DARVO
...and a prayer to Saint Gobnait
The acronym DARVO means Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The usual perpetrators of DARVO are narcissists who deny any wrongdoing and refuse to be accountable. They deflect attention away from their harming behaviors by turning the tables, accusing their victims of being the offenders when the opposite is true.
It can happen on a personal scale, or a grand scale, as it is now in the USA. The dynamics for both are similar but have their differences.
When someone launches a smear campaign against you personally, they’re not just reversing victim and offender. They’re recruiting an audience to do it for them. The DARVO manipulator will tell a twisted version of events where you’re the aggressor, they’re the victim, and suddenly people who barely know you are treating you like you’re dangerous or crazy. They might cry to mutual friends about how hurt they are by your behavior. They might hint at dark things you supposedly did without quite spelling it out, so you can’t even defend yourself against specific accusations. The smear works because it gets there first before the truth, and plays on people’s desire to protect the “victim.” A DARVO manipulator who feels scorned is clever, charming, often loud, and sometimes quietly, dangerously persuasive. To their flying monkeys, they can turn a gesture of love into perceived abuse. If they know that damaging info about them could eventually surface, one strategy is to pre-contaminate the pool.
If this happens to you on a personal scale, your instinct will be to defend yourself loudly, to correct the record with everyone who’ll listen, to prove you’re not what they’re saying. Don’t. Because you’ll look defensive and obsessed, which confirms their narrative that you’re unhinged.
Instead: document everything privately but don’t blast it publicly. Keep all emails, texts, photos, etc. Tell your actual story once, clearly, to people who matter and who ask. Let your consistent behavior over time speak for itself. Recognize that people who believe the smear without talking to you weren’t really your people anyway. Focus your energy on the relationships where there’s actual trust and mutual respect.
The hardest part is accepting you can’t control what others believe about you. Some people will believe the smear. That’s a loss you have to grieve and move past. Your real defense is living in integrity and letting the manipulator’s story eventually collapse under its own contradictions. Which it usually does, given enough time.
My newest memoir, No New York drops via Faber & Faber UK on March 26 and Beacon Press on March 30th.
An opening page presents a spiral of people I encountered during that time in NYC, people who are no longer on the planet. Some died of natural causes brought on in part by a lack of spiritual self-reflection, which often resulted in dangerously hard living that eventually eroded their physical lives. They died young, far younger than they should have. But while they were here, they burned with a ferocity of light that dazzled all witnesses.
Inside the layers of No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene is a story of how a lack of accountability, of empathy, of the denial of reality (for instance, escape via drugs, alcohol or assorted addictions) can destroy people from the inside out. As it nearly did me.
In the book, I talk about artists I knew and admired at a time when I was out of control, a narcissistic kid running from my traumas. In the book, I own my bad behaviors and am truthful nearly to a fault. Obfuscation has never been my game. Although I adore the abstract, the surreal, and the magical, honest nakedness is my elixir… the alchemical fire that runs through the blood, in and out of the wounds, burning up the dross to make way for the cooling river. Wounds need air to heal. I will never lie about who I was. With hard work, healing comes, as do second and third and on chances. I am hardly perfect. Yet being broken has softened me as well as taught me to be boundaried. Having died and been reborn through several incarnations in one lifetime, the people who’ve loved me across the changes and decades can tell you I’m not the same creature I was 40 years ago. Or a year ago, for that matter.
