Prescriptivism and Scam Victim Recovery

A SCARS Institute Scam Victim Recovery Insight

When “Should” Becomes Another Burden

After a relationship scam or other serious fraud, you are often surrounded by instructions about what you should do, what you should feel, how quickly you should recover, and what a “healthy” response is supposed to look like. Some of that guidance can be useful. Recovery does require structure, learning, behavioral change, and sometimes difficult decisions. But there is an important difference between guidance that helps you move forward and prescriptivism that tells you there is only one acceptable way to experience what has happened to you.

Prescriptivism is the belief that there is a correct way something ought to be done. In language, it tells people how they should speak or write. In social life, it appears as rules about how people should behave, what emotions are appropriate, and how long certain experiences should last. In trauma recovery, prescriptivism appears whenever someone takes a complicated human process and turns it into a rigid timetable, formula, or standard that you are expected to meet.

This matters because recovery from betrayal trauma is not simply a sequence of tasks. You are rebuilding trust in yourself, trying to understand manipulation, grieving what you believed was real, confronting financial or relational consequences, and learning how to function again after your assumptions about another person and perhaps about yourself have been disrupted. These processes rarely move according to a neat schedule.

Every victim is unique; however, there are standard approaches to helping you recover. Unfortunately, far too often, people tend to view this as just a prescription – do this, then that.

The Tyranny of “You Should Be Over This”

One of the most damaging forms of prescriptivism occurs when other people decide how long your recovery should take. You can hear statements such as, “It has been six months, so you should be over it by now,” or, “You know the person was fake, so there is nothing left to grieve.” These statements often sound logical to someone who has not experienced betrayal trauma, but they misunderstand what you actually lost.

You did not simply lose contact with a scammer. You can lose a future you believed you were building, a relationship that felt emotionally real, money that represented years of work, trust in your own judgment, confidence in other people, and sometimes your sense of identity. Your nervous system also does not suddenly erase months or years of conditioning simply because your conscious mind now understands that deception occurred.

When someone tells you that you should already be better, the statement creates a second problem on top of the original trauma. You are no longer only dealing with grief, fear, anger, confusion, or shame. You can also begin judging yourself for still experiencing those emotions. Instead of asking, “What is happening inside me?” you begin asking, “What is wrong with me that I am still feeling this?”

That is where prescriptivism becomes harmful. It transforms recovery from a process of understanding yourself into a test you believe you are failing.

The Rules You Create for Yourself

Other people are not the only source of prescriptive expectations. You can create them for yourself. In fact, self-imposed rules can become some of the harshest obstacles in your recovery.

You might tell yourself that you should have recognized the scam earlier, that you should never have sent money, that you should have listened to family members, or that someone with your intelligence and experience should have known better. These statements appear to be reflections on the past, but most are actually judgments built from knowledge you possess now and are applying backward to a time when you did not possess it.

You are evaluating your earlier decisions as though you had access to the information you later discovered. You also overlook the psychological conditions under which those decisions occurred. Manipulation works by controlling information, building trust, creating emotional dependence, exploiting cognitive biases, increasing urgency, and gradually changing what seems reasonable. Your decisions did not occur in the same informational environment you occupy today.

A useful recovery question is therefore not, “What should I have done?” but, “What did I know, believe, and perceive when I made that decision?” That question does not remove responsibility for learning from what happened. Instead, it replaces condemnation with investigation, and investigation gives you something you can actually use.

Prescribing the “Correct” Emotion

Prescriptivism also appears when you begin deciding which emotions you are allowed to feel. You might believe you should hate the scammer, but instead you miss them. You might believe you should be furious, but instead you feel numb. You might think you should feel grateful that the scam ended, yet you find yourself grieving intensely. You can even experience several of these apparently contradictory emotions at the same time.

None of those emotional combinations means that you approve of what happened. Human attachment does not disappear simply because the object of attachment is revealed to have been deceptive. Your emotional system learned through repeated interaction, anticipation, attention, reassurance, affection, reward, and expectation. Discovering the truth changes your understanding of the relationship much faster than it changes the emotional pathways that developed while you believed in it.

You therefore do not need to prescribe the emotion you think a “good survivor” should have. You need to understand the emotion that is actually present.

If you still miss the person you thought existed, that feeling can tell you something about attachment. If you are furious, your anger can tell you something about violated boundaries. If you feel ashamed, that emotion can reveal the beliefs you have formed about yourself. If you feel frightened, your fear can point toward areas where safety and predictability need to be rebuilt.

Recovery becomes more productive when emotions are treated as information rather than evidence of success or failure.

Recovery Is Structured, but It Is Not Mechanical

Rejecting prescriptivism does not mean that recovery has no structure. There are practices that consistently help people recover from trauma, including psychoeducation, reducing contact with offenders, restoring routine, developing emotional regulation skills, rebuilding social connections, challenging distorted beliefs, learning about manipulation, and seeking appropriate professional support when needed.

The difference is that useful recovery principles describe processes that tend to help rather than dictate exactly how you must experience them (with a couple of exceptions).

You can learn emotional regulation without being told that you should never become upset. You can practice acceptance without pretending that what happened no longer hurts. You can develop accountability without converting accountability into self-punishment. You can recognize mistakes without redefining yourself as a foolish person.

• Structure gives you direction.
• Prescriptivism turns direction into judgment.

A recovery framework should therefore help you understand what you are experiencing, what skills you can practice, and what changes can improve your functioning. It should not become another authority telling you that you have failed because your nervous system, grief, or emotional attachment did not obey a timetable.

Comparing Your Recovery With Someone Else’s

Prescriptivism becomes especially powerful in support communities because you can see other people progressing differently from you. Someone who entered recovery after you can appear calmer, more confident, or more socially engaged. Another person can stop talking about the scam quickly, while you continue struggling with intrusive memories or unanswered questions.

