When To Seek Professional Help

By Soraya Grant

Anyone who has been scammed, or who believes they may be in a relationship with, or even just talking to someone they suspect of being a scammer is more than welcome to use the resources listed here at Scams of the Heart. We also warmly welcome those who were not scammed themselves, but are concerned about a family member, housemate, or friend. We also encourage our readers to seek support in their offline communities. In some cases, that may mean professional counseling or other mental health help.

We urge you to seek help if:

You are thinking of harming yourself

It does not matter what you did before, during, or after the scam. You do not deserve to die for it. If you are thinking of killing yourself, or seriously harming yourself in any way, we urge you to please visit your nearest hospital or mental health clinic, speak to your pastor, rabbi, or other clergyperson or spiritual advisor right away, or call or log on to a suicide hotline immediately.

You have the urge to harm other people or pets

Violence toward yourself or anyone else is never a productive way to deal with any part of the scam. If you fear you may hurt a family member, friend, or pet, please speak to someone at a hospital, clinic, religious or spiritual organization, or a crisis hotline right away. The only people who deserve anything bad to happen to them after a scam are the scammers, and the only way to punish them is to educate people to avoid becoming involved with them, thereby cutting off their supply of victims. Never act on any urge to harm another person or a pet, no matter how angry, despondent, or fed up you may be feeling. There is always a better way of handing the situation.

You are unable to return your eating, sleeping, work, or other daily patterns to normal.

Some disruption in your life is to be expected during and after the scam. It may take a while to sleep and eat normally, and you may need to take some time off work. But if nothing you do to try to get back to normal works, you haven't been able to sleep or eat well for months, and your livelihood is in jeopardy, it may be time to call the health professional of your choice and schedule an appointment.

Your fear of the scammer prevents you from leaving your home.

Even though it is not in the scammer's own interest to do more than send you some creepy messages, it is still normal to fear them for a bit. Most scam victims can remember those days when everyone and everything made them jump. But if you cannot leave your home for an extended period of time due to fear of the scammer, you may want to speak to a professional about the situation.

You aren't violent, but you do find yourself "taking it out" on other people

Nobody is in a great place right after they realize they've been the victim of an online romance scam. You are probably not going to be in the mood to hear about your sister's absolutely real kids when you just found out the child you were planning to be a stepparent to doesn't exist, or hear your friend's financial difficulties when you just gave large chunks of your savings to a someone who turned out to be a scammer. You certainly won't feel like hearing about someone's boyfriend or girlfriend or their romantic dates or how many people were attracted to them at the party last night. Pulling away from people at first is normal. Flying into verbal rages, becoming seriously angry over minor slights or rude moments, and refusing to speak to anyone for long periods unless you absolutely have to are not. Reach out for professional help any time you notice yourself treating people poorly, losing friends, or avoiding all human contact for long periods of time.

Some behavior of yours feels out of control to you or is frightening or distressing to others

Substance abuse may be the first thing that comes to mind, and if you find yourself drinking excessively, abusing other drugs, or using substances that are against the law to cope with the scam, it is certainly a good idea to seek help. But this applies to any and all behaviors, including gambling, overeating, shopping, and even excessive cleaning or personal hygiene practices, such as spending your entire eight hour day disinfecting your home or taking a series of showers in a short period of time. Anything that is causing a major disruption to your life, is upsetting someone else, or is scaring you may be a cause for concern.

Your focus on the scam and the scammer intensifies over time rather than lessens

When the pain of the scam is fresh, focusing on it is to be expected. Anyone who learned they had been scammed would need to know what happened to them and why. But in most cases, gaps begin to appear, and then increase over time. You may think of nothing but the scammer for two weeks, then realize you spent two hours playing with your grandkids without a scammer related thought. Over the next few days, you may cook a meal or write a work email without thinking of the scammer as well. In time, you only think of the scam when you dredge it up on purpose to help someone else. The timing will be different for everyone, but gaps should begin to appear and they should increase. If you find that you cannot stop thinking of the scam and the scammer for even brief periods of time, or if you find yourself becoming increasingly interested in things you only associate with the scam, it may be time to seek professional counseling.


