Are You Gaslighting Yourself?

Your Inner Critic Might Use DARVO Against You

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published on Psychology Today on 4 February 2026.

In our current political landscape, accountability is often avoided not through silence but through story. When confronted with evidence of harm, powerful actors rarely engage directly with the facts. Instead, they deny wrongdoing, attack critics, and recast themselves as victims of persecution.

This pattern is known as DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Originally identified by the psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe abusive interpersonal dynamics, it has become an all too familiar feature of political communication.

DARVO unfolds in three phases:

1. Deny – deny wrongdoing, deny harm.

2. Attack – aggressively discredit the accuser or evidence.

3. Reverse Victim and Offender – the perpetrator casts themselves as the one suffering, claiming victimhood status.

By controlling the narrative framing of incidents in which harm occurs in that way, public perception is shifted even before independent investigations can take place. 

There are numerous examples out there of the ways in which politicians control official narratives by using DARVO tactics. We are all familiar with the playbook by now, and yet it remains upsetting to see how effectively it works every time it is deployed.

But recently, I realised something equally shocking: The same narrative tricks used to excuse abuse and cement authoritarian power in the political world are often used by our inner narrators to excuse harm done to us. In our private stories about ourselves, we can be our own dark spin doctors, and we are often highly adept at spreading toxic PR in our inland empires.

How we learn to gaslight ourselves

Many of us have experienced moments of confusion, shame, or trauma – moments that leave us questioning, “Why did this happen to me? Was it my fault? What does this say about who I am?” In their narrative aftermath, when we try to make sense of these moments, some disturbing patterns emerge – patterns that look eerily like DARVO turned inward.

After we experience social pain or emotional or physical violence, we often develop stories that:

• Deny our pain – “It wasn’t that bad,” or “I should just get over it.”

• Attack ourselves – “I’m weak for feeling this,” “I invited this in,” or “This happened to me because I’m a bad person.”

• Reverse Victim and Offender – “It’s my fault,” “I deserved it,” or “I am the problem here.”

In other words, we gaslight ourselves. We blame ourselves for harm done to us and turn our capacity for complex meaning-making against ourselves. And just like political spin, our internal DARVO narratives can be extremely convincing. They appear to us like the truth about ourselves. Trying to protect us from feeling righteous anger, they direct all anger inwards, for righteous anger could have potentially dangerous consequences and be unsafe.

DARVO isn’t just a public-relations strategy – it’s a psychological one. Trauma survivors often internalize narratives that cast them as the source of the very harm that was done to them. Instead of facing the terror of vulnerability and loss, our psyche manufactures a story where the self – not the perpetrator – is the source of failure, inadequacy, or threat.

Internalised self-blame is not an insight but a maladaptive protection ritual. We tell ourselves that if I did something wrong, then the world is predictable and suffering is not random. If what happened is my fault, then there is a logic to it and it can be understood.

To be absolutely clear here: political and interpersonal abuse and internalised trauma adaptation are in no ways morally comparable. In fact, ethically speaking, they sit at opposite ends – one being other-blaming and the other self-blaming. Internal DARVO is a psychological survival strategy – one that once protected but now constrains. My point is that our inner critics can be shockingly cruel and painfully convincing, and that we have a lot to gain from understanding their playbooks.

Public Spin Meets Private Spin

At its core, DARVO is a reframing strategy. Publicly, it protects power by distorting accountability. Privately, it is designed to protect the self, paradoxically by attacking our self-worth. While the ethics differ, the mechanics are strikingly similar: the frame is shifted, causality is reassigned, and responsibility is relocated.

Consider a familiar private example. Someone sets a clear boundary at work or in a relationship and is met with anger, withdrawal, or subtle retaliation. The external harm is real – but the internal story quickly flips. Maybe I overreacted. I’m too sensitive. I shouldn’t have said anything. I must have provoked this. What began as someone else’s behaviour is reinterpreted as personal failure. The self becomes the offender; the other party, suddenly, seems reasonable.

This is internal DARVO in action. In the public arena, this can look like institutional denial and blame-shifting. In the internal arena, it shows up as toxic self-stories that centre on self-attacking. Both are spin – the defensive, evasive type that prevents truth from informing growth or repair.

What Makes This Toxic?

Toxic self-stories, like DARVO narratives, are harmful because they:

• Twist agency – they make us believe we are the source of our suffering.

• Misinterpret evidence – they dismiss real causality in favour of internally more bearable constructions.

• Preserve identity at a very high cost – better to be flawed than to be unprotected.

In The Story Solution: Change Your Toxic Self-Stories and Thrive, I treat the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as dynamic meaning-making structures. When we interpret perceived failure or trauma as evidence of our intrinsic defectiveness, we engage in a narrative inversion of the actual facts of our lives. Shame is often the residue of a story that was never meant to be told that way. Like DARVO spin, our toxic self-stories pre-empt accountability and healing.

Rewriting the Script

So how do we get out of an internal DARVO loop?

Become the observer and recognise the pattern: The moment you notice you are telling yourself “It’s my fault,” “I’m a bad person,” or any other self-blaming story, simply recognise it as a story. Give your story a name. Learn to become the observer of your story-telling mind in action.

Become the interpreter and re-analyse the narrative: Separate the events that feature in your story from the meaning you are assigning to it. Look at the relationships of causality you have created: “This happened to me because of x…” or “I am y because of z…” Learn to distinguish between fact and interpretation. Often, we are very ungenerous and unreliable interpreters of the facts of our own life.

Become the author and cultivate kinder narratives: The truth is often that trauma was done to you, not caused by you. Reverse the DARVO structure and flip denial, attack, and the victim and offender roles you have assigned in your narrative.

In practice, this means retraining your inner narrator – the part that selects, edits and interprets your experience – and to tell yourself kinder, wiser, and more helpful stories.

From Spin to Supportive Story

The very same story structures that allow a government to deflect accountability can allow a mind to deflect pain. Both are narrative inversions meant to protect and preserve the status quo but that have devastating consequences and prevent repair.

In the wake of ongoing protests against narrative distortion in public institutions, we are reminded that stories matter – not just as rhetoric, but as essential architecture of self and society. When we allow toxic narratives – public or private – to go unexamined, we give spin the upper hand. Who benefits when we blame victims or ourselves? To thrive, we must learn not only to spot DARVO tactics in the outer world, but also in our inner world.

Images: Sydney Latham and Isi Parente @Unsplash