The Despair of Disconnection in Scam Victims
The Despair of Disconnection: Kierkegaard’s Insights on Scam Victims’ Trauma and the Path Back to Yourself
Primary Category: Scam Victim Recovery Psychology
Intended Audience: Scam Victims-Survivors / Family & Friends
Authors:
• Vianey Gonzalez B.Sc(Psych) – Licensed Psychologist Specialty in Crime Victim Trauma Therapy, Neuropsychologist, Certified Deception Professional, Psychology Advisory Panel & Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
• Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. – Anthropologist, Scientist, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
About This Article
When you have been the victim of a scam, it is not just the money that disappears. It is often your sense of self, your trust in your own judgment, and your inner moral compass. The emotional aftermath can leave you confused, ashamed, and uncertain about who you are and what you believe. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, described this kind of inner disorientation as despair. Not just sadness, but a separation from your true self. After a scam, you might feel like you betrayed your own values by trusting someone who never existed. This sense of betrayal is more than emotional injury; it is a psychological fracture. Kierkegaard believed that despair results from being out of alignment with your identity, a condition many scam victims recognize all too well.
However, this despair is not the end. It is an invitation to face your pain honestly and rebuild your life around what matters most. By reflecting on what you value, reconnecting with your voice, and refusing to let the scam define you, you begin to reclaim your identity. Healing is not about erasing the past. It is about integrating it, choosing authenticity over shame, and rediscovering the strength you thought was lost. This is how you become whole again.
The Despair of Disconnection: Kierkegaard’s Insights on Scam Victims’ Trauma and the Path Back to Yourself
The Inner Collapse After Deception
When you are victimized by a scam, the damage goes far beyond financial loss. What often hurts the most is what happens inside you. Your sense of self is shaken, your trust in your own judgment fractures, and your values feel compromised. You may begin to feel that you are no longer yourself, or that the self you were has somehow vanished. This experience of emotional confusion and identity loss is what Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described in the mid-1800s as “despair.”
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard defines despair not as sadness or depression in the modern sense, but as a deep misalignment between who you are and how you are living. It is the ache of not being true to your own identity, of feeling like a stranger to yourself. For scam victims, this idea resonates powerfully. When you’ve been deceived, especially by someone you trusted or cared for, you may feel humiliated, hollow, or morally broken. You might question your intelligence, your character, or even your worth. Kierkegaard’s work offers a way to understand this despair, and more importantly, a way to recover from it.
Understanding Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair
Kierkegaard believed that despair is the result of being out of sync with yourself. It is not a temporary feeling, but a condition, a way of existing in which you are disconnected from your true self. This can happen in many forms. You might lose touch with your values. You might try to be someone you are not. You might reject parts of yourself out of guilt or fear. Regardless of how it manifests, the root is always the same: an inner division, a broken relationship between who you are and how you are living.
According to Kierkegaard, there are degrees of despair. The mildest is unconscious despair, where a person doesn’t even realize they are disconnected from their true self. They might go through life distracted, unfulfilled, or numbing themselves to avoid deeper truths. Then there is conscious despair, where a person knows something is wrong but feels powerless to change. Finally, there is what he calls “defiance”, a state where you reject your true self entirely, believing that you must become someone else or be nothing at all.
Scam trauma often leads to conscious despair or defiance. You might become hyper-aware of the ways your choices or trust led to pain. You might feel shame about ignoring red flags, or fury at yourself for believing in a fantasy. These thoughts can spiral into deep self-judgment, making it feel as though you have betrayed your own values and identity.
The Scam as a Catalyst for Self-Alienation
Scams are not just criminal acts: they are personal betrayals. If you were manipulated in a romance scam, for example, the experience likely touched the most intimate parts of your identity. Your hopes, your dreams, your emotional needs—all were drawn into the scammer’s narrative and used against you. This creates a kind of internal fracture. You may feel like you participated in your own deception, even though you were targeted.
That’s where Kierkegaard’s idea becomes especially relevant. He writes, “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” After a scam, this is exactly how many victims feel. You may no longer recognize yourself. The person who trusted so deeply now feels foolish. The person who once had clear values may now feel disoriented or ashamed. It’s not just that you were lied to—it’s that the scam made you question whether your own sense of identity is real or trustworthy.
