btw, if you base whether or not you have been Wronged in a situation on how bad you feel? that's bad. hurting other people feels REALLY BAD. FREQUENTLY. you feeling REALLY BAD does not = other people have mistreated you terribly.
experiencing consequences for legitimately bad behavior often feels absolutely terrible. even worse than being punished for something you didn't do, in my experience! if you allow your emotions to dictate whether you think you have been mistreated, you're going to treat the people YOU mistreat like they have harmed you unforgivably.
this is the logic that leads to DARVO. it is imperative to recognize the paths that lead to this behavior. your feelings are real and hard and they're also not telling the truth about every situation. they don't dictate reality.
The AMOUNT of therapy I have been to that never had a satisfying explanation for the behavioral consistency of DARVO across multiple culturally distinct individuals-
it's an empathetic injury, that's why it's *so* fast, so severe, and the "reasoning" can change so much even when the same story is told again; it's not pre-planned, there's no mastermind string-pulling or whatever, it's "Ah fuck, why do I feel so bad, it can't be my fault, so I need to explain why it is your fault".
I wish I could tell past me this. It would have shattered a lot of the illusions of control built into my environment if I had been able to see how many of the lies were just made up on the literal spot and that the people telling them were not expecting their actions to have consequences.
Many thanks, I will be taking this information with me both in terms of "How to not hurt others like I was hurt" and in terms of continuing my knowledge project of "Everyone is a person with their own internal motivations and reasoning"
I really do think that the narrative about ppl who DARVO being intentionally evil mastermind manipulators has fucked with our ability to understand when we are hurting others. hurting people you care about feels bad. being TOLD you have hurt someone you care about feels bad, even if you intellectually knew it. people without skills to tolerate distress experience feeling bad as an Attack and an Emergency which triggers Defense Mode. people can be VERY manipulative and just be acting in blind panic -- they're unthinkingly doing what works! none of this makes it okay! at all! but it's a version of something that we all have an impulse towards, I think, just totally unexamined and Writ Large/taken to the furthest possible level. at its core abusive behavior is about not being able to tolerate or manage your own emotions and believing that people besides you are ultimately responsible for this, I think. it's emotional fragility and usually a lifetime of practicing a specific kind of lashing out in order to get some sort of relief from the Big Bad Feelings. like.
the biggest thing I've learned about people who get into abusive and manipulative behavior patterns is that something can be absolutely terrible and indefensible and also, at its core, DEEPLY pathetic.
we don't want to see people who do that kind of harm as pathetic because there's this feeling that that somehow excuses their behavior. it doesn't. a lot of the time its behavior that they saw Work for people with power over them when they were children, and now they think it's the only behavior that Works when interacting with people over whom they have power. because it connects back to early developmental learning re: interpersonal interactions, this also often explains why people approach these situations like they're the victim -- it's a child headspace, it's a path that was originally trodden during childhood, and childhood is a state defined by a lack of autonomy. which I think also acts as a way to insulate people from the need to consider other people's experiences and feelings -- when you're a kid it's absolutely vital to defensively hyperrocus on your own experience because nobody else will do that for you. no one does that for children, generally. and so, many people learn that prioritizing their feelings = dismissing other people's. anyway I'm rambling now and none of this is like. I don't have citations for it, lol, but this is the best way I have found to conceptualize these dynamics in Learning terms. because I truly do think that so many things in life are about Learning, and how we are initially taught that the world works.
I also think that in general we overestimate how much we understand our own motivations for our behavior; generally people act first, based on emotions, and then come up with intellectual explanations for their decisions after the fact. I think that's important to keep in mind and it's something that's helped me understand people a LOT better.
"at its core abusive behavior is about not being able to tolerate or manage your own emotions and believing that people besides you are ultimately responsible for this" -> I think there is also a counterpart/corollary to this which is "not being able to tolerate or manage your own emotional responses to other people, and so trying to manage those people's actions and emotions into an arrangement that does not cause you distress" - rather than pushing responsibility onto others, it's denying them agency, because anything they try to do or say is subsumed into your meta-narrative of the situation.
Which is maybe distinction without difference, because it plays out the same, more or less. Just, rather than externalizing an emotional response that scolds people around you when they don't act the way you want, it's more... very nicely and kindly explaining to people what they actually think and feel, and why they acted in that way and what it means. Very heartfelt and earnest emotional processing conversations where what happened in what order and who felt what and why are rehashed into mush and reshaped.
In some cases, I think this can result from a failed attempt to mitigate the first type of response. Someone who is aware that they need to learn to analyze their own motivations and how their emotions shape their actions, and that they need to learn how to manage themself to avoid setting themself up to be hurt - but, whose sense-of-self boundary is bad enough that they also apply these tactics to everyone around them in a continuum with themself. Analyzing other people's actions as if your own emotional state was a universal baseline, a fundamental truth which they are at all times aware of. As if they were extensions of you. And trying to manage them into place in your emotional schema, like unruly twitchy limbs.
To have a usable model of someone else's emotional state, you MUST acknowledge that you could be wrong about it. If your model of them operates on the assumption that you know what they really feel, you're modeling them as an extension of you.
For me, one of the worst parts of untangling this was relearning that it IS normal for someone's understanding of a situation to change over time - as their emotional state changes, their intepretation of what happened will also shift. As long as someone is not expecting you to instantly and seamlessly comply with their reinterpretation, this is actually... fine. I had learned such a fear response to someone's interpretation shifting that I felt a need to create a stable understanding of What Actually Happened And Why, and to have that be untouchable. Unfortunately... that's exactly how this behavior propagates forward. My stable understanding wasn't actually intrinsically more stable than anyone else's, and now I was the one trying to force people to comply with the conceit that it was - that is, to edit their understanding seamlessly to match changes in mine that I was willfully unaware of.
To have an understanding of the world that feels steady and reliable, you have to be able to accommodate a bit of a shift back and forth, in your perspective and that of others. It's scary trying to build this when you're used to people completely upending the world on you. But it is possible to build trust that people will shift back and forth but maintain a steady enough overall position that you can work with it. And with an understanding like this, you're able to recognize when someone's perspective is swinging hard due to a strong emotion, and to integrate that with your existing understanding of them, rather than having it totally destroy what you think you know. And, you're able to shift your understanding of them if you find out it's wrong, without feeling like that destabilizes your entire relationship with them, because you didn't build the relationship on the hard assumption of them being exactly a specific type of way.
god yes this is all such an important addition, thank you.
