Extraordinary vs. The Ordinary

A SCARS Institute Scam Victim Recovery Insight

Something Extraordinary Happened, or Something Ordinary Is Being Misread

When a relationship scam ends, victims can be left with experiences that feel almost impossible to understand. Their sense of reality has been disrupted, their attachment has been broken, and information they once trusted can suddenly acquire an entirely different meaning. One useful way to understand this period is through a simple distinction: either something extraordinary has actually happened, or something ordinary is being interpreted as extraordinary.

In relationship scams, the first possibility is often true. Something genuinely extraordinary has happened. A person can discover that someone they believed they knew intimately was not who they claimed to be. Photographs can belong to another person, personal histories can be fabricated, emergencies can be manufactured, and promises of marriage, travel, retirement, or a shared future can turn out to have been deliberately constructed for manipulation. In some cases, multiple criminals can participate in maintaining the illusion of a single relationship.

This is not an ordinary breakup. It is the collapse of a perceived reality.

The victim can suddenly be forced to reinterpret months or years of memories. A loving message can become evidence of manipulation. A photograph can become evidence of identity theft. A crisis that once inspired concern can become part of a criminal strategy. A future that felt emotionally real can disappear in a matter of hours.

The extraordinary nature of that discovery can make everything that follows feel extraordinary as well.

Yet many of the victim’s reactions after discovery can be understood through ordinary human psychology. A victim can continue missing the scammer even after understanding the deception. The victim can feel compelled to check messages, revisit photographs, search for explanations, or hope for renewed contact. Intrusive memories can continue, and the absence of communication can produce powerful anxiety.

These reactions can feel mysterious because the victim now knows that the relationship was fraudulent. The victim can wonder how attachment can remain when the evidence is so clear.

The explanation often lies not in anything mysterious about the relationship, but in normal human attachment, grief, conditioning, memory, and trauma responses.

Attachment does not disappear simply because new information becomes available. Habits do not stop instantly because the circumstances that created them have ended. Emotional conditioning can continue after the victim intellectually understands what happened. Memories associated with affection, anticipation, reassurance, and belonging can continue activating emotional responses long after the underlying deception has been exposed.

The victim’s feelings are therefore real, but the feelings are not necessarily evidence that the victim’s previous interpretation of the relationship was accurate.

A victim who misses the scammer is demonstrating that attachment existed within the victim. That longing does not prove that the scammer experienced the same attachment. Grief demonstrates that something emotionally important has been lost, but it does not prove that the fraudulent identity existed as represented. A powerful desire for renewed contact demonstrates that the attachment system remains active, but it does not prove that returning to the scammer would restore anything genuine.

This distinction becomes especially important because human beings naturally use internal feelings as evidence about external reality. Under ordinary circumstances, that often works reasonably well. When someone feels loved, there is usually another genuine person participating in the relationship. When someone remembers intimacy, that intimacy usually occurred between the people they believed were involved.

Relationship scams violate those assumptions.

The victim’s emotional system can therefore continue responding normally to experiences whose meaning has radically changed. This creates a dangerous reasoning error in which the victim concludes that because a feeling is real, the relationship that produced it must also have been real in the same way.

That conclusion does not follow.

The emotional response can be authentic even when the circumstances that created it were fraudulent.

This makes the period after discovery partly a problem of classification. Some experiences belong in the category of something extraordinary having happened. A sophisticated deception occurred. Trust was exploited. Emotional attachment was manipulated. Reality was deliberately concealed. Money might have been stolen, and an imagined future might have been deliberately constructed and then destroyed.

Other experiences belong in a different category. Something ordinary is happening inside a human being who has experienced something extraordinary. The victim is grieving. The attachment system is reacting to separation. The nervous system is responding to perceived threat and loss. Memory is repeatedly retrieving emotionally important material. The mind is trying to reconcile contradictory information. Habits formed during the relationship are continuing after the relationship has ended.

Even the feeling of no longer recognizing oneself can sometimes be understood through this distinction. A victim can interpret severe emotional changes as evidence that something fundamental has been permanently damaged. Yet traumatic stress can temporarily alter sleep, concentration, emotional regulation, decision-making, attention, memory retrieval, and threat perception. A person who was previously confident can become uncertain. Someone normally independent can become desperate for reassurance. Someone who previously trusted personal judgment can begin questioning every decision.

These experiences can feel alien without being inexplicable.

The usefulness of this framework lies in avoiding two opposite mistakes. The first is minimizing the event by treating the scam as nothing more than someone being fooled. That fails to recognize the extraordinary psychological impact of prolonged deception, attachment manipulation, betrayal, and the destruction of a perceived future.

The second mistake is assuming that every extraordinary feeling afterward requires an extraordinary explanation.

A victim can feel deeply connected to the scammer without that feeling proving an ongoing bond between them. The victim can think about the person constantly without that proving they were a soulmate. The victim can experience powerful grief without that proving the fraudulent identity was genuine. The victim can struggle to accept the evidence without the evidence being wrong.

Both parts of the original premise can therefore be true at the same time.

Something extraordinary happened to the victim, but many of the experiences that follow can still be understood through ordinary human psychological processes responding to extraordinary circumstances.

That distinction can become an important form of reality testing during recovery. Instead of asking only, “Why is this happening to me?” the victim can begin asking a different question:

“What normal human process could explain what I am experiencing?”

That question does not diminish the seriousness of the trauma. It makes the aftermath more understandable. The deception can remain extraordinary while the victim’s grief, attachment, confusion, longing, fear, and search for meaning are recognized as human responses to an abnormal and deeply disruptive experience.

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