Finding Help

The best place to look for mental health care is in your hometown or neighborhood. Look online or in the print phone directory for mental health therapists in private practice, or look for something called a "mental health center" or "behavorial health" clinic or center. The first thing you need to make sure of is that the practioner you choose is licensed. Anyone who presents him or herself as a Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Marriage and Family Therapist, Social Worker, or Licenced Professional Counselor must be licensed to practice in the state where they reside. You have the right to check up on any mental health care professional's credentials by asking them for their license number and the name of the professional body that licenses them. If you encounter someone who acts insulted, angry, hurt, or irritated when you ask for this information, or refuses to give it to you, do not use their service.

Licensing is the minimum professional qualification. A mental health professional provides a service just like any other professional, and just like any other professional, some provide excellent service, some mediocre, and some poor. If you notice that the therapist appears to be distracted, hostile, or simply uncaring and focused on their own agenda rather than your healing, you have the right to seek help from a different licensed professional. Remember that your therapist is there to provide you with the service of helping you learn to cope with the difficulties in your life. You may need to tell them information you would normally only tell a close friend in order for them to do that, but the therapist is still a professional providing a service. Report the situation to the therapist's licensing body and any supervisors they may have any time a mental health professional asks you for personal favors, flirts, makes suggestive jokes or comments, or asks you for a date, or in any situation where the person encourages you to do anything you know to be illegal, harmful to others, or dangerous.

As of this writing, there are no known mental health practioners trained specifically to deal with online romance scams and we do not know of any mental health professional who makes this the focus of his or her practice. However, you have the right to expect any professional mental health care provider to take the scam seriously. Return to your research and find another professional in your area if the therapist makes light of the scam, minimizes the pain caused by the scam, or refers to the scammer as your "ex" and behaves as though it were a real relationship.

SOTH Stepping Stones: Restoring A Healthy Sleep Pattern

by Soraya Grant

Scammers manipulate their victims' sleep patterns as a means of psychological manipulation. One of the first stepping stones on the road to recovery is getting a decent amount of sleep once again. Sleep is vital to overall mental and physical health. Restoring a healthy sleep pattern will make it easier to cope with the scam and heal.

Remove Traces of the Scam from Your Home With Special Attention to Your Bedroom

Immediately following the discovery of the scam, you deleted, ignored, and/or blocked all the scammer's accounts from all of your accounts. Repeat the process with every other web site or document that reminds you of the scam. Get rid of pictures they sent, web pages you visited because of them, lists you made because of them, even statuses from your social networking sites that are related to them. Once the computer is cleaned of all things scammer related, go over the rest of your living area,paying special attention to your sleeping area. Any teddy bears or other plush toys they sent you should be taken to the thrift store or local charity of your choice, as should any little symbols you purchased to represent the relationship that turned out to be a scam such as perfumes, night lights, statues, or posters. Include sleepwear. If you bought fancy silk pajamas to wear the first time your boyfriend or girlfriend spent the night, dig your old pajamas out of the drawer or donation box and donate the silk set. Do everything you can to remove all traces of the scam, but don't add to your own stress. Do the best you can. If you bought a whole new bed and bedroom set, it may not be possible to just haul it to the thrift store and buy a new one right now. Just make sure that anything that is kept stays behind only because you cannot afford to replace it right now, and not because you are attached to it.

Reclaim Your Evening Routine

Your body clock was reset by the scammer. You always watched a movie on DVD before bed, then crawled in and drifted off. Once the scammer began manipulating you, your routine changed to spending three hours chatting with them and going to bed an hour later. Dive back in to your DVD collection. If you still cannot sleep, do something you find relaxing with that extra time. Make sure it is something you truly find relaxing. The traditional hot bath, clean pajamas, and a cup of chamomile tea works for some people. Other people would rather play with pets, write out their schedule for the next day, or clean out a drawer. The only rule is that nothing you do can be related to the scammer; don't log on to the site where you met them, watch the television show the two of you talked about, or look at recipes you were planning to cook when you thought someone would be visiting you. Try to gradually cut back on the extra time spent awake until the evening routine you had before you ever met the scammer feels natural to you again.

