The Lasting Chronic Wound of Trauma – Care and Healing for Scam Victim-Survivors
The Wound That Doesn’t Close: Scam Trauma as a Chronic Injury for Scam Victim-Survivors
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
Scam trauma often behaves like a chronic wound—an injury that doesn’t close on its own, one that requires long-term care and deliberate healing. The initial shock of betrayal hits hard, like a physical trauma, but the emotional damage doesn’t stop with discovery. When support is absent and shame takes root, the wound lingers, complicated by identity collapse, repeated triggers, and internalized blame. Healing in this context isn’t fast or linear. Like chronic wound care, it demands attention, consistency, and painful but necessary honesty.
Acknowledging what was lost, naming the emotions involved, and actively choosing to care for the emotional injury—through routines, support, and self-compassion—are all part of the process. Shame, one of the most damaging secondary effects, thrives in secrecy and silence but weakens in the presence of understanding and connection.
Healing may leave scar tissue—changes in trust, vulnerability, or how a survivor navigates relationships—but those scars are signs of strength, not weakness. The key is remembering that you are not the wound. You are the person healing from it. And even when recovery feels slow or incomplete, every act of care, every moment of clarity, is a step forward. Healing happens in layers, and over time, the wound closes.
The Wound That Doesn’t Close: Scam Trauma as a Chronic Injury for Scam Victim-Survivors
Most people understand the process of healing a physical wound. There’s bleeding at first, then clotting, inflammation, tissue repair, and finally, closure. If a wound is clean, properly treated, and supported by the body’s natural resilience, it heals on schedule. But when something interferes—poor circulation, infection, underlying illness—the wound doesn’t close. It lingers. It becomes chronic.
That’s the nature of some physical injuries: they outlast their moment of trauma and become ongoing conditions. And emotionally, the same thing can happen.
For scam victims, the trauma often doesn’t end when the scam is discovered. The damage doesn’t just seal itself shut. In many cases, it festers. Reopens. Gets triggered. Lingers in the background like a chronic wound, demanding long-term care. Understanding the emotional recovery process through the lens of chronic wound care can help you navigate healing more deliberately—and more compassionately.
The First Injury: Immediate Trauma
In both medicine and psychology, trauma refers to a sudden impact that overwhelms the system. For scam victims, the realization of betrayal hits like a blunt force injury. You might remember the moment: the message that didn’t add up, the reverse image search, the call from your bank, the quiet confirmation that it was all a lie.
Your nervous system reacts like it would to a car crash or fall—adrenaline, panic, nausea, disorientation. This is the emotional version of bleeding. It’s raw, disordered, and immediate.
In a healthy response, the mind would begin clotting around the damage. Support systems would step in. A structured response would follow: validation, safety, a sense of justice. But for scam victims, that doesn’t always happen. Friends don’t understand. Family judges. Authorities may seem disinterested. And so the wound stays open.
Why Scam Trauma Often Becomes Chronic
What transforms a wound from acute to chronic isn’t just time—it’s neglect, complication, and repetition.
In scam recovery, emotional neglect plays a huge role. When you’re left to handle the aftermath alone, the injury doesn’t get the care it needs. It becomes infected with shame, secrecy, and self-blame. You might hide the story, replay it endlessly, or punish yourself in silence.
There’s also the problem of complication. Scam trauma is rarely about one thing.
It’s not just the money. It’s not just the lie. It’s the collapse of trust, the dismantling of identity, the confusion about what was real and what wasn’t. Each of these elements adds another layer to the wound, making it harder to treat in isolation.
And then there’s repetition—triggers, relapses, setbacks. Maybe you get a new scam call and your chest tightens. Maybe someone makes a careless comment and the shame floods back in. Maybe a memory surfaces and you’re right back in the moment, heart racing. These moments reopen what you thought was healing. It’s like scratching at a scab. Progress resets.
Understanding the Wound: Location and Depth
Doctors treating chronic wounds assess more than just surface damage. They look at depth, tissue involvement, surrounding health. Scam trauma needs the same approach.
Where did the injury hit you? Was it your trust in others? Your belief in your own judgment? Your financial stability? Your sense of dignity?
How deep did it go? Was this just an unfortunate event—or did it awaken old traumas?
Did it reinforce childhood wounds, past betrayals, or longstanding fears of abandonment?
Every wound is different. Some are shallow but painful. Others are hidden under years of resilience, but still bleeding underneath. The deeper the emotional injury, the more careful and intentional the healing must be.
Treatment Doesn’t Mean Disappearance
With chronic wounds, the goal isn’t always a perfect return to the skin you had before. Sometimes the wound leaves a scar. Sometimes it never fully closes, but it becomes manageable—non-infected, non-disabling. In scam recovery, the same principle applies.
