D.A.R.V.O. stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, Offender.
When I first learned about DARVO it was a gut punch. I watched a Youtube video on it and went back over the video multiple times. My father is the DARVO King.
As a child, I would sometimes start a conversation or talk in a normal, civil, loving way to my father and his response would be to provoke me when nobody was watching. My response was to cry or get angry. Later, as I stood up to him, he would respond as the victim and not tell his rescuers what he had done to provoke me in the first place. This has gone on my entire life, with his attacks becoming more effective in sobriety.
In my experience, the “D” (Deny) in DARVO was impossible to recognize in early childhood, not because it wasn’t happening, but because I rarely witnessed it directly. From an early age, I was conditioned to accept my father’s version of reality, so I seldom questioned or accused him of wrongdoing in the first place, making his denials unnecessary. At other times, when my mother would witness his attacks, she would intervene to protect me. The conflict then shifted from me to the relationship between my parents, leaving me unaware of how he responded to being confronted. I remember vivid instances when my father would attack me psychologically with shame and my mother would intervene. Most of the time, though, she would take him away from me, into the bedroom, and my mother would fight off the narcissist for me, while counseling my father or even, perhaps, validating him.
Looking back, I can see that during my childhood I consistently experienced covert narcissistic attacks from my father, fueled by his insecurities and fragile sense of self, along with his attempts at DARVO.
After my mother died, I started trying to hold my father accountable for his narcissistic games and attacks without knowing he was a narcissist. I would confront him to his face but that got me nowhere. He would either walk away or play hurt. Later, I found it more effective for me to correspond with my father via texts and emails. This form of communication carried with it a recorded transcript.
But these recorded attempts at holding my father accountable for his abusive behavior had their shortcomings as well. What difference does it make if you have recorded accounts of his abuses if there’s nobody to report those abuses to? I was still alienated from my family. And in a way, these communications played right into his hands because he could selectively quote isolated portions of my messages, and play the victim by adding meanings or motives that were never there.
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This is a form of gaslighting.
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If the purpose or effect of my father and brother’s lies were to create a false version or narrative to persuade friends and family members with that false narrative, that’s gaslighting.
Thankfully, there was really only a three year period in my life, from 2008 through 2010, when I was relatively close to my father. During that time, without knowing about his narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), I played the role of my father’s caretaker (which is a common role for children of narcissists to take on), but repeatedly tried to hold him accountable for both his overt and covert narcissistic behaviors. I had the tiger by the tail, though, not knowing about his personality disorder.
I never recognized my father was incapable of accepting constructive criticism or acknowledging his own shortcomings. That was a huge blind spot for me. An apology from dad? Never. I assumed those failures were rooted in his alcoholism. My time as my father’s caretaker ended when I intervened on his alcoholism and left the caretaker role permanently.
As I was walking away from my father’s caretaker role in 2010, I began the difficult process of confronting what I then believed was our family’s only disorder: alcoholism. I thought if we fixed the alcoholism we’d live in harmony. What I didn’t realize was that once you get sober you have to then deal with the underlying issues.
After my father, brother and I all achieved sobriety, my father’s DARVO attacks on me, along with his gaslighting, began anew, only now they were more defined.
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His attacks now had the clarity of sobriety.
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My father’s attacks would be reversed onto me, and he would gaslight me by twisting my behaviors when talking about me to friends and family members. So, if you didn’t hear it from me, it likely didn’t happen the way my father or brother described it to you.
Regardless of the role NPD and DARVO played within my family, I remain proud that in 2011 we all achieved a form of sobriety. I consider it a large part of my mother’s legacy. However, if you’re familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous, you know “you’re always eligible.”
On April 22, 2026, I celebrated 15 years of sobriety. Throughout my journey in AA, I’ve had sponsors, worked the steps, and made amends to friends and family members.
As a member of A.A. and someone truly working the program, I watched as my father faked it in A.A. Sure, he attended meetings. He could talk the talk about the big book; he knows Claudia Black; he hosted meetings. But A.A. has one flaw or component to it that narcissists manipulate: members get to pick their own sponsors. My father picked a drug addict and someone who later died from drug and alcoholic related abuses as his sponsor. My father celebrated this sponsor as his hero, but the reality is my father picked him as his sponsor because Bobby G was never going to hold my dad accountable.
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AA is about accountability and self reflection. Those are two things narcissists run from.
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Recovery requires rigorous self-examination: the willingness to acknowledge the harm you’ve caused, take responsibility for your behaviors, make amends, and continue to examine your own shortcomings. Narcissists struggle with these concepts. AA asks you to look in the mirror; narcissism encourages you to look for someone else to blame.
To date, my father has not made his A.A. amends to me. Ironically, I have made my amends to him in a letter that I wrote with my A.A. sponsor. My father routinely talks about how much his children mean to him, and plays the victim because I don’t want him in my life. A good place for Thom to start to repair this relationship would be for him to make his A.A. amends to his children. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
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