5 Stages of True Love Scam

We think it’s love but fall into a world of hell.
A hell that for all its pain, we can recover from.

True love scam as a reality – beyond scary movies and television shows – is coming into focus like never before. How bizarre it feels to know something’s wrong, something needs to be fixed but you can’t pinpoint what it is or name it.

Finding yourself in a relationship nightmare as I did in 2012, you likely whipped out your laptop or smartphone to google away for answers. This search for information begins for most of us when you’re feeling that something’s wrong, yet you can’t put your finger on it, and nothing you do changes it, or makes things better.

True Love Or True Love Scam

Maybe you’ve felt a sense that they’re lying, or you’re being ignored or were rejected, insulted, or they haven’t answered your texts for the zillionth time.

This furtive search is inspired by what each of us experiences. By a fog and suffering that muddles what had been good.

The thing that brings anyone here is that we start to see that the frog we kissed isn’t a prince, a princess, or even a frog, but some kind of monster. That’s okay. It’s a good thing that you’re here…

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True Love Scam: Who Does This?

Not one of us thought, oh geez, this bloke is pulling me into a true love scam! We believed this was a relationship and are finding that rather, it’s an entanglement initiated and created by a person of supreme narcissism.

This kind of person is what many people call a “narcissist” or “narc” or a “narcopath”, but is in fact a sociopath, also known as a psychopath. – Calling them sociopaths works for me.

Breaking Up With Evil

Breakign Up with Evil, by Jennifer Smith on Amazon and Good Reads

Breaking Up with Evil: Escaping Coercive Control on Amazon

Five women’s true stories of being ensnared, hauled through the confusion, lies, fear, and pain, and breaking away.

Told in their own words, they leave nothing unsaid. Find validation and see new glimpses of the truth as they share their stories… Stories that could be any of ours.

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True Love Scam: A Nightmare on Steroids

True love scam is a nightmare of epic proportions. It starts out feeling magic, even beyond normal relationships. This is an occurrence that brings pain and loads of confusion. It’s an event that comes to light slowly as we’re in what we think is a true love relationship only to discover it isn’t.

The other way they take and use couldn’t be more simplistic. They take it… whatever they want. Extra room in the closet, our credit cards, cash, cars, our friends become their prey.

Realizing this is hard. Truly taking in what this is will likely be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. That’s okay. You’re now in a great place to find answers and to know that you’re not alone. – Many people from all over the planet are reading this just as you are. And once you get this sorted, the potential to be user-proof forever is here.

Think of a true love scam as a hijacking; a deliberate invasion and infiltration by a parasite. Every parasite needs a host who knows nothing of its presence to survive. This weird dynamic happens, in the same way, each and every time. – Let’s take a look at the phases of a true love scam.

True Love Scam: Stages One Through Five

Catch Our Eye: Assess
Contact: Win Trust and Empathy
Bait and Hook: Take and Use
Take and Use More
Fail and Bail and Smear

Catch Our Eye: Assess

The first thing that happens is that we notice that someone notices us. Maybe this happens online, on a dating app, at a party, or through a friend. Could be a work colleague, or classmate. There’s also the built-in romance of an old friend reaching out.

In this first moment of introduction, the user does an assessment; a rapid-fire intake of who we are as potential prey. It’s here and in this split second of sizing us up that the sociopath aka narcissist feels out how to get a foot stuck into the door of our life.

If we happen to have unresolved trauma from other similar life invasions, they’re delighted because they know we’re still spun out. They smell that we don’t understand what happened. – Well, all of that is changing here and now.

Have a listen: Narcissistic Abuse Unwound

Contact: Win Trust and Empathy

As normal people, when we meet a new person, we want to be pleasant and leave it at that. Friendships and romance with normal people go at an easy pace and blossom naturally with mutual interest and effort on both sides.

We each become a woven fabrication of a version of a story for their use in the future about their past.

From this devious parasitic predator’s side, they know something that we do not. They know that they desire to get into our lives to take and use as much as they can before they exit. They know that exiting does not mean they won’t want to come back for more.

They must work quickly to get in, to hook us hard so that they can make use of us, and then to get out before we see or know too much that could tear their house-of-cards life apart.

True Love Scam: Contact Required

The reality is, they’ve been talking trash about you to someone or several someones since the day you met. Remember the things they told you about others?

During initial contact and over the next few weeks the predator pays close attention to us. This can be called the love-bombing phase. It can be thought of as the grooming phase as well.

They seem laser-locked in genuine interest in us and we find them fascinating. We’re enamored. We feel we’ve met the most incredible human on the planet. We’d never imagined that this kind of person could exist.

