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shutinthenutouse · 27 days ago

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The United States of DARVO: A holiday message from an abusive parent

Let’s psychoanalyze this post from the vantage of abuse dynamics.

Feigned “Generosity” Framed with Criticism

Trump begins his post by extending a superficially inclusive “Happy Thanksgiving,” then immediately undermines it by targeting and vilifying a specific group— the Left.

This is a propaganda technique that is effective over generations, solidifying the dynamics of a family with an abusive, authoritarian parent with golden children and scapegoats

The only criteria needed to stay out of the wrath of the parent is compliance without question, including passively agreeing to live in a fantasy version of reality where all the problems are caused by the scapegoats— the people who refuse to go along with the lie because it’s not fair or honest.

The only way to continue to live and maintain the lie is to paint the scapegoat as insane or a liar. The abuser makes the scapegoat the reason the abuser “had to punish” them. They’re just so bad, they have to be dealt with like they’re a broken, defective, immoral, crazy, unreasonable non-human.

These passive aggressive gestures of “kindness” set up the abuser as the good guy who is doing the scapegoat a favor they don’t deserve by granting them good wishes, but every gift from an abuser is really a punishment or a ransom.

The golden children just fall in line, showing deference because they don’t trust their own understanding of reality, either. Besides, the abuser sets themselves as the ultimate wise, fair, wonderful person— the ONLY person— who can save them from the evil antagonist and the miserable scapegoat.

No one is allowed to tell the truth about why the scapegoat is miserable.

By labeling the oppositional ideas, criticism, and policies as “hopelessly bad,” Trump sets himself up as the sole source of wisdom, ideas, morality, and success.

He makes himself the victim of the scapegoat. The scapegoat is trying to ruin everything they do right with their insane, miserable disposition.

DARVO

DARVO is an acronym used to summarize the behavior of serial abuser: Deny wrongdoing, Avoid accountability, Reverse Victim and Offender

Abusive parents see their children and sycophants (minions; dutiful followers) as objects or extensions of themselves. When a golden child tries to assert their individuality and boundaries, their own identity, they threaten the plot of the fantasy the abuser stewards.

To ensure golden children don’t rebel, they publicly dismiss or degrade the scapegoat’s individuality and ideas to maintain control and dominance. They will later take any good idea or accomplishment and claim it as their own, or as only being possible because of them.

Trump is signaling to his golden children to maintain the hate for the scapegoat.

False binaries

Abusers maintain false binaries of “good” and “bad,” rendering the only acceptable way to exist as a servant and extension of the glory of the abuser.

Using Fear and Promises to Manipulate

The post from Trump exists to instill fear about a supposedly failing country and offers a promise of restoration— that he can fix, thanks to the unflinching dedication of the golden children.

The abusive parent is using fear to destabilize the scapegoat and get them to act out, so Trump can point at the “bad child” and say, “Look. Dangerous and ungrateful.” The golden children stay in their lanes.

Grandiosity and Projection

The assertion that opponents have “miserably failed and will always fail” reflects an inflated sense of self-importance that thrives on the false binary. He can only be as good as his scapegoat is bad— as the protagonist, naturally.

This is abusive dynamics 101 wherein the parent refuses accountability and instead shifts responsibility for problems onto the child or a more general “kids these days.”

Conditional Pride:

Trump’s post has a heavy implied message— the audience can only feel proud under the speaker’s vision and leadership, tying their self-worth to obedience and alignment with Trump’s expectations.

Golden children are abused, too. They can’t have dreams, independent thoughts, boundaries, or free will. They can only be “good” through self erasure.

How to survive this:

What I’m about to say is going to sound like victim blaming, but there’s no blame here. It’s simply a fact— if you take the bait, you’re going to “prove them right.”

The fallout isn’t going to reach a lot of you, and the fact that you know that shows. You all are, in broad daylight, saying things about wanting the worst things for Trump’s supporters. In broad daylight.

You haven’t seen me, ever, say things like this.

I keep begging you all to stop. I write tens of thousands of words begging you to stop. But you don’t. You tag me in posts with Leftists who are going to get people like me killed as if we are the same.

They get on social media and fan the flames, mocking the golden children.

Right now, rumors are going around that Black women are planning to jump white women in the South who voted for Trump.

