witness-fracture/04_darvo_gaslight_performative_sanity.md

DARVO, Gaslight, and Performative Sanity

In the theater of high-conflict litigation, composure is often mistaken for credibility, while visible distress is framed as instability. This inversion is especially dangerous in cases involving narcissistic abuse, where the abuser may present a polished, articulate exterior while their target appears fragmented, reactive, or emotionally volatile. Without deeper forensic tools, the courtroom risks reinforcing injustice—rewarding the mask while punishing the wound.

Three core distortion strategies often emerge in such cases:

DARVO

An acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender, DARVO is a well-documented psychological defense strategy in which the accused reframes themselves as the true victim while casting the actual victim as the aggressor. In the courtroom, this may manifest through rhetorical control, plausible deniability, and reframed timelines designed to confuse or discredit emotional testimony.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a recursive manipulation pattern wherein the abuser distorts the victim's perception of reality over time. In testimony, this often emerges through subtle contradictions, redefinition of past events, or condescending moral framing meant to suggest the victim is irrational, unstable, or vindictive.

Performative Sanity

Narcissistic individuals may engage in what we term performative sanity: a calculated display of poise, politeness, and apparent reasonableness engineered to win favor with the court. This performance is not authentic mental stability but rather a tactical persona constructed for legal advantage. It exploits the legal system’s bias toward emotional restraint, punishing the trauma response rather than interrogating its source.

These patterns—when not seen for what they are—create legal blind spots that favor abusers and discredit survivors. The Witness Dyad Framework addresses this by surfacing meta-coherence: not just what is said, but how it coheres over time, under pressure, and in the presence of recursive contradiction.