Confront someone about real harm and, often, a strangely consistent sequence plays out. First they deny it happened. Then they attack you — your memory, your motives, your stability, your loyalty. Then, in the move that makes the whole thing work, they claim the victim's chair: you're hurting them, this confrontation is the real abuse, look what you're doing to this family.
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd at the University of Oregon named the pattern in 1997: DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The acronym gave researchers a handle on something victims had described for decades without a word for it.
That last result is inoculation in miniature, from a lab that wasn't studying inoculation. Knowing the script's name, before you're inside the script, changes the outcome. This keeps showing up across the manipulation literature, and it's the load-bearing wall under everything Psy-Opt-In builds.
One caution the researchers themselves raise: not every denial is DARVO, because some accused people are innocent, and innocent people also deny. The pattern earns the label when all three moves arrive together, repeatedly, aimed at ending scrutiny rather than establishing facts. A person who denies but engages with evidence isn't running the script. Learn the shape, and stay honest about when it actually fits.
The reversal is the part that gets people, and it's trainable. World 02 of the app runs confrontation scenarios where the character flips victim and offender mid-conversation, then names the move. Feeling the flip in a simulation, twice, buys most people the pause they need to see it live.