Repeat the Process with Your Morning Routine

The scammer may have insisted you get up early to chat. Or maybe you got up early to get ahead on work so you could log on to chat with them in the evenings. Get up at the time you used to get up before you ever met the scammer. Resist the urge to get out of bed if you wake up at the earlier time. Even if you need to get up to use the bathroom, go back to your bed and lay back down until your normal waking time. Having a book to read, a television channel to watch, or some music to listen to as a way to keep you occupied if you do not fall back to sleep might be beneficial. Once it is time to get up, revert to the morning routine you had before you met the scammer.

Give Yourself a Relaxing Gift

Consider giving yourself a gift designed to help you sleep. If you have absolutely no money to spare, take an hour online and build yourself a folder full of relaxing images that can be saved and viewed as a slideshow on your computer. If you can spare up to five dollars, you might like a few new songs for your playlist, a scented room spray, a night light, a flameless candle, or a glass or cup in your favorite color for your nightstand. New pajamas, a new blanket or body pillow, a plush toy of your favorite animal or a teddy bear, a new sheet set, a new comforter and pillow shams, or a soothing sounds machine might be good for someone who can afford to spend a little more. Tailor this step to your own tastes. If playing video games, reading, or knitting relaxes you, get a new game, book, or materials for a project. The idea is to add something to your evening that prompts you to go to sleep.

Seek Professional Help If Needed

These steps are simple because they are ideas that proved effective for the author of this article. They are not medical or therapeutic advice from a professional. Anyone who feels they may need medication to help them sleep, experiences frightening or deeply upsetting nightmares, or simply cannot get a decent night's sleep despite taking steps to relax and restore their normal sleep pattern should visit a licensed mental health and/or medical professional.

Steps To Healing From A Scam

Here is an article written for us by a guest writer. it is very informative and may give you a new perspective on the whole experience of being scammed and what the writer did to help the healing process.

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Steps to Healing from a Scam

by Soraya Grant

Give Yourself Time, Energy, and Space to Process What Happened to You

Scammers engage in deliberately planned patterns of psychological manipulation. Many of the tactics they use are identical or very similar to those used by abusers in domestic violence situations, cult leaders, and unscrupulous multi-level marketing schemes. You may have lost, or come very close to losing a lot of money or find your finances in disarray because you bought clothes, electronics, furniture, or other items for what you thought was your new life with someone wonderful. None of this is something a person can just recover from instantly. Accept that for a time, you will dwell on the scam. The person you believed you were talking to either shared your religious and political beliefs or the two of you engaged in an enjoyable or enlightening banter on these subjects. The two of you had the same or perfectly compatible career, family, and financial goals, and spent a great deal of time discussing these issues. You were likely charmed by all the "little things" the two of you had in common. When you've just spent weeks or months discussing everything with someone, everything is naturally going to remind you of that person. You may find yourself clinging to tiny bits of the scam as though they reflected reality, even though you know they do not. Some scam victims become attached to videos or photos the scammer used. My own scam was a copycat of the Nigerian scam, run by one or more Americans who tossed in a few real details of the primary, possibly only, scammer's life to throw off anyone who researched them, and I found myself unable to let go of the town I had been made to believe would soon be my home. This period of intense focus on the scam will be incredibly painful while it lasts, but you are not doomed to a life sitting alone repeatedly watching the movie the two of you talked about or gazing at stolen photos or web pages of places you'll never see. Eventually, little gaps will begin to form. My first gap was a criminology book I purchased on a trip to a mall with some people who knew nothing of the scam. I spent about ten minutes picking it out and several hours reading it and pondering the cases it discussed instead of the scam. These gaps will slowly stretch, becoming larger and larger as you heal, until the scam is nothing more than a tiny thread at the back of your mind.

