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Feelings, Facts, and the Space to Decide

A Twelve-Lesson Recovery Skills Course for Scam Survivors

Course Introduction

After a scam, you face decisions while also carrying grief, anger, fear, longing, or shame. You sometimes distrust your judgment, search for reassurance, or feel pressure to settle a question immediately. This course gives you a practical process for understanding your experience and choosing your next step.

You will practice separating three things: what you feel, what the available evidence establishes, and what you believe the situation means. You will then create enough space to examine a request before acting. Your feelings deserve attention, and your decisions deserve information.

Being deceived does not make you responsible for the criminal’s conduct. Learning a decision skill now does not mean that knowing it earlier would have prevented the crime. Your purpose is to strengthen your choices in the present.

This is an educational course, not psychotherapy or a diagnostic test. Its exercises draw on general thinking skills and consumer protection principles; the complete course has not undergone evaluation as a treatment for scam-related trauma.

How to Use the Course

Each lesson takes about 15 minutes: four minutes for learning and the worked example, seven minutes for practice, and four minutes for the review question and your next step. Complete one lesson at a time and leave space between lessons to practice. There is no requirement to complete the course in one sitting or on consecutive days.

Use fictional examples first. Choose low-stakes personal situations only when you feel ready, and stop an exercise that becomes overwhelming. You do not need to revisit messages from the criminal, contact anyone involved in the scam, or disclose private details.

Record your answers in the worksheet inside each lesson. Your answers save to your account, and only you see them. Plain, unfinished sentences are enough. The process you will build is simple: notice the feeling, describe the situation, separate claims from evidence, identify the interpretation, check urgency, and choose a protective next step.

Sources

This original educational course adapts general distinctions between thoughts and feelings alongside established consumer protection advice. The sources support those underlying principles, not the effectiveness of this complete course as a clinical treatment.

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Strategies: https://www.mirecc.va.gov/visn5/EBT/CBT-D/Cognitive_Behavioral_Therapy_Strategies.pdf
• Federal Trade Commission, How To Avoid a Scam: https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-avoid-scam
• Federal Trade Commission, What To Do if You Were Scammed: https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-you-were-scammed

Course Syllabus and Lessons

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