, clean, grow a family with no running water or plumbing-he left to join the service at 14-he was about two emotionally and this is the source in part of his mental illness-it’s trauma in childhood unaddressed) At a certain point it was obvious he wanted her to go file for divorce. In fact eventually he railed at her to do that. Daily. He was a screamer and very loud and very frightening. Deafening. So my memory is quite clear on all this. I’m fair too. My brother and I from about age 8 for me on -lived in fear of losing a home and our life. Projected all over us. Daily. He’d scream it. We did not have security. Regularly Dad would say we would be on the street on welfare. Vast prognostications of doom. And that we would deserve it.  He regularly told my mother she had no economic value.  She’d never get a real job. To put that in context she had degrees in psychology, social work, English, business, accounting, a CPA, and in public administration. Two degrees were MAs. She audited English classes like Southern writers, Shakespeare, Jewish writers. She became certified to peddle stock. She loved astrology. And for ten years supported his education. By working. So while we lived in a very small back east university town where dad taught -with almost no other jobs and little room to find one-my mother had also previously put my father through grad school. She always was in classes-then free to wives in terms of tuition.  He’d insisted on having us kids. As was common in the 1960’s she stopped work to raise my brother and I - really at my father’s insistence. She had long worked as a telephone operator. She had worked scanning films for “events” in the physics labs in Madison Wisconsin. Worked in a university library in research. Mom was very educated, literate and an autodidact and I don’t know why this destroyed her personal confidences but it did. Life with dad destroyed her independent money making. Created dependency. Both my parents were probably textbook high functioning autistics. Mom certainly.  Dad just destroyed your confidence daily, narcissistic abuse does this.  I will never recover mine if I ever had it. I doubt I ever built it. A nuisance to his narcissism. Mom in my opinion was definitely outclassing the area we lived in, but she didn’t see that at all. Finally my father just separated suddenly and it was rumored to us he was in an affair with a student my age. Early twenties. Soon verified. She filed for her divorce out of intense humiliation and in those times it was great humiliation and loss of community standing, though pretty soon almost everyone there was divorced. For my mother it was worse. Did we experience DARVO.  Well yes. Literally daily on many levels.  My mother was maligned by Dad to his family, to townfolk we knew,  to university people (he was a prof) and how do I know?  Often they just told us. He’d insist on maligning mom to both my brother and I -blatantly lying. Hurting us to hear this about mom. Now the story was how in long suffering way he’d endured mom-only for the kids. She was now accused of horrible distortions. After a few years divorced almost everyone told us they felt really bad. For mom. There was no subtlety.  Dad openly said he’d been “sainted to be with her” and then let loose. Always a “bad marriage” to a real crazy nightmare. She was portrayed as crazy always as his fundamental truth, as a follower of the devil -because of his families lower level of sophistication to really make him noble to them and righteous-from the astrology. And she was actually unable to access any joint funds and left instantly so no opportunity to get working or be financially ready. Set up to fail. Just your life over in a day. I so identify. Then he pointed at that. As proof of her crappiness and taking advantage of him. He said he was stuck with damaged good. Literally. Now his family was no longer family. He was out getting “new family” to replace the bad one he had. What he did to his kids- to me -was far, far worse. And I’m unprepared to face it now. But that’s probably worse in retrospect because I lived it in the first person.  Mom might disagree. He absolutely wanted no contact of his children with his family -my relatives-for me to never speak what we knew first hand to set the record straight. Or to have any family. I completely lost all that extended family. That echoes now. Overnight. And his family completely did that shunning. Lined up like dominoes.  So we were painted long term grifters, lazy, living on his largesse -but in my case he said I’d had an abortion. As well as naming my rapid weight loss due to working and no money for food on anorexia-being crazy. I weighed 86 pounds when I met my current husband. But this so called abortion-  I had never even had sex.  Wouldn’t til much later. He made sure he spread this in strict “confidence” to as many upright people as he could.  My dad. Imagine what morals my now completely alienated family thought I had by 19.  I was on my own. By then if I did talk about his real physical abuse no one believed me. He basically stopped at nothing so that he’d be seen as having been utterly justified in any divorce of cruel behavior. Poor Mac.  He made endless letters to his family outlining huge lists of spending on my brother and I going back to infancy. Of our crimes against him. Poison pen. Look at his trying. On our supposed behavior. We lived as paupers. And that grew desperate. I didn’t eat for days at a time. On one list he estimated toilet paper roll consumption cost. Everyway you could humiliate a person he did. Ways I’m not prepared to speak about.  For one year after he left when I was working nights and watching my grandmother with Alzheimer’s in the day -while mom worked when I was supposed to be asleep before my teaching shift -he’d wake me daily at six am on the dot to rail about what “a lazy piece of sh!t” my brother and I were.  Obscenity was all I was called. (It’s why being called the b word is destabilizing to me to this day, also why my spouse’s long term problematic profanity use was extremely difficult to live with) Why wasn’t I working? I was. He knew that. My entire tuition for all my years was paid by a Performance grant I earned to WVU in Art. He still totaled that up and said he paid it. Condemned art. My major. I have ability.  In truth he paid way under $3000 total for books. I never had the books for classes. I chose to listen well. Notes.  He paid for about a third of what I needed for books. That’s all. Don’t get me wrong I appreciate what he paid for.  I didn’t know about student loans til married and learned my spouse carried them. And I inherited that debt. I was put in the position of helping mom pay the bills.  In the end she did a terrible thing and sold the house.  

