When both call themselves victims

The problem this chapter addresses

You have read the previous chapters. You recognised your relationship in them. But there is a complication that books on toxic relationships rarely address:

Your partner may have read them too. And they recognised the same thing in them — casting you in the role of the aggressor.

This is not a theoretical hypothesis. It is an extremely common situation. In the majority of serious relational conflicts, both people genuinely experience themselves as the other's victim. And those around them, the families, sometimes the institutions, find themselves faced with two symmetrical and incompatible accounts.

This chapter will not tell you who is right — no book can. It will give you something more useful: criteria that do not reverse.

The mechanism: DARVO

In 1997, the psychologist Jennifer Freyd named a recurring pattern among perpetrators of violence confronted with their acts. She called it DARVO, for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender ¹.

The pattern unfolds in three stages.

1. Deny

The fact is denied, or reduced until it becomes insignificant.

• "It never happened that way."
• "You're exaggerating, it was nothing."
• "You have a selective memory."

This is the ground of gaslighting, treated in the chapter Manipulation vs. open communication. The difference: here, denial is only the first stage.

2. Attack

When denial is no longer enough — because there is evidence, witnesses, a direct confrontation — the target is no longer the fact, but the person reporting it.

• "You're unstable."
• "You're destroying everything over nothing."
• "Ask anyone, everyone will tell you you're difficult."

The attack never bears on the content of the accusation. It bears on the credibility of the one stating it. This is the distinguishing sign.

3. Reverse Victim and Offender

The final stage, and the most effective. The perpetrator presents themselves as the wronged person, and the wronged person becomes the aggressor.

• "I'm the one suffering in this story."
• "You're destroying me with your accusations."
• "I was only reacting to what you were doing to me."

This is not necessarily cold calculation. Many people who proceed this way are sincerely convinced of it — which makes them all the more persuasive.

What science says

The work of Freyd and Sarah Harsey established several points ².

• Role reversal is a common response during confrontations between victim and perpetrator.
• It produces a measurable effect on third parties: exposed to an account built on this pattern, observers judge the perpetrator more credible and the victim less credible. The inversion works ³.
• It produces an effect on the victim themselves: the more the reversal is used during a confrontation, the more the wronged person reports feeling responsible for what they suffered ².

This last point is the most important for you, reader. If you wonder anxiously whether you might not, in reality, be the problem — that very question can itself be a product of the mechanism, and not a reliable intuition.

An essential clarification, formulated by Freyd herself: resorting to this pattern is not proof of guilt. A person unjustly accused also denies and defends themselves. It is not a test. It is a reading grid that lets you not be disoriented by a reversal — not a verdict.

The criteria that do not reverse

Since the accounts can be symmetrical, we need criteria that are not.

What does NOT settle it — and which you should therefore never rely on:

Misleading criterion	Why it's worthless
Who suffers most	Both suffer, genuinely. Suffering does not designate innocence.
Who cries, who breaks down	Emotional expression is correlated with nothing. Many victims are flat, dissociated, factual.
Who tells it best	The coherence of an account reflects narrative ability, not truthfulness. Trauma fragments memory; calm preserves it.
Who has the most witnesses on their side	See above: the reversal acts precisely on third parties.
Who "started"	Both always have a version of who started. Unsolvable.
Who is most certain they are right	Indicative at best, dangerous at worst. Never make it a decisive criterion.

What does settle it — the six asymmetry questions:

1. Fear

Who adapts their behaviour to avoid the other's reaction?

Who weighs their words before speaking? Who anticipates the storm? Who has a "careful mode"?

Fear reverses very rarely. It is the most robust criterion we have.

2. Autonomy

Who has lost something over the course of the relationship?

Friends. Family. A job. Money. A home. Freedom of movement. A password. The ability to go out without accounting for it.

Look at the trajectory over several years, not the current state. The shrinking of the world is directional.

3. The freedom to leave

Who can end the relationship without fearing the consequences?

If one can leave and the other cannot — for financial, material, safety reasons, or explicit threats — the power asymmetry is established, whatever each one's suffering.

4. The direction of control

Who checks on the other?

