April 2023

Dear Friends of Courage,

We have two fascinating articles in this issue of the Courage Brief. The first, by Dr. Sarah Harsey, Postdoctoral Fellow of the Center for Institutional Courage, describes some of the findings we have from a newly completed Courage project regarding the relationship between DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim & Offender) and anti-social personality characteristics such as those exhibited by narcissists. This research was presented last week as a poster at the 40th annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation held in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’m excited to tell you that our poster won the Best Poster Award at the conference. There are additional fascinating findings from this research, some of which I will be telling you about in the next Courage in Action. This research about DARVO was only possible due to the financial support of our donors; we thank you. The second article is by author Kayla Taylor who shares a compelling story about her own experience as the mother of a child who was bullied in school followed by institutional betrayal by the school.

I hope you read every word of these two articles.

Jennifer Freyd
Founder and President, Center for Institutional Courage

DARVO and the Dark Triad

By Sarah Harsey
Postdoctoral Fellow for Research and Education
Center forInstitutional Courage

An ever-growing number of videos, articles, blog posts, podcasts feature DARVO, the manipulative tactic Courage Founder and President Jennifer Freyd first identified in the late 90s. Even the raunchy animated series South Park aired a scene in which a fictional Donald Trump Jr. advises another character to use DARVO - “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender,” as he said - to evade criminal charges.

A quick search for this kind of DARVO content online suggests that people are particularly interested in connecting the concept with narcissism. Recently, popular YouTuber and psychologist DoctorRamani, who enjoys an audience of over 1.3 millions subscribers, released a nearly 15-minute long video detailing how narcissists use DARVO when held accountable. But connections made online between DARVO and narcissism were purely speculative. After all, no data existed to back such claims - until now.

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Institutional Courage where I, along with Freyd and other Courage-affiliated scholars, do research on DARVO. Recently, we explored the personality traits of people who use DARVO - specifically, we wanted to see if DARVO use was related to a specific cluster of antisocial personality traits ominously referred to as the dark triad. The dark triad, as the name suggests, has three parts: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Narcissism is characterized by a lack of caring for others, grandiosity, and self-serving actions. People who exhibit psychopathy are likely to act impulsively with a disregard for how their actions affect others, while Machiavellianism describes a type of cold and strategic style of manipulation. All three personality traits are underpinned by callous manipulation - getting what you want out of other people, regardless of the cost. 

The dark triad seemed to share a lot in common with DARVO, which similarly seeks to manipulate other people for personal gain. And so Freyd and I surveyed nearly 1,000 people - 601 college students and 335 community members - to test if people who used DARVO were also more likely to have these dark triad traits.

Here’s how we did it: we asked participants in this study to indicate how much DARVO they used on someone else during a time they were confronted over a wrongdoing. These participants then responded to a scale measuring their levels of each of the three dark triad traits - narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. 

What we found helps validate the connections people have drawn between narcissism and DARVO: in both student and community samples, people who were more likely to use DARVO were also more likely to exhibit higher levels of narcissism. Moreover, both samples revealed the more aggressive DARVO users were also more likely to report both higher psychopathy and Machiavellianism. DARVO use, as we found, was associated with the entire dark triad.

This is the first study to identify a link between DARVO and antisocial personality traits, revealing that people who use this manipulative tactic do, in fact, have manipulative and self-serving tendencies.

The more we learn about DARVO and the people who use it, the better equipped we are to identify it and mitigate the harm it causes. We already know that providing even a brief education about DARVO can reduce the negative influence it has on observers who are exposed to perpetrator DARVO. Anticipating that people who have antisocial traits might try to use DARVO (or knowing that DARVO is more likely to come from people who seek to manipulate others) might offer similar protection against it.

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Institutional Betrayal in the Most Innocent of Places

By Kayla Taylor

When I first realized my child was being bullied in school, I believed our problem could be solved swiftly. I assumed adults in positions of power would support the targeted child, teach the aggressors to be kinder, and coach peers to stand up to future playground injustice.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. My child endured repeated attacks while the school head denied the existence of bullying of any kind, despite numerous witness accounts. It felt like he was more worried about public image than the well-being and safety of children.

So, we pleaded with the school board to help, but trustees responded with a crushing letter that warped facts and turned the table on our child. I wondered if they were preparing for a court fight when they suggested our daughter’s learning differences made her incapable of determining if she’d been mistreated or not. Illogically, they then suggested that if she had been mistreated, her differences were most likely the root cause…that she perhaps deserved any abuse she might have received.

A senior staff member also declared that our child needed to stay clear of one of the students who had taunted her for months (and whose father was a trustee). Apparently, this student was “sensitive” and, therefore, the one in need of protection.

The experience was mind-bending until I came across Dr. Freyd’s research. Her acronym “DARVO” neatly described the ways the school Denied our accounts, Attacked my family, and Reversed the roles of Victim and Offender. I had spent months reading all I could about bullying, but it was Dr. Freyd’s work on DARVO, Institutional Betrayal, and Institutional Courage that provided the most clarity and validation. Her team offered the language I needed to articulate and surface the truths buried deep in my bones. Without her important work, it would have been easier to gaslight me into accepting the school’s narrative, thereby negating my own judgment and sense of sanity.

In time, I came to understand something crucial: while several peers initially wronged my child, it was the institutional response that was the most devastating. School leaders could have helped a vulnerable student, but instead, they victim-shamed her and suggested she was unworthy of dignity or belonging. We experienced firsthand how some adults won’t care for a child in need and how an entire institution can be complicit in her pain.

The mental health effects of this kind of abandonment were…and remain…significant. Our child developed such serious anxiety that she resisted going to school or even leaving home. She also began to question the value of her own life. I will never forget the fear on her face or throughout my body as she told me what she was considering. She was eight.

I once believed trauma is only experienced in extreme contexts like war or rape, but I now understand that it can surface in seemingly innocuous environments, like offices, hospitals, and yes, even places of worship and schools. While victimization can happen anywhere, the anguish is regularly exacerbated, often drastically, when an entire community fails to help or, worse, covers up the truth. Apathy and duplicity like this – i.e. Institutional Betrayal – can cause the injured parties to doubt the existence of basic goodness and humanity and can trigger deep despair. After all, if the organizations designed to protect us don’t care, who will?

I am beyond grateful that Dr. Freyd created the Center for Institutional Courage to help individuals, including children, feel supported rather than further betrayed in their times of greatest need. Advances in this body of research will surely enable organizations to embody missions that are both prosperous and humane for the betterment of us all.

Kayla Taylor shared this experience in her book Canaries Among Us: A Mother’s Quest to Honor Her Child’s Individuality in a Culture Determined to Negate It.