SCARS Institute’s Encyclopedia of Scams™ Published Continuously for 25 Years
Scam Victims Often Sabotage Their Own Recovery After The Scam Ends – Victim Psychology
To Successfully Recover It Is Important To Understand How This Happens
When you feel the tension like this building within you, take a long, deep breath. Consider the potential consequences or implications of overreacting to it. It’s also important to understand what’s causing that stress and unrest to feed negative emotions. You can see emotional ticking time bombs in action in your daily life, too.
For example: You can see it in a hospital with two nurses, one cheerful and compassionate, the other rushed and unfriendly. You can see it in your own office, with two people in the same position coping differently with their tasks.
Our beliefs, filters, biases, upbringing, life experience, values, and health all contribute to how we process situations. These differences are why we all have different emotional responses to an identical situation.
This is especially true for scam victims. Overreactions and outbursts happen regularly, and it is the number one reason why victims do not stay in recovery of any type.
To manage these emotions, you must identify them and ask yourself why you feel this way. Acknowledge it but put space/time between the trigger and response, and actively choose how you respond.
The greatest challenge in managing your emotions is putting space between the trigger and your initial response. You can do this with a few deep breaths or by walking away from the situation where possible. You can do it by putting yourself or the other person in time-out.
This technique will allow you the time to choose your response actively. For some, it only takes a few minutes, but for those deeply traumatized it may take several days to reset their emotions.
You can’t control your immediate emotional response to an event or situation. However, you can manage your response, which is the key to diffusing an emotional ticking time bomb.
FIVE SABOTEURS
- Frustration – there’s an obstacle in your path. People are not helping or saving you as you believe they should.
- Fear – your brain is trying to protect you. Victims often carry fear for many months after the scam ends.
- Disappointment – an expectation hasn’t been met. Expectations are a real enemy immediately after the scam ends and for months, sometimes years afterward.
- Self-Doubt – you’re underestimating your worth. This takes many forms, but constantly asking “what if” questions is one of them.
- Anger – your values are being challenged. People tell you what you should do, but you just know better and anger is your default response.
This is something that happens to most victims that are not in counseling or professional support groups and we want to place special focus on helping you avoid these situations. The obsessive viewing and exposing of scammers is a manifestation of these.
This is from our Grief Counseling Training Guide Book that will be available in the next few months.
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It is so possible to stand in our own way during our recovery. That self-doubt about what happened, even feeling shame and guilt, or letting go of those feelings can lead us away from the yellow brick road toward sabotaging our recovery. It is important to recognize how we feel. All too often I have been in a situation recently where I don’t recognize that I’m shallow breathing, feeling anger, that it is building from frustration and then the next thing I know I am standing in the way of my recovery. Thank you for this article and the clarity it brings on what to do when this happens.