Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict

An Interpretive Model of Persistent Fixation Following Relationship Scam Victimization

Principal Category: SCARS Institute Research

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, Polymath, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

Abstract

Relationship scams, in which an offender constructs a wholly fabricated identity in order to cultivate an intimate bond and exploit it, produce a psychological aftermath that is frequently misunderstood. A recurring and distressing feature of that aftermath is persistent fixation on the offender after the deception has been exposed and contact has ended. Drawing on a longitudinal, theory-generating qualitative study conducted over twelve years within the support and recovery programs of the SCARS Institute, this paper develops an interpretive construct, termed Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict, to account for that fixation. Working from a de-identified and aggregated corpus of formal interviews and naturalistic observation, and using a grounded-theory-informed thematic analysis, the study identifies a core pattern in which attachment to the believed identity and moral revulsion toward the offender remain simultaneously active rather than resolving in sequence. The resulting approach-avoidance tension is expressed as fixation, and hatred, rather than signaling detachment, can operate as the final mechanism through which the offender remains psychologically central. The construct integrates attachment theory, ambiguous loss, cognitive dissonance, betrayal trauma, and evaluative ambivalence into a single account, and is extended to the collective level to interpret the emergence of anti-scammer hate communities as a social manifestation of the same unresolved conflict. Recovery is reframed not as the replacement of affection with anger but as the reduction of the offender’s psychological centrality. Implications for clinical practice and victim-support programming are discussed.

Keywords

Relationship Scam; Romance Fraud; Attachment; Ambiguous Loss; Cognitive Dissonance; Betrayal Trauma; Ambivalence; Approach-Avoidance; Qualitative Research; Victim Recovery

Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict: An Interpretive Model of Persistent Fixation Following Relationship Scam Victimization

1. Introduction

Relationship scams, often described as romance scams or online dating fraud, are a form of interpersonally mediated fraud in which an offender assumes a fabricated identity, cultivates an intimate or trusting relationship over an extended period, and then exploits that relationship for financial or other gain (Whitty & Buchanan, 2012; Whitty, 2013). Unlike many property crimes, this offense inflicts two distinct injuries at once: the loss of money or other resources, and the loss of a relationship that the victim experienced as genuine and often central to daily life (Buchanan & Whitty, 2014). The psychological consequences are correspondingly severe and frequently prolonged.

Among the most confusing features of the aftermath, both for those who experience it and for those who support them, is the persistence of fixation on the offender after the scam has ended. Contact may have ceased, the deception may be fully documented, and the individual may understand at an intellectual level that the person they believed they loved never existed as represented. Yet the offender can continue to occupy an extraordinary amount of psychological space. Affected individuals commonly report recurrent intrusive thoughts about the offender, repeated searching for information, revisiting of messages and photographs, imagined future conversations, and questions that never seem to yield emotional resolution.

Observed from the outside, this pattern is readily labeled as obsession, denial, unresolved romantic attachment, or an unwillingness to move forward. Each label captures part of the experience, but each also risks obscuring a deeper structure. The present paper argues that, for a substantial subset of affected individuals, the fixation reflects an unresolved conflict between two powerful and simultaneously active emotional orientations: an enduring attachment to the believed identity, and an intense revulsion toward the offender who fabricated and exploited it.

Several established literatures bear on this phenomenon, yet none has been brought together to explain it directly. Attachment theory holds that affectional bonds form through repeated interaction, proximity-seeking, and the operation of internal working models, and that such bonds do not dissolve immediately upon separation or even upon the discovery of unworthiness in the attachment figure (Bowlby, 1980). Work on grief and continuing bonds similarly establishes that emotional ties to a lost figure persist and are reorganized rather than severed (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996). The concept of ambiguous loss, in which a figure is simultaneously present and absent and the loss resists closure, is particularly apposite, because in a relationship scam the loved figure both mattered