True Love Scam: The “Courtship” Dance

Throughout these early days, they’ve told us quite a bit about themselves. It will more than likely include:

Compliment us
Talk of their many accomplishments or plans
A story of something going wrong because of someone else
More talk about the great things they’ve done
Their dream of an amazing future that we fit so well
A sob story of being victimized or cheated
Talking semi-badly to very badly about an ex
Murmurings of childhood abuse

The First Stage of a Love Scam

The first sign that we’re headed for a nightmare is found within our emotional reaction to them. The thing is, as normal humans, we don’t realize this is happening… Or that what is happening inside us signals this. When we encounter one of these creatures and we “like” something – anything – about them, we’re hooked. We enter into a spellbound altered state. There’s a sense of being elevated into another dimension. We’re excited, almost in a cliched state of breathlessness.

On the hot air of their rather banal or odd compliments float us into another realm. Compliments from a predator range from the quite generic, you’re hot. Odd such as, yah, this will work. Or can be “profound” such as I feel like I’ve known you forever.

We’re Tossed Into an Altered State

As we all know on an intellectual level, no one lasts long if they’re breathless. In this alternate universe we’ve immediately been catapulted into, we believe every word they say even though a lot of what they say doesn’t make perfect sense. Our mind busily makes sense of what doesn’t make sense. – This is normal when we meet a predator.

And normal humans need things to make sense. It’s natural to make sense out of things that don’t make sense. This natural human quality is – as are all our natural human qualities – bent to the sociopath’s purpose without any effort on their part, and without our conscious awareness of it or control over it.

This is the effect of the sociopath, it’s what we call coercive control. – The realities of coercive control are invisible and subtle. Coercive control isn’t initiated at that obvious threat, if you don’t do such-and-such, I’ll break your arm, nor at, if you do such-and-such, I’ll put those naked photos of you online. However, those threats might come later.

Bait and Hook: Take and Use

To the sociopath (aka the “narcissist”), we’re an animated object, a natural resource to serve their purpose – or not. Their desire – their need – is to first hook us into action with hints of what they need and want.

They continue the promises, and the swings from being either nice or mean. These different tactics are made in hopes that some emotion or other of ours will be tapped and that we’ll give up what they want in response to our own emotions.

As we’ve all experienced, but maybe didn’t put together consciously… The way they get what they want is surprisingly simple: they drop the bait. Bait is embedded within every little casual remark they say. It’s rare that a sociopathic user directly asks for something but instead leaves dangling hints in trailing phrases.

Their baiting intention is most easily seen when they say things like, I’ve always wanted a Mercedes… Or, we’d make beautiful babies… Or, my roommate owes rent, and I need to move out… Or, we can be married and live in different places… – Yes, that last one was said directly to me while standing in the kitchen one day with the nutter who was at that time my legal husband. – The pathological user is hoping we pick up the bait and fulfill what they’re fishing for.

It Takes Us Unawares And By Surprise

The bizarre hypnotic and stunning effect that comes along with the “narcissist”, the sociopathic user means that very often we do just what they’re hinting at. They aren’t displaying genius in this. We respond as we do in response to an invisible, powerful element they possess. They come out of the box with an inborn quality that results in what can be called coercive control.

It’s that thing about them that we might think of or others refer to as “charm”. – Though not all of us see the sociopath in front of us as charming. Sometimes they kind of gross us out. But if they can keep the connection up, at about a two-week-in point, it’s possible we flip and suddenly “like” them. And there we are… Hooked. It has the same result either way.

You can probably still recall the feeling of compulsion to do things for them, to give them things, and to make sure things are taken care of for them. This is the natural human response to the effect of a sociopathic user.

Sociopathic Users Believe Our Things are Theirs

The other way they take and use couldn’t be more simplistic. They take it – whatever they want. Be it extra room in the closet, the whole closet, our credit cards, cash, cars, and even our friends can become their prey.

These people who make use of others as a way of life take as easily as we breathe. They lie about who they are and what they intend. This is how they live. There’s no such thing as “boundaries” on what they will or will not do. We may not see this for a long time.

The thing is, we as regular people look at the world through a lens of “good” and aren’t expecting or even aware that people who live by using other people exist. That’s okay – and that’s about to change.

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Take and Use More

True love scams can go on for quite some time or can be a short yet soul-ripping tumble. I give guided recovery and restoration sessions with clients who’ve been in it for their entire lives, with parents who are sociopaths, from 30-year marriages to only months, to a span of entrapment of just a few months. Or maybe all three.