Take Back Some of the Little Things You Gave Up to Please the Person You Thought You Knew

Did you used to love to tend your flower garden, but gave that up to spend time online talking to the scammer? Buy new plants or seeds if you can afford it, and if your finances are depleted, organize your gardening tools or shed or spend some time online learning about the latest trends or techniques for the type of gardening you enjoy. If you love to read, but never got to finish many books due to waiting for the scammer to IM you or log into chat, buy or check out something new for yourself. Have a video, movie or television show marathon featuring that celebrity crush you always avoided mentioning so the person you thought you were in a relationship with wouldn't get jealous. Listen to music you gave up because it was part of a painful story the scammer told, or an artist they claimed not to like. The scammer who victimized me played on my sympathy by insisting that he broke down crying because the song "Drops of Jupiter" by Train was "his song" with his wife who died. While the ringleader or sole copycat scammer did indeed have a wife who died, I have no idea if that was one more detail of his deceased wife's life he was heartless enough to use in an internet romance scam, or if that was an invented detail he or they stole from some former victim...and it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that Train is my favorite band, I've loved that song since it first came out, and I stopped listening to it so I wouldn't ever slip and tell "my boyfriend" that I had it playing in the background. That song has never sounded better than it did the first time I listened to it just because it was a song I liked.

Get Rid of Everything You Added to Your Life for the Person You Thought You Knew

Scammers craft the characters they play into the ideal partner for each victim, but they also manipulate people into making major plans they can use as an excuse to ask for money. Planning to marry or move in together as soon as he gets back from his business trip to Nigeria is a common ploy west African scammers use to set up the "I'm stuck in the country and need your money to get out" scene. If you experienced this, you may have started picking out furniture, looking at houses, or putting money away for a down payment. The American scammer who manipulated me planned a special first date and vacation for the two of us that would require him to travel a great distance, then complained incessantly about being broke until I offered to send him the money for his plane ticket and pay for the hotel rooms. I closed the account I set up for this purpose. Getting rid of realtor's cards, furniture catalogs, and anything else you obtained in preparation for your life together with this person will probably feel just as freeing. Another common scammer tactic is applying subtle pressure to see what little things they can get you to agree to do. You believe you are making compromises for the sake of a relationship, or doing something special to please your man or woman, but the scammer is really giving you a little test to see if you will do what they want. The American scammer had me convinced I should attend a school whose philosophy strongly contradicts my own beliefs, purchasing clothing items in colors and styles I don't care to wear, and changing my grooming and beauty routine habits to fit his stated tastes. I even took out an expensive cell phone plan in order to communicate with him. The process of informing that school I would not be attending, finding a place suited to me, donating those clothes, and getting rid of that phone was the process that finally ended the lasting pain.

Embrace Those Things That Have Always Been True to You Once Again

Sorting out what was you and what you took into your life because of the scam can be a complicated process. Mixed in with all those grand life changing plans and little tests the scammer gave you is a lot of your own thoughts, feelings, tastes, and interests that have been reflected back to you as belonging to the person you thought you knew. It's one of the primary methods they use to make you think the two of you have a lot in common or are compatible. Take your time with this, and be honest with yourself. The American scammer had an "ordinary guy" persona with me. He liked the simple life, in a small home with no designer or name brand labels or need to have jewelry or the latest gadgets. . He even sang me a song he claimed to have written years ago about being "an ordinary guy." Being more Sears and Applebee than Dior and country club myself, I embraced this enthusiastically and was inspired by "my man" to simplify even more. The day I discovered the scam, I first found a marriage announcement in his local paper for the man I thought was my soon to be live-in boyfriend and possible fiance and another woman. Not realizing it was a scam, I told someone else who claimed to be just his friend in the chatroom where we met that this man and I had been dating, but he demanded I keep it a secret. I then went on to tearfully tell the person the relationship was over because he had been cheating on me and had married the other woman. His "other friend" and I discovered it was a scam together, as we traded stories detail by detail, and realized that he had been pretending to carry on nearly identical relationships with both of us, including wanting us to arrange special meetings and dates that required him to travel. The only major difference was...the man she believed she'd been dating had a very different background, a slightly different appearance, and lived a very different lifestyle than the man I believed I had been dating. Her "boyfriend" had already bought her diamonds, lived in a huge house, and had just purchased the latest model smartphone. My initial urge was to start looking for five jobs I could hold at once, so that I could afford to live in a manner that was the exact opposite of the life we discussed, even if I would have to hold my nose to swallow that fancy food and own one outfit because it cost more than a whole wardrobe of clothes I actually wanted. But that would only be an act of cruelty to myself. That person who would rather have a DQ Blizzard than the Golden Oppulence Sundae at Serendipity 3 wasn't the scammer or the person the scammer was pretending to be...that was...and still is...me.

