According to many people, in their testimonies Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh both sounded believable. And yet one of them was lying and the other was telling the truth. Is it merely a case of "he said, she said?" Thankfully, there is a deeper pattern that has emerged in their testimony that indicates, with an extremely high degree of accuracy, who should be believed. There are a number of checkpoints that, when seen together, make up this deeper pattern, all of which became apparent during the Ford-Kavanaugh testimony.
The first checkpoint is whether the accuser - in this case Dr. Ford - was credible and congruent. I haven't come across anyone - Republican or Democrat
- who doesn't feel that Dr. Ford wasn't an honest, compelling witness.
Dr. Jennifer J. Freyd has coined an acronym - DARVO - which, when seen along with our other checkpoints, can be very helpful in shedding light on our situation. DARVO points to a typical response that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, always seem to enact when being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. This characterizes Judge Kavanaugh's response perfectly - he totally denied the accusations, went on the attack with self-righteous, indignant rage, and portrayed himself as being the victim of an organized smear campaign and political hit-job. Playing the role of "the victimizer disguised as the victim," he cast Dr. Ford in the role of the offender who has destroyed his life.
There are still other checkpoints that need to be met, however, for this deeper pattern to be fully operative. It is always helpful to ask ourselves who benefits from lying. On the one hand, Judge Kavanaugh's incentive for lying is really clear - a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, which I imagine is every judge's dream. Not only is there no benefit for Dr. Ford to lie, but there is a disincentive - she has created a living nightmare for herself and her family - suffering death threats, having to move out of her house, upending her life, not to mention being retraumatized by Judge Kavanaugh and his supporters' (including President Trump's) attacks on her for speaking her voice. And in their cluelessness, they openly wonder why she didn't share her story years earlier, all the while unwittingly providing the answer to their own question via their aggressive reactions.
As if reading tea leaves, there are signals that the surrounding field gives that are part of our checkpoints. For example, before Judge Kavanaugh's supporters' (such as President Trump) even heard the details of Dr. Ford's story, they were invalidating her claims, characterizing them as "false accusations," when they are in no such position of authority to know this - she was the one who had the experience, not them. Unconsciously doing the very thing of which they are accusing Dr. Ford, by accusing Dr. Ford of making "false accusations," they are literally making "false accusations" against Dr. Ford. Doing the very thing they are accusing someone else of doing is a huge red flag signaling the workings of subterranean shadow forces in their own unconscious psyche.
There is one final checkpoint that ties everything together and makes who is lying and who is telling the truth practically certain, particularly if all of the above checkpoints have been met. Oftentimes this last piece of the puzzle is not available, which makes it really hard to discern who is telling the truth. Thankfully, in this situation, this last piece of the puzzle is readily available and puts things in their proper perspective. Simply put - is there something that can be easily done that will undoubtedly shed more light on the murkiness of what happened? And the answer is a most resounding YES. Dr. Ford is not only fully willing, but actively wanting an FBI investigation so as to help reveal the actual truth of what happened. Judge Kavanaugh and his supporters (including President Trump), not only are being evasive around wanting this to happen, but are actively resisting this. This refusal to get the facts is a telling admission, a violation of the very spirit of the judicial goal of truth-seeking.
Each of these checkpoints by themselves is not sufficient to reveal who is lying and who is telling the truth. Just as putting separate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together eventually reveals the whole image, when all of these checkpoints are met, a certain picture undeniably comes into focus which indicates, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Dr. Ford is telling the truth and Judge Kavanaugh is lying. I'm not even sure Judge Kavanaugh consciously knows he's lying - to me it looks like he actually believes his own lies. It is a well-known psychological fact that when someone convinces themselves that their lies are the truth they come off as being very convincing to others, which might explain why Judge Kavanaugh appeared to be very believable in his denials of Dr. Ford's accusations.
To turn a blind eye to what is being revealed is to remain in denial and self-deception. In his testimony, Judge Kavanaugh derisively and self-righteously brought up that a democrat said that anyone who is supporting him is colluding with evil. A truer statement has never been uttered.