In all that time what they never stop wanting is more. More money, more sex – or no sex – more stuff, more freedom to go about their day and night in any way they wish.

Fail and Bail and Smear

This last bit is a trio of head-shaking, gut-wrenching poop. It’s possible you’ve heard of people referring to the end of the true love scam as the time when the narcissist aka sociopath “devalues” and “discards” us.

There’s a specific way we shine the light on these surreal rides in coo-coo land to see the truth and resolve loss, be safe, heal, restore our lives, and become user proof forever.

Yes, you feel devalued and discarded, but this is not what’s happening. Our emotions about what they do – no matter how strong our emotions are, do not accurately reflect the pathological user’s intention, motivation, purpose, or goal.

Our emotional reactions to what they do, do not explain the purpose of their actions. Unfortunately, humans tend to sort through the meanings of other’s words and actions through the lens of our emotions to understand or explain what they have said or done. I’m here to say – sorry – so, sorry – but using our lens of normal will not bring an understanding of what they mean or what has happened.

See Through the Eyes of the “Doer”

Keeping up the optometric analogy, our lens needs to be re-ground in the, if you will, prescription of the “sociopathic mind” to see what is going on. And why. And how. – In truth, this disintegrating madness of what we thought was a relationship, spanning the closing months or weeks of the end – and into the aftermath – reveals the sociopaths for what they are in a shockingly stark silhouette against the backdrop of normal as they fail and bail.

The thing is: things aren’t going so well for them. The days of easeful and plentiful taking and using are failing… So, they bail. Just as all they do. Many, many times in a lifetime. It’s a basic instinct on their part rather than the work of a mastermind. The scam fails, and they bail.

This isn’t readily seen by us from our normal way of thinking; our not seeing this is what they count on.

Smearing is The “Narcissist’s”, The Sociopath’s Self Protection

“Smear campaign” is a term we as a cultural social group of humans have collectively coined to describe the campaign taken up by the pathological user to convince others that they’re normal and amazing and that we were the problem and in fact, that we’re

This is unavoidable. Every sociopath (aka “narcissist”) does this. They do it, in the same way, every time. The reality is, they’ve been talking trash about you to someone – or to several someones – since the day you met. Remember the things they told you about others? – We each become a woven fabrication of a version of a story for their use in the future about their past.

Seeing This For What It Is

True love scam follows a specific cycle or phases whether the narcissistic hijacking goes on for three days or thirty years. It’s horrific to extract ourselves from. – In other words, what you’re feeling is normal. The doubt, the sadness the confusion are all a normal and inevitable part of this. Feeling these things doesn’t signal that something is wrong with you, it’s a sign and symptom that means everything is “right” with you, your mind and your body. Healing is needed, but there is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with you.

When it started, what we didn’t know is that this person hooked us. With any predator the early attention is overwhelming, and their enthusiasm is contagious. Their actual intention in our lives is not seen… It’s impossible to see because this narcissistic abuse or more accurately, this invisible, odorless, intangible effect that puts us under coercive control is something we didn’t know existed.

The basis of this is that these are crimes rather than relationships. This isn’t readily accepted when we still feel like we love them or had good times together. This is hard to see when we think that they are the way they are because of something as off the mark as a “tough childhood”.

Seek Answers That Fit

If you experienced the five stages of a true love scam, consider yourself as targeted and ensnared by a pathological user, a predator, a sociopath, or a “narcissist” if that’s the term you’ve discovered. The thing is, an actual diagnosis of them isn’t needed.

There’s a specific way we shine the light on these surreal rides in coo-coo land to see the truth and resolve loss, be safe, heal, restore our lives, and become user-proof forever. I invite you to seek answers. Answers that fit in place, and resolve that burning question or that piece of the puzzle.

Our experience reveals what we’re facing. Delving into what our experience truly was – peeking into the reality rather than basing it on our emotions, impressions, and assumptions about it all is key. This is the shift to finding answers.

Knowing Heals

When the answers you find are correct there’s no residual feeling that things have been your fault. There is absolutely nothing about you that causes the five stages of a true love scam.

This phenomenon of predator and prey occurs because these predators exist. Taking this in, developing a full understanding – a profound comprehension and acceptance of all of this is where we find our lives restored and begin to thrive.

You owe it to your gorgeous inside and out beautiful self.

Here’s to REAL True Love and Happiness!

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As a certified coach, upholding industry standards I strive to inform, educate, invite thought and dialogue, to co-plan, co-strategize, advise, consult, refer, recommend, train, teach, guide and coach people in guided recovery and discovery specific to these crimes, and from hell and broken in the aftermath to whole again, and more. You decide what winning is.