The above article was based on the path to healing taken by a romance scam survivor. It is not a therapy plan, nor is it recommend or endorsed by a mental health professional.

 

Taking Care of Me

One of the things we have been talking about in the chat room lately is that no matter what we are going through, we still need to put some focus on taking care of ourselves.  For one thing, after a scam, after a broken heart, it is so easy to fall into depression.  Depression can mean different things for different people.  For some it may involve isolating oneself.  For another it may involve loss of sleep or too much sleep.  Others may overeat, or not eat at all.  There can be many ways depression manifests itself in one's life.  
Lack of sleep is a big problem for many victims of romance scams.  For some it may have already been a problem before the scam, like with me.  For others, it is something they never dealt with before the scam, but because the scammers use sleep deprivation as one of the methods to help gain control over us, the sleep deprivation can become a serious problem.  Lack of proper sleep is one of my issues but it was a problem for me before I was scammed.   For me, not getting enough sleep makes any kind of mental, emotional, or physical problem I am dealing with even worse.  Luckily I can usually get some sleep during the daytime, but nights are the hardest for me.  One reason is that I have always been a night owl and my brain seems to function better from the late afternoon until an hour or two after midnight.  But if I could go to sleep then, I would be okay.  This week I had to go to the doctor to see if I could get a change in prescription because the sleep aid I was taking was no longer working.  Tonight I try something new.  Hopefully it will do the trick.

Besides solving sleep problems, we need to take care of ourselves in other ways.  We may need to take a serious look at what we are eating, if we are eating, and how much we are eating.  We might need to see if we are avoiding social situations or time spent with family.  If we need to take care of physical conditions that we are neglecting, then that should be put at the top of the list of things to do to take care of ourselves.  

It's not easy for me to always do the right thing to take care of me.  I have a lot of physical issues I am dealing with.  The physical issues effect my social life at times, as well.  If I am not eating properly, meaning the kinds of foods that are healthy for me rather than those that are harmful for me, then I don't feel good physically.  Add that to lack of sleep and I can shut down physically as well as emotionally and mentally.  Everything is connected.  We need to get our lives into a healthy balance, physically, socially, emotionally/mentally, and spiritually.  Once I had a counselor who had me draw a circle and divide it into quarters like a pie.  Then I was to label each part as follows:  physical, emotional/mental, social, spiritual.  After I had done that she had me list the activities in my life that fit into each quarter.  When I was done, if there was anything off balance, I could readily see where I needed to do the most work.  This is something I have not done in a long time and think it would be a good time to do it again in the process of taking care of me.  I already know I am off balance in a few places. (Ha ha, those of you who know me, no comments here please.  LOL)  


The main point here is to look at your life and see if there is something that you might need to do to get yourself back into balance so you can take care of you.  When you go through something like a romance scam you are going to come out of it a little lopsided in some way or another.  Taking care of yourself is of prime importance now.  Whether you are new to having been scammed or it's been awhile, it's never too late to start taking care of you.  In AA and Alanon it is said that it is a "selfish program".  That is because to heal, to recover, you have to put yourself first at least for awhile.  Just like a car can't go anywhere until you put fuel in the gas tank (or plug it in for these new electric cars), you can't be expected to function properly without being fueled and refueled as needed.  Waiting until you are on empty while you expend all your energies on others does not help you or them.  Sometimes we all need to take a little time to take care of ourselves.  Daily, weekly, monthly, annually.  When we neglect ourselves, we end up not working properly at all.  We all need our batteries recharged sometimes, just like our cell phones and other electronic gadgets do.


What is it that you need to do today to take care of you?  
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