But it is white people— the Leftists who are not at risk— on social media and out in the world mocking dangerous people who aren’t living in reality. And the collateral is putting a target on Black women because white women benefit from the way men dehumanize them.

You do this because if you’re a privileged white person, you’re not as safe or easy to scapegoat. Hurting you could divide the horde that gives the abuser a majority advantage and threaten the plot of the collective fantasy they uphold.

You’re generally not an easy target.

Abused children become adults, and the scapegoats are terrified of and averse to any expressions of identity. It makes them so uncomfortable. They have witnessed what happens to the scapegoat, and they want them to stop “causing division” and just go along with the plot.

Assimilation is painted as a moral high ground. If you have a strong identity, people can’t shape you. You’re not going to go along with the plot and let someone else be the protagonist.

When you shame a golden child’s parent, or punish them, you start a transactional cycle wherein the golden child feels an overwhelming compulsion to restore balance—not by addressing the parent’s wrongdoing, but by doubling down on defending them.

This is because the golden child has no identity, so their only anchor is the role they play in the parent’s narrative of dominance and moral infallibility. Any attack on the parent is internalized as an attack on themselves and a threat.

If they don’t defend the parent, they will become the abused scapegoat.

The golden child feels compelled to act to restore honor to the parent. Whether through public defense, private enmeshment, or retaliatory aggression, the golden child shoulders responsibility for maintaining the parent’s status and ensuring the scapegoat and external critics are silenced.

Both the golden child and the abusive parent operate within a system of fear—fear of losing control, fear of exposure, fear of chaos, fear of loss of dominance and the scapegoat getting the justice they deserve.

The parent rewards the golden child’s loyalty with conditional approval, reinforcing the dynamic. Meanwhile, the scapegoat is painted as dangerous, irrational, or unworthy, keeping the golden child aligned with the parent.

Golden children in a system like this mirror how people loyal to figures like Trump react when he is shamed or criticized.

How to resist without feeding innocent scapegoats to the horde:

Mockery and public shaming don’t break these cycles. It just doesn’t work that way. It just hurts the people who are easiest to scapegoat and locks us into an escalating cycle.

I frankly don’t care if they “deserve” it. My kid does not deserve to grow up without a parent, and neither do the kids of people who are more likely to be harmed.

Making the situation worse and irreconcilable is not justice. It’s also not ever going to lead to a positive outcome.

Frame your critiques around accountability and fairness rather than moral superiority.

Explain the objective problem, explain the consequences of upholding, and don’t use value judgements.

Don’t use binaries or value judgements. Just be objective. You can be objective in a spicy way, with flare and humor and scathing wit.

Stop falling for people like Nick Fuentes saying things like, “Your body, my choice” and platforming people intentionally causing division. They are doing extreme things on purpose to gear up to justifying things like martial law.

Again, you aren’t standing up for yourself or defending people against assault to engage on their terms. They want to scapegoat you for reacting so they can justify hurting you.

Don’t engage on the abuser’s terms. The system relies on predictable responses to maintain power, and you disempower them by not giving them the reaction they want.

Now, if you really want to topple their plans to increase their wealth and power, stop buying things. Don’t buy anything you don’t need to survive unless you buy it from individuals and small businesses that are benefiting other small businesses.

Don’t do retail therapy. Buy everything you can get that you need secondhand. Get it locally if you can, from Facebook yardsale groups and similar.

Sell things you don’t need so people aren’t buying new.

Barter. If you don’t have a trade and barter group locally, start one.

Cotton shirts take over 2,500 gallons of water to produce— each. Cotton requires a lot of water, so irrigating cotton fields is a lot. That’s enough water for you to live 3 years.

There is almost no reason for you to buy new clothes right now. Buy used shirts.

Now— I am not in any way suggesting you should neglect to defend yourself should you need to. But conflict is lucrative and a commodity in an economy of harm. Starve the market and be a good person.

And for heaven and hell’s sake, give people a path to redemption and stop taking a position of blamelessness.

Someone has to be the adult. Someone has to let go of the rope in this tug of war and refuse to get back on the maga-go-round.

Stop dehumanizing and generalizing other white people. White is an American invention. It is not an ethnicity, a culture, or a heritage. It’s half of a false binary that does not exist.

Dehumanization is never healthy. It always harms you and other people.

