DARVO
How does raising something that hurt you end with you apologising? This blog explores DARVO through my experience of denial, blame, and having my hurt turned against me.
DARVO: How I Ended Up Apologising for Being Hurt
My experience of DARVO: I would start a conversation wanting to explain something that had hurt me. Somehow, by the end, I would be reassuring him that he was a good person and apologising for bringing it up.
The thing I had wanted to talk about disappeared beneath his reaction.
At the time, I didn’t have the language to explain what was happening. I knew I felt confused. I knew my hurt never seemed to get heard. But I couldn’t understand how a conversation about something he had done kept ending with me feeling guilty.
Now I know there is a name for that pattern: DARVO.
It stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes a response to being held accountable in which someone denies wrongdoing, attacks the person raising it, and turns the situation around so they become the person being wronged.
In my relationship, it could unfold like this.
Deny: I would explain that something he had said or done had hurt me. My experience would be dismissed, contradicted, or rewritten. I was left trying to establish what had happened before we could even begin discussing how it had affected me.
Attack: The attention would turn towards me for raising it.
“You always bring this up.”
Now I was defending why I had spoken, trying to explain that I wasn’t looking for an argument. I just wanted him to understand.
Reverse victim and offender: Then came the shift.
“Oh, you don’t love me.”
“Oh, I must be a terrible person.”
And there I was apologising...
“No, you’re not. You’re amazing. You’re lovely. But…”
That “but” rarely got us anywhere. I was already comforting him, trying to undo the hurt he said I had caused by mentioning mine.
He became the victim. I became the person who needed to make things right.
It was mind-fucking if I am honest. There really isn’t a gentler word that captures how it felt.
I kept thinking that if I could explain myself more clearly, choose a better moment or find gentler words, perhaps he would finally hear me. So I put more and more effort into how I raised things, while the behaviour I was raising remained unresolved.
Eventually, even bringing something up felt exhausting. I had to weigh the original hurt against everything that might follow if I mentioned it.
That is the part I want people to understand: apologising in that situation did not mean I had stopped being hurt. Reassuring him did not mean the issue had been resolved. Sometimes I was simply trying to settle a conversation that had become unbearable.
DARVO can appear beyond intimate relationships too: in families, friendships, workplaces and institutions. The setting may change, but the reversal is recognisable: someone raises harm, and suddenly they are defending themselves while the person they challenged claims to be the injured party.
Context matters. A disagreement, a denial or a defensive response alone does not establish DARVO or prove abuse. Someone can genuinely feel hurt during a difficult conversation. The concern is the pattern of denial, attack, and reversal that pushes accountability out of the conversation.
For me, recognising that pattern helped me look back with more understanding and less blame towards myself.
I hadn’t needed the perfect explanation. I had needed my experience to be heard without being turned against me.
Learning the word did not undo what happened, but it gave me a way to understand conversations that had left me questioning myself for years. Once I could see the reversal, it became much harder to unsee.
If you recognise this, you do not have to persuade the other person to agree with the label before seeking support. You can take time to make sense of what is happening with someone you trust. If challenging them could put you at risk, your safety matters more than naming the pattern to them.
You are allowed to say, “That hurt me.”
You deserve room for that sentence without having to spend the rest of the conversation apologising for it.
Love Molly x