You might ask yourself, “Who was I when I believed in this person?” or “Why did I allow myself to become so vulnerable?” These are not easy questions. They strike at the heart of self-trust. In many cases, the shame and confusion that follow can become a lasting emotional wound. This is what Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death”, a despair so deep that it feels like the loss of the soul, even if you are physically alive.
The Moral Distortion: When You Feel Complicit in the Deception
One of the cruelest aspects of scam trauma is the way it manipulates your own goodness. Many victims acted out of love, generosity, or a desire to help. But once the truth is revealed, those same acts begin to feel like mistakes. The values you once held, trust, empathy, hope, now seem like liabilities. You may begin to believe that being kind was naive, or that caring was foolish. This reversal can create a painful dissonance. The very traits that once defined you now feel like the cause of your suffering.
Kierkegaard’s framework helps you understand this. He explains that despair often begins when you betray your own moral ideals. In other words, when your actions do not align with your deeper sense of right and wrong, your identity begins to unravel. Scam victims often experience this as internalized guilt. Even though you were deceived, you may feel responsible for the outcome. You may think, “I should have known better” or “I should have seen it coming.” This self-blame adds another layer of despair—one where you no longer trust your judgment, your instincts, or your own capacity for goodness.
But here is the truth: you were not wrong to hope. You were not wrong to trust. What was wrong was the exploitation of those instincts by someone who saw them as tools to be used. Your actions, however painful their result, came from a place of authenticity. The path forward lies not in rejecting that part of you, but in reclaiming it with awareness.
Confronting the Despair: The First Step Toward Healing
Kierkegaard believed that despair could be overcome—but only through honest self-reflection. You cannot escape despair by denying it. You cannot outrun it by distracting yourself. You must turn inward and face it directly. This means asking hard questions: “Who am I now?”, “What do I still believe in?”, or “What matters to me, even after this loss?”
For scam victims, this process can be painful. It means confronting the reality that you were targeted and hurt. It means accepting that your identity may feel fractured. But it also means that healing is possible. Because despair, as Kierkegaard saw it, is not just a wound. It is also an invitation. It calls you to rebuild yourself, not as the person you were before, but as the person you are now becoming.
This rebuilding requires courage. It asks you to examine your values, your desires, and your fears. It asks you to reconnect with the self that existed before the scam, and to integrate the lessons learned into a new, stronger identity. Kierkegaard wrote that the self is not a fixed thing. It is a relationship between who you are and who you are becoming. That means you are not defined by what happened to you. You are defined by how you respond to it.
Restoring Alignment: Living in Accordance with Your True Self
Once you have faced the despair, the next step is to realign your life with your values. This does not mean pretending the scam never happened. It means integrating the experience into your story without letting it define you. It means saying, “This hurt me, but it will not break me.” It means reclaiming the parts of yourself that feel lost, your voice, your dignity, your capacity for joy.
You can start small. Speak your truth. Share your story with someone you trust. Reconnect with activities or causes that matter to you. Set boundaries that reflect your new awareness. These are not just acts of recovery. They are acts of identity. Each one brings you closer to the self that the scam tried to erase.
Kierkegaard believed that living authentically was a form of spiritual courage. He saw the self as a dynamic process—something that must be chosen again and again. In scam recovery, this means choosing to believe in your worth, even when it feels diminished. It means choosing honesty over silence, courage over shame, and integrity over avoidance. These choices restore your sense of self not through denial, but through resilience.
The Role of Compassion and Community
You do not have to walk this path alone. One of the most powerful antidotes to despair is connection. When you speak with others who understand what you’ve been through, your shame begins to dissolve. When you hear someone else say, “I felt that too,” your isolation breaks open. Community is not just support. It is a mirror, reflecting back the parts of yourself you feared were lost.
Sharing your journey with others who have experienced scam trauma helps you externalize the pain and reframe your experience. It gives you language. It gives you validation. And most importantly, it reminds you that your story is not over.
Kierkegaard’s solution to despair was not isolation or perfection. It was relationship to self, to truth, and to the process of becoming. In the context of recovery, this means embracing the idea that you are still in motion. You are still healing. And you are still worthy of love, respect, and hope.
Conclusion: You Can Rebuild What Was Lost
If you are in despair after a scam, you are not alone. The loss of trust, identity, and self-worth is real. But it is not final. Kierkegaard teaches that despair is the sickness of a self that cannot be itself. But that same self, once it turns inward with honesty and courage, can heal.
