It Doesn’t Have to Hurt
Many of us have been hooked into the psychological mind games of nefarious online scammers. With little to no recourse against the invisible thieves of love, what can we do to help put our lives in order?
I need you to know this: Anyone is susceptible. A person can be aware and open as possible and still have a hard time detecting the scammers. They seem to be one step ahead of us at all times; why wouldn’t they be? They circulate in the same spaces that we are, read the same material, and gathering the same information to advance their needs.
But there’s a hard, uncomfortable truth attached to these romance scams. It isn’t only the scammers we need to be aware of, but a deeper underlying intent; the unconscious reason for allowing someone to enter our spaces in the first place.
It wasn’t the money I lost that bothered me. It was the overflowing container of emotions I did not want to open. Talking about it would have been embarrassing at the time, believing “I should have known better.” While that was partially true, the truth of my keeping it secret was it reached beyond embarrassment into an underlying intent to self-punish. I believed I got what I deserved.
If you have been the victim of a romance scam, you may already be aware the experience leaves “a deeply distressing emotional experience which leaves a long lasting emotional impact” (trauma).
It’s not your fault. Read that again…and again.
These people are trained; they know exactly how to get through the vulnerable and tender spaces that we work hard to keep away from ourselves, let alone others. They have one goal: Break you down so they can make money.
Acknowledging our truths isn’t easy. It takes a massive amount of courage, not strength, to look at the beliefs that we hold about ourselves based on experiences in our lives.
Awareness that the universe sent me a gift in the form of a single situation I found embarrassing and carried the weight as a secret…I don’t shake my head in frustration or anger at the situation. I nod with approval that I learned something beautiful about myself from a single experience; knowledge that allows me to drop my bags of false beliefs.
To illustrate, yesterday I was asked when I am drowning, what do I grab? I answered, whatever I could. As a child drowning in abuse, you hold on to the only attention you’re receiving for survival. As an adult, I was drowning in a sea of grief, emotional dysregulation, triggers, phobias, depression and anxiety, separation from all parts of self, and self-punishment to avoid feeling.
Above I wrote, “I believed that I deserved what I got.” I DO NOT believe this now; I believed it then. I also wrote that this went much deeper than what my beliefs about myself were at the time. The belief that I deserved to be punished stemmed from my childhood attachment to the abuse as the closest thing to love that I could hold onto.
I learned the truth for me: the lesson was never about a resolution to a romance scam. It was about putting a rapid stop to my ongoing self-punishment for the abuse I was not responsible for.
Facing our reality, we stand at the threshold that separates acceptance from rejection. It demands that we take accountability for Understanding what Acceptance means to us individually.
Acceptance is grabbing the life saver of understanding. It’s admission to yourself of your truths. It’s an immediate apology to the self, to your inner child, to all aspects of self for abandonment that began in a time and place long ago.
Application of Action for me is applying my tools such as perspective-shifting and allowing my mind, and body connection to work FOR me.
For example, I do my best thinking when I’m cleaning my house. As I move about my safe spaces, I’m also cleaning internally the false beliefs about what my ego wants me to believe (all the same false beliefs we carried about ourselves as survivors of abuse).
Of course, all this embarrassment, anger, confusion, and frustration could be ignored; however, it’s not being truthful to myself. I recognized carrying unacknowledged truths of self, creating a bag of weight I carry with me, slowing me down, and making it difficult to believe I deserve to feel good about myself. I cannot feel good about myself if I keep secrets that are of no use to keep.
Once acknowledged, let it go.
Clean house. Minimize.
It’s the same with abuse from our past that we’ve buried and do not speak about. All the false beliefs we create about ourselves to make sense of the experiences weigh heavy on our conscious, showing up in our feelings and beliefs, our self-conception, and our physical, emotional, sexual, and financial health.
Once acknowledged, acceptance is letting go.
The only action you need to take after that is moving forward with your tools, conceptions, and skills on your path to create an evolving declaration.