You don’t need to erase the experience to be okay.
You don’t have to forget the scam, forgive the scammer, or make peace with every emotion it stirred up. You just need to care for the wound so that it stops controlling you. So that you’re not constantly reacting, reliving, or retreating.
This kind of healing is subtle. It may look like sleeping through the night again. Or trusting yourself to make decisions. Or not crying when someone asks what happened. Or finally saying, “That wasn’t my fault”—and believing it.
The Role of Debridement: Cleaning the Injury
In wound care, debridement is the process of cleaning the injury. Removing dead tissue, draining infection, exposing what’s still healthy. It’s painful. It’s not pleasant. But it’s necessary.
In trauma work, the equivalent is truth-telling.
You can’t heal from a scam while denying parts of it. You can’t clean a wound while pretending it’s not there. Healing begins when you start saying out loud what happened. When you stop protecting the scammer with your silence. When you stop minimizing the impact because it feels embarrassing. When you look at the full scope of the damage and decide that honesty matters more than comfort.
This is where therapy, support groups, or journaling can play a role. It’s where you name what was taken from you. Not just the money—but the dreams, the self-esteem, the days or years you’ll never get back.
That’s debridement. And it’s a turning point.
Daily Wound Care: The Discipline of Healing
Chronic wounds need regular attention. They can’t be ignored. You clean them, dress them, protect them. You watch for signs of infection. You don’t pick at the scabs.
Emotional wounds demand similar discipline. You need routines that support healing. That might mean:
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Avoiding contact with scam triggers like photos, emails, or social accounts.
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Speaking kindly to yourself when shame resurfaces.
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Tracking emotional flare-ups and noting what caused them.
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Staying connected to a support system, even when you want to isolate.
Healing isn’t something you feel your way through—it’s something you do your way through. And that takes consistency, even on the days when progress feels invisible.
Every day, tell yourself these affirmations:
- This was not your fault
- You are a survivor
- You are stronger than you know
- You are not alone
- Axios – you are worthy
- Vera – this is akk true
Secondary Infections: When Shame Delays Healing
One of the most damaging emotional infections in scam recovery is shame.
Shame tells you this was your fault. That you’re weak. That you should’ve known better. That people will think less of you. It silences your voice and slows your recovery.
Shame is not a sign that the wound is too deep—it’s a sign that the wound hasn’t been protected. It’s been left open to judgment, misunderstanding, and secrecy.
The antidote is exposure to compassion. From others. From yourself. From people who understand that being scammed is not a failure of intelligence—it’s a result of human vulnerability being targeted by professional manipulators.
You don’t heal shame by arguing with it. You heal it by refusing to let it isolate you.
Scar Tissue: What Healing Can Look Like
Every healed wound leaves something behind. A scar. A tenderness. A change in texture or sensitivity.
But here’s what scars also mean: the wound is no longer open. It’s closed. Stronger. Tougher in some ways. Less likely to bleed again.
Scam survivors often carry psychological scar tissue. They may be more cautious. They may trust less easily. They may take longer to open up. But they’re not broken. They’re healed in a new way. And in many cases, they are more grounded, more insightful, and more compassionate—toward others and toward themselves.
That’s not a flaw in the healing process. That’s part of it.
You Are Not the Wound
The biggest risk of chronic injury—physical or emotional—is identity confusion. When you’ve been hurt for a long time, you start to think of yourself as the hurt.
But you are not the wound. You are the one healing the wound.
It’s easy to forget this. Easy to feel like the pain defines you. But it doesn’t. It informs you. It guides you. It may even change your course. But it is not you.
You are more than what happened to you.
You are more than what was taken.
You are more than the wound.
Conclusion: Healing Happens in Layers
Recovery from a scam doesn’t follow a clean, upward curve. It follows a spiral. You move forward, then back. You feel strong, then suddenly raw again. You think you’re past it—then something opens it back up.
This isn’t failure. This is healing.
Wounds close in layers. Physically and emotionally. And every layer takes time.
If you’ve been carrying this pain for longer than you expected—if you’re still flinching at certain memories, still carrying shame that won’t budge, still feeling like something in you hasn’t healed—you are not behind. You are not broken. You are simply healing something deep.
And deep healing takes time.
If it helps, picture it like this: You’re tending a wound. It’s slow. Some days it looks better. Some days it stings. But you’re caring for it. You’re keeping it clean. You’re learning not to pick at it. And one day, maybe not soon, but surely—you’ll notice it’s closed.
Maybe tender. Maybe scarred. But no longer open.
And that, in the world of both medicine and healing from betrayal, is the definition of progress.
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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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