You can return to a life of alignment. You can reclaim your voice, your judgment, your dignity. Not by forgetting the pain, but by understanding it. Not by denying the experience, but by integrating it. The scam tried to rewrite your story. But you can write a new one.
And in doing so, you become something the scammer never imagined: whole, awake, and fully yourself.
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Important Information for New Scam Victims
Please visit www.ScamVictimsSupport.org – a SCARS Website for New Scam Victims & Sextortion Victims
SCARS Institute now offers a free recovery program at www.SCARSeducation.org
Please visit www.ScamPsychology.org – to more fully understand the psychological concepts involved in scams and scam victim recovery
If you are looking for local trauma counselors please visit counseling.AgainstScams.org or join SCARS for our counseling/therapy benefit: membership.AgainstScams.org
If you need to speak with someone now, you can dial 988 or find phone numbers for crisis hotlines all around the world here: www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines
A Question of Trust
At the SCARS Institute, we invite you to do your own research on the topics we speak about and publish, Our team investigates the subject being discussed, especially when it comes to understanding the scam victims-survivors experience. You can do Google searches but in many cases, you will have to wade through scientific papers and studies. However, remember that biases and perspectives matter and influence the outcome. Regardless, we encourage you to explore these topics as thoroughly as you can for your own awareness.
Statement About Victim Blaming
Some of our articles discuss various aspects of victims. This is both about better understanding victims (the science of victimology) and their behaviors and psychology. This helps us to educate victims/survivors about why these crimes happened and to not blame themselves, better develop recovery programs, and to help victims avoid scams in the future. At times this may sound like blaming the victim, but it does not blame scam victims, we are simply explaining the hows and whys of the experience victims have.
These articles, about the Psychology of Scams or Victim Psychology – meaning that all humans have psychological or cognitive characteristics in common that can either be exploited or work against us – help us all to understand the unique challenges victims face before, during, and after scams, fraud, or cybercrimes. These sometimes talk about some of the vulnerabilities the scammers exploit. Victims rarely have control of them or are even aware of them, until something like a scam happens and then they can learn how their mind works and how to overcome these mechanisms.
Articles like these help victims and others understand these processes and how to help prevent them from being exploited again or to help them recover more easily by understanding their post-scam behaviors. Learn more about the Psychology of Scams at www.ScamPsychology.org
SCARS Resources:
Getting Started: ScamVictimsSupport.org
FREE enrollment in the SCARS Institute training programs for scam victims SCARSeducation.org
For New Victims of Relationship Scams newvictim.AgainstScams.org
Subscribe to SCARS Newsletter newsletter.againstscams.org
Sign up for SCARS professional support & recovery groups, visit support.AgainstScams.org
Find competent trauma counselors or therapists, visit counseling.AgainstScams.org
Become a SCARS Member and get free counseling benefits, visit membership.AgainstScams.org
Report each and every crime, learn how to at reporting.AgainstScams.org
Learn more about Scams & Scammers at RomanceScamsNOW.com and ScamsNOW.com
Learn more about the Psychology of Scams and Scam Victims: ScamPsychology.org
Self-Help Books for Scam Victims are at shop.AgainstScams.org
Worldwide Crisis Hotlines: International Suicide Hotlines – OpenCounseling : OpenCounseling
Campaign To End Scam Victim Blaming – 2024 (scamsnow.com)
Psychology Disclaimer:
All articles about psychology and the human brain on this website are for information & education only
The information provided in this and other SCARS articles are intended for educational and self-help purposes only and should not be construed as a substitute for professional therapy or counseling.
Note about Mindfulness: Mindfulness practices have the potential to create psychological distress for some individuals. Please consult a mental health professional or experienced meditation instructor for guidance should you encounter difficulties.
While any self-help techniques outlined herein may be beneficial for scam victims seeking to recover from their experience and move towards recovery, it is important to consult with a qualified mental health professional before initiating any course of action. Each individual’s experience and needs are unique, and what works for one person may not be suitable for another.
Additionally, any approach may not be appropriate for individuals with certain pre-existing mental health conditions or trauma histories. It is advisable to seek guidance from a licensed therapist or counselor who can provide personalized support, guidance, and treatment tailored to your specific needs.
If you are experiencing significant distress or emotional difficulties related to a scam or other traumatic event, please consult your doctor or mental health provider for appropriate care and support.
Also read our SCARS Institute Statement about Professional Care for Scam Victims – click here
If you are in crisis, feeling desperate, or in despair please call 988 or your local crisis hotline.
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