No one is special because of their meat sack or any of its attributes.

“Whiteness” is language that is used to describe a similar affliction as that experienced by golden children. This is not an affliction related to your intrinsic self, and it does not only inflict pale people.

And white privilege, just like straight privilege or class privilege or any form of privilege, comes at a cost to you and reflects a decision made by authoritarians who came before you. You had the “option” to be a golden child, so long as you went along with the script and understood the assignment.

If you have the fortitude to make it to the end of this post, your reality isn’t shattered by hearing the truth. You didn’t run. You’re probably a scapegoat.

People on the Left can be every bit as hollow, performative, destructive, and divisive as people on the Right can be. Having a less harmful set of values does not mean you aren’t causing harm.

Scapegoating only works when golden children agree to give up their agency and sell out the scapegoat. They only do that because they are afraid of the scapegoat’s honesty.

If you are experiencing arrested emotional development because of abandonment, abuse, and a lifetime of invalidation and neglect, get some support and find yourself before publicly engaging.

That’s advice that I and most American’s will have to take. You’re not a bad person if you need to work on yourself.

But if you have been saying things like “People who voted for Trump deserve every bad thing that will happen to them,” you have the same golden child ethos as them.

I have seen people on the left celebrating everything that might happen to Natives because of an exit poll of a few jurisdictions in a few swing states. They are celebrating slurs against Natives and genocide. I’ve seen the Left celebrating Palestinian suffering.

The Poorest states with the lowest education rankings are the reddest states.

West Virginia is a red state.

When I detailed in a post yesterday the devastation that will come to Poor states, a lot of people in the comments were happy. They said things like, “I won’t even act like I notice them when they scream for help.”

They called my post that I put all that time into a “takedown.” Like I was punishing Poor people for making a terrible decision.

No. I don’t do punishment. I just say true things with language that is very direct.

I didn’t put that to words to dehumanize people. I put it to words because golden children keep falling for the lie that supporting an authoritarian is going to pay off for them. It never does. They need to know what is coming.

We all do, so we can work in the vein of harm reduction as we formulate a plan to move forward.

You will never get the abuser to stop hating the people who don’t let them star in a grandiose hero arc. But, you can reduce the impact they have by refusing to dehumanize and scapegoat people who cause harm.

A lot of you don’t care. You’re so mad at them, you paint them all with a broad brush and don’t see their humanity.

If you made it to the end of this post, you likely have profound academic and intellectual privilege in comparison. You just scapegoat people who scapegoat people, but it’s all the same kind of unhealed abuse.

You act like your actions don’t have consequences and their actions do. That’s what they do to you.

But if you want to see thousands of people suffer and die and be incarcerated and taken out of commission because they didn’t respond the same way you did to an authoritarian threat, you both are stuck in the same dynamic.

This is not a game or a perpetual experiment where you use other people as variables trying to manipulate the world into a narrative that works for you, but some of you live as if it is. How you voted doesn’t absolve you as if your one vote out of 156 million was the deciding factor.

How you participate in the world the other 1,460 days of an election cycle matters more.

You ever think about the basic math of an election? Half, approximately, have to vote the same way as you for your candidate to win and to not empower another abuser.

We might not have another election, but even if we do, things won’t ever be the same. We can either figure out how to break the dangerous cycle we are in, or we can hate each other for the benefit of authoritarians all the way up until we destroy each other on a massive scale.

Until you get out of that, you’re perpetuating it. You need to get a journal and stop saying things out loud until you are confident it’s a good idea that impacts the greater good— because you’re not the main character. Other people in this story are being impacted by your behavior and words.

The scapegoat escapes the cycle of trying to be a golden child when they don’t need the external validation of authority figures and sycophants to be the unimpeachable righteous person that only exists in fiction.

The golden child escapes the cycle of living as an extension of the will of an authority figure who only shows conditional love when they decide to not accept the terms and conditions and face the brutal wrath of the abuser.

No one realizes they are being used and exploited. They don’t know what they are missing or even that it exists. They think people are all performing morality because they are performing.

People with a solid sense of who they are and what they believe are not performing.

They do exist. They either grew up having their identity and individuality celebrated, or they did the brave work of risking their safety to figure out who they are.

Everyone has the choice to stop dehumanizing self and others, and that means opting out of celebrating abuse and suffering.