“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies, and so lives.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.” - Octavia Butler
Today, to say I am triggered, well, triggered is not the adequate word here. As a survivor of torture, of being held captive for days and raped by gunpoint, I weep over the psychological assault now happening to the Epstein survivors of sexual abuse and torture at the hands of our smug corporate and criminal governance, who turn their faces away. They are mocking all of us who have suffered and survived SA trauma. It is very easy to accuse trauma survivors of being crazy, deranged. Abusive. It’s all our fault because we’re so damaged... this is DARVO deflection. Is bullshit to anyone who has experienced the intense suffering and work it takes to overcome trauma and abuse. Not everyone is able to survive torture and abuse and build a healthy sense of self when you have been treated as invisible, worthless. To strive for compassion for oneself and for others requires hard work, intense strength, vulnerability, discernment and faith. Having survived Epstein and his cabal of pedophiles, these women standing up in court are the shining essence of bravery. The government are torturing us all right now via their newest PSYOP, the consistent dumps and leaks of the Trump-Epstein file horrors… 9 year old children. murder. medical torture. buried bodies. It is important that we look, and we are doubly punished by the present torture; the abhorrent flaunting of their perceived impunity. The mainstream media should be reporting this. It’s like the government and their enablers saying Here, look! Desensitize yourselves while poisoning yourselves with our evil! What you all pay for with your hard-earned taxes, this is the dark power you support through your compliance with our demonic system… you can’t stop paying in. This is the evil, the torture of children your elected officials easily abide and uphold for gold. Rubes and fools, all of you, willing servants to convenience and the slot machine hypnotism rotting your brains. Complaining! How laughable.
The patriarchal cruelty of the Epstein files is being framed to present women as helpless. Mainstream media is afraid to call this what it is. Patriarchy and misogyny on steroids. Two words you never hear mainstream, twin pillars that uphold fascism. And too many women complicit in this system of harm.
DARVO sadism on this massive of a scale affects the entire world. Especially We the People in the USA who are under attack, physically and psychologically. We need to defend ourselves and our mental health for the ongoing fight. Normal defenses won’t work right now. We can’t just document and report when the media are compromised. We can’t trust official investigations when the investigators are the criminals. The smear campaign has institutional backing now.
When the institutions that were supposed to protect us become the ones doing the harm, to the extent of massive sexual sadism, we’re in a fundamentally different and dangerous situation. The courts, the media, the expertise we relied on... when these are captured or corrupted, there’s no authority left to appeal to. The government claim they are the victims of conspiracy theories, as they did with their PSYOP Pizza Gate, blaming child rape on Hilary Clinton. Where is QAnon now? In hiding. Anyone pointing out the obvious betrayals gets labeled the threat. But the lightbulb has been switched on and the cockroaches are scurrying into hide-y holes, having nervous breakdowns as exposure threatens. Beware the ides of March.
What we can do: get off the convenience tit where in exchange they take our personal sovereignty. Stop feeding the systems betraying us. Amazon, Meta, Google, all of it. Find and protect independent sources of truth that exist outside the captured system. Support journalists, researchers, and organizations that haven’t been co-opted; there are many and the network is growing. Create parallel interconnected networks of mutual aid and information-sharing with people we trust. Spread the news of all instances of group resistance. Preserve evidence and testimony knowing it might only matter years from now when the political winds shift.
Most importantly, resist isolation. Authoritarian gaslighting, just like personal gaslighting, works by making us feel like we’re crazy and alone in seeing what’s really happening. If this also happens to you on a personal level, like it is now with Epstein’s survivors, I know how excruciating it is to bear. When you find others who recognize the true reality of the system, and of who you truly are, hold onto those connections. They are your sanity.
We can’t fight institutional betrayal by working within these institutions. We have to build and preserve alternatives and wait for the moment when enough people who have bought into the rotten system recognize the con while the structure loses legitimacy. It’s exhausting. Sometimes it takes generations. But we cannot give up and accept their dark, sadistic version of reality. And we cannot wait for the goddamn midterms. It’s time for the pitchforks.
Here’s a beautiful thing. The feast of Saint Gobnait is celebrated on February 11th. She was a 6th Century Irish Abbess, patron saint of bees, who protected her community and convent from attackers and thieves by releasing her swarm. The hive defends the vulnerable. Thanks to my dear friend, author Michael Patrick McDonald, I learned about Saint Gobnait. In Irish indigenous spirituality, bees symbolized order, discipline, communal labor, reciprocity and sacred sweetness. Bees have always been the protectors of my heart (though I’ve sometimes been stung when not in right relationship). Wise, the bees are.
May we stir up the bees.
From Michael: ‘Sending prayers of defense, protection, truth, accountability and repair in this moment of heightened awareness; of genocide, State kidnappings and killings in the US, attempted erasure of communities, and horrific sadistic dark arts rituals committed by the elite class.’
#voodoocatholic🙏🏼