It could go on and on. Details.  The thing I didn’t have then was the label DARVO.  It is a very tidy way to label years of abuse and the experience of my parent’s divorce. Yes.  Dad used DARVO to try to preserve his “standing” as a professor despite involvement in an affair with a young student, and eventually secure his reputation in several admin positions. He absolutely reversed victim and offender.  He demanded almost daily we apologize for his choices and actions. For our living.  Or as my Uncle states he’s “seen my dad cry” as if that makes it all true. He especially used DARVO to paper over an affair with someone years younger he eventually married, had a baby with in his fifties, divorced and by the time my sister was 12 he never saw or parented her again.  And DARVOd that ex and her replacement in high drama chaos.  As the victim. A role he loved. A role as a young child he was. He lived it. 

Yeah I’m leaving a whole lot out. But to understanding the construct. 

Let’s return to AI-

“How DARVO Works

The tactic happens in three distinct steps:

1. Deny: The person denies that the harmful event or bad behavior ever happened. (Examples: "That never happened," or "You're making things up.")
2. Attack: The person attacks the character of the person who is calling them out. They might accuse the person of being too sensitive, crazy, or dramatic. (Examples: "You're always trying to start a fight," or "You're too sensitive.")
3. Reverse Victim and Offender: The person twists the situation to claim they are the ones who are actually hurt or being abused. The person who brought up the issue suddenly has to apologize and comfort the manipulator. (Examples: "I can't believe you would accuse me of this, it's ruining my life,"or "You are abusing me by saying these things.") [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]” 

In my memory -which is being forced to open with my situation now -forced-I remember having to beg Dad monthly for the $100 to $900 he paid my mom a month. To supplement the full time job she found at $1000 a month -take home $650-she earned that at the Job Service where she was the Veteran’s Outreach Worker -run by the state. She’d scored the highest in the state on the civil service test and she was too kind to do this work. They didn’t have any jobs and the clients were largely West Virginia Vietnam vets. She’d feel such pain she’d try to hire them. Many were deeply mentally disturbed. We had nothing. Not even TP. I’d get a roll at work. She herself was a vet. She’d hired a woman with no leg to clean the house. She hired a man to resurface the kitchen cabinets who moved into the garage with his 11 year old son. Never did the job.  I had to -after three months -stop this squatting situation. Many were worse issues -some dangerous.  What she didn’t do was have the funds to survive. And I worked. And we tried to take on her mom in serious dementia dropped on her without a cent or more than two dresses who wasn’t even getting her SS check. Her son was. Mom’s brother. And he took over her property. Grandmom was robbed. In her son’s mind he well deserved it. In his mind he’d looked after her for years. Way more DARVO. But. The point is how it works is adequately explained here I suppose.  The abuser feels they deserve respect, praise, apology while carrying out an agenda of harm and often great cruelty. Looking at only their view. You are silenced. They are covering their own bad behavior. 

 There’s always a lot you “can’t tell out loud” with narcissism. Folks who can’t talk to one another. Always. Silence ordered, mandated by the narcissists. No one can be open. Always an image to protect. Silencing is always essential-the victims are expected to be silent. All of his kids. And it’s always sold as a2sides situation. Usually by flying monkeys covering for them with a vested interest in an outcome they want or think they want. Dad’s new wives occupied that monkey role at stages in discarding wives. As if you only lived in their monkey looking shoes you’d condone adultery immediately -or as in my father’s case ditching your 52 year old spouse who put you through all your schooling as only paid worker, raised your 2 kids, she had done literally all housework-all home life even mowing, canning, lived in virtual poverty -and then expected to be applauding your spunk and initiative behind their back getting a younger than your daughter replacement. Protecting their happiness and now called your “peace.” Or a far thinner better more “your speed” someone new -finally you can have happiness -a replacement you deserve. Mobility itself. Applause is cued.  Of course your bad behavior is deserved and heroic. You are always right. He even expected the women to agree  to be amicable and delighted for him. And silent. Always held to that  -dad would love confidentiality agreements-he was ahead of his time. All that enforced silence. 