Phone, location, accounts, associations, schedule. Control leaves concrete, verifiable traces. It is very rarely reciprocal at equal intensity.

5. The relationship to verification

Who accepts that a third party looks?

A wronged person generally asks to be heard: they want a therapist, a mediation, a witness, a written record. A person who has something to hide seeks to isolate the relationship from any outside gaze — while accusing the other of "washing dirty laundry in public."

Note the nuance: a victim may also refuse exposure, out of fear or shame. This criterion is read in combination, never alone.

6. The reversibility of the reproach

Is the reproach a fact or a characterisation?

"You came home at 3am without warning" is a fact — datable, verifiable, debatable. "You are toxic" is a characterisation — unverifiable, and reversible as is against its issuer.

Count, in each account, the proportion of facts and the proportion of characterisations. It is often revealing.

How to read your answers

If the six questions point in the same direction, you have a reasonably solid answer.

If they point in different directions, it is possible you are in a mutually destructive relationship — two people hurting each other, with no designated aggressor or victim. This is a common configuration, no less serious, but it calls for a different response: neither protection nor flight, but the ending of the relationship and separate work on each side.

If it is you who are wrongly accused

This chapter would be dishonest if it did not address this case. False accusations exist, they are devastating, and being thrown back "that's exactly what an aggressor would say" is an untenable position.

Three markers:

• Apply the six questions to yourself, sincerely. If you are the one who is afraid, who has lost autonomy, who cannot leave — you have an answer, and it does not depend on who speaks loudest.
• Stay with the facts. The temptation is to counter-attack on the person. That is exactly what will make you resemble the pattern you want to refute. Facts, dates, traces.
• Seek outside gaze, don't flee it. A qualified third party, over time. That is what most sharply distinguishes the two positions.

A usage safeguard

This grid applies only to your own situation, from the inside.

It does not allow you to diagnose an absent third party, nor to settle a conflict between two people of whom you hear only one version. No book, no test, no artificial intelligence can determine who, in a given couple, is the victim. Only a professional with access to both people, over time, can.

If you are reading this chapter thinking exclusively about someone else, and never about yourself, stop and start again from the beginning. This invitation is not a guilt test: it is a reminder that lucidity always starts on the inside.

Convergence of the Wisdoms

Al-Ghazâlî — Justice as balance. Justice, the fourth cardinal virtue, holds the whole together: it requires treating each person according to their due, including oneself. Role reversal is a double-edged injustice — it deprives the wronged person of recognition, and deprives the perpetrator of the confrontation with their reality, without which no change is possible. It makes two victims, one of whom does not know it.

Jung — projection. What we refuse to see in ourselves, we see in the other, with an intensity that betrays its origin. The accusation of being toxic, carried with disproportionate vehemence, is sometimes the exact description of what the accuser cannot look at in themselves. Jung invites us not to turn the accusation back, but to ask ourselves, on each side: what am I refusing to see in myself right now?

The Stoics — the dichotomy of control. You do not control what the other recounts about you, nor what those around you believe. You control the rightness of your own gaze, and your actions. Epictetus would say: stop trying to win the trial of opinion, and attend to what depends on you — seeing clearly, and acting accordingly.

Summary

• Two people can genuinely experience themselves as the other's victim. This is common; it is not a sign that the truth lies "in the middle."
• DARVO — deny, attack, reverse — is a documented pattern of role reversal. Knowing it means no longer being disoriented by it.
• Resorting to this pattern is not proof: a person unjustly accused also defends themselves.
• Criteria based on feeling (who suffers, who cries, who convinces) are unusable: they reverse.
• Criteria of asymmetry are reliable: fear, loss of autonomy, freedom to leave, direction of control, relationship to verification, the factual nature of reproaches.
• If the criteria do not converge, the hypothesis of a mutually destructive relationship must be considered — it calls for ending, not for designating a culprit.
• No grid replaces a professional third party with access to both people.

Footnotes

1. DARVO — origin of the term (Freyd, 1997) ↩

2. Role reversal is common and increases victim self-blame (Harsey et al., 2017) ↩ ↩²

3. DARVO influences the perceived credibility of perpetrator and victim (Harsey & Freyd, 2020) ↩