It is easy to convert those observations into rules. You can think, “If they can do it, I should be able to do it,” or, “They are recovering correctly and I am not.”

The comparison overlooks enormous differences between people. The duration and intensity of the scam can differ. Financial consequences can differ. Previous trauma histories, attachment patterns, family relationships, social support, physical health, financial stability, and access to professional care can all influence recovery. Even two people who experienced similar scams can process them very differently.

Other survivors can show you what is possible, but they should not become measuring sticks against which you punish yourself.

From “Should” to “What Helps?”

One of the most useful changes you can make is to become suspicious of the word “should” when you use it against yourself. The word is not always wrong. You should take reasonable steps to protect yourself from further victimization, and you should seek appropriate help when your distress exceeds what you can safely manage alone. But many of the “shoulds” that torment survivors are not safety principles or recovery practices. They are judgments disguised as rules.

• Instead of saying, “I should not still be thinking about this,” you can ask, “Why does my mind keep returning to this, and what does it still need to understand?”
• Instead of saying, “I should not miss the scammer,” you can ask, “What part of the relationship am I actually missing?”
• Instead of saying, “I should have known better,” you can ask, “What prevented me from recognizing the manipulation at the time?”
• Instead of saying, “I should be stronger,” you can ask, “What skill or support would help me manage this moment more effectively?”

These questions move you from judgment toward curiosity. Curiosity does not excuse what happened, but it creates the conditions for learning.

You Are Learning How Your Recovery Works

Your recovery does not need to conform perfectly to someone else’s expectations to be real. Progress can occur while you are still grieving. You can become safer while still feeling confused. You can learn to trust yourself again while still occasionally doubting your judgment. You can understand intellectually that the relationship was fraudulent while your emotional system continues to process the attachment that developed during it.

The goal is not to eliminate every difficult feeling according to someone else’s schedule. The goal is to become increasingly capable of understanding those feelings, regulating them, learning from what happened, protecting yourself, rebuilding your identity, and participating in your life again.

• Prescriptivism asks whether you are recovering the way you are supposed to recover. A healthier question is whether what you are doing is helping you become safer, more informed, more emotionally regulated, more connected, and more capable of directing your own life.
• Recovery needs guidance, practice, education, accountability, and sometimes professional care. What it does not need is another rigid voice telling you that you are doing your humanity incorrectly. You have already experienced someone attempting to manipulate your perceptions, decisions, emotions, and expectations. Recovery should not replace that control with a different form of control.

It should help you understand yourself well enough to reclaim your own.

There Is Still a Formula for Recovery

None of this means that recovery is whatever you want it to be, or that every approach works equally well. There is a fundamental difference between prescriptivism and the essential practices that make recovery possible. Prescriptivism tells you how you are supposed to feel, how quickly you are supposed to heal, what your emotional experience should look like, or where you should be according to someone else’s expectations. Recovery basics do something very different. They give you the knowledge, repetition, participation, and practice your brain needs to change.

There is a formula for recovery, and when you genuinely follow it over time, it works. You begin by learning why things are the way they are. You learn what happened psychologically during the scam, how manipulation affected your perceptions and decisions, why attachment developed, why your emotions continue after the deception is exposed, why shame and self-blame appear, and why your mind can continue returning to an experience that you consciously know was fraudulent. Understanding removes some of the mystery from what you are experiencing and gives you a framework for responding to it.

You also learn why it happened. This does not mean searching endlessly for some personal defect that supposedly made you vulnerable. It means understanding the conditions, manipulative methods, psychological processes, circumstances, decisions, and vulnerabilities that came together during the experience. When you understand those mechanisms, you can replace the frightening belief that “this happened because something is wrong with me” with a much more useful understanding of how deception worked and what you can do differently in the future.

Then you follow the recovery basics: read, think, and write. You read so that you continue acquiring accurate information about trauma, manipulation, attachment, grief, cognition, and recovery. You think about what you are learning and connect it with your own experiences instead of allowing the information to pass through your mind without being integrated. You write because putting your thoughts into words forces your mind to organize experiences, examine assumptions, recognize patterns, and turn vague emotional reactions into something you can understand and work with.

You also participate regularly. Recovery does not happen entirely inside your own head. Participation exposes you to other perspectives, allows you to ask questions, gives you opportunities to articulate what you are learning, helps you recognize patterns in the experiences of others, and gradually reconnects you with people after betrayal has damaged your willingness to trust. Regular participation also keeps recovery active instead of allowing avoidance, isolation, or discouragement to quietly take its place.

These are not prescriptive demands about how you should feel. They are essential recovery practices. You are not being told that you must stop grieving by a particular date, that you should already trust again, that you should never miss the person you thought existed, or that your recovery must look like someone else’s. You are being asked to do the work that allows change to occur.

Recovery therefore contains both flexibility and discipline. You can move through grief at your own pace while continuing to learn. You can have difficult days while still participating. You can struggle with an idea while continuing to read, think, and write about it. You can experience setbacks without abandoning the practices that are gradually helping your brain, emotions, beliefs, and behavior reorganize around reality.

The distinction matters. Prescriptivism says, “You should be different by now.” Recovery says, “Keep doing the things that help you become different.”

You cannot command yourself to heal. You can, however, create the conditions in which healing becomes increasingly possible. Learn why things are the way they are and why they happened. Read. Think. Write. Participate regularly. Repeat those practices even when progress feels slow, because recovery is built through repetition, understanding, connection, and continued engagement.

Those are not arbitrary rules imposed upon you. They are the essential work of recovery.

Prof. (Emeritus) Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.
August 2026