Yes. My memory holds so much knowledge of this process I can’t process it to sit here to write. I’ll improve with practice.  Dad could use this DARVO technique if he broke a plate.  You made a noise, you startled him, you were guilty. You owed him apologies for his breaking a plate over simply that’s an accident.  Then he’d scream cry. And sometimes hit you if you were small enough. 

From the small to the giant cracks in character always DARVO at the ready. The DARVO playbook. I really should try one day to talk to how much of my life I’ve apologized for basically being just being alive.  And being around someone justifying horrific choices and conduct failures to escape responsibility.  To not “hear” about it. To be silenced. 

Well back to AI 

“ Why People Use It

• To avoid accountability: It lets the wrongdoer escape punishment or blame.
• To confuse the victim: It makes the victim doubt their own memory, feelings, and sense of reality.
• To regain control: It puts the victim on the defensive, forcing them to prove their innocence instead of pursuing the original issue. [1, 2, 3, 4]

If you're dealing with a situation like this, let me know if you would like tips on how to set boundaries or how to respond using the broken-record technique.”

At this point I have to say AI my father used DARVO so much and spent so much time false documenting, falsifying, gathering others into this -that it was important I leave my home state by 22 and I made some horrendous mistakes of judgement doing that -majorly misunderstood who I was dealing with in seeking a way out, and came to California and married unprepared and apparently in grave error as I did so for life. My only requirement. I wasn’t repeating this infidelity I thought imperceptibly. Not doing that to my kids. I would never have done any of that leaving if I hadn’t been in constant home crisis far, far, far beyond my capacity. Mom had a stroke misdiagnosed as schizophrenia one night. Nothing ever the same. She broke forever. And I didn’t extract myself later from such a far distance away with babies because returning to home meant this. I brought mom with me as a package deal I’m told. Returning to my bone deep hopelessness in WV was impossible. A deeply destructive nightmare too much to ever share here or tell -driven by narcissistic abuse- physical and mental.  At 67 and in deep crisis I’m forced to look at my actual life. Forced. That never serves me. It freezes me now in deep psychological collapse. 

To understand how I got to this. 

A spouse in an affair and blame shifting to where I can not fairly say what the last years have been. Silenced. As a disparager. I feel I am an overly fair, decent, good, fat person. Overly empathetic. I don’t feel I should apologize for how I’ve lived.  Or what I’ve said. I feel crushed and discarded, betrayed and broken. I feel hurt beyond measure. Silenced. 

Back to AI for just a bit more. 

Why was my father doing this? 

“ Why Do Narcissists Employ DARVO

• Protecting the Town Image: As a university prof and admin his career and social status depends heavily on public perception. He was terrified that the truth will rupture their carefully curated reputation. 
• Deflection: If he can keep you terrified, defensive, and focused on defending your mom and your self,  he successfully avoids discussing the harsh logistical realities of your situation and the divorce.  
• Control: Isolating you and making you feel like the "bad guy" is designed to drain your energy so you won't fight back legally or socially.

That’s what happened. Mom got no part of his retirement. A house with a mortgage and he paid $300 a month for two years.  His child support for my brother was $100 a month til 18. WV was a place with serious consequences in those years for women seeking divorce.  She did not cite adultery because she had lousy local counsel.  And I suppose no rich text history proof as there were no texts. Long phone calls though.  Mom had no credit card. She never had one. My mother opened a bank account it never held more than a thousand. She’d made dad a ton on the stock market. She got nothing of it. She started over in her 50’s with not a dime. She died here with me -penniless. She earned $400 a month in SS. Dad having other marriages and a child drawing on his SS is why she couldn’t make a little more from using his.

 Practically DARVO works like a charm. The narcissists that employ it succeed. Always. I never saw one person beside myself ever effectively confront Dad on any of it. My brother did- so he was annihilated.  I never heard a peep except being told later what he said about me. But he destroyed my name in my town through his own behavior and then to cover it invented mine. He manipulated gullible fools basically. 

This topic deserves much posting. And I’ll try. I want to address Flying Monkeys-those people that assist DARVO in the doing. What that looks and feels like. Or did in my childhood. And how time often takes away their wings. How eventually those monkeys need a lot of support themselves. And how time often -when you have an arc of time- can change those assistants into people coming to terms with their complicity and their own injury.  I saw this in three women’s stories connected to my father. And I’m going to share another post specifically about one who has passed along and how she worked to rectify the hurt she caused me. But never addressed the harm with my mother.  And to my mother. 

I will share in time.  Right now my brain is bleeding.  Going back into memory for me is just self harm. And it has such consequences. See recovery from the damage of narcissistic abuse is forever and extremely private because society stands with the abusers. 100%. And the abusers hold power  and so do their monkeys  at all costs.

But for those dealing with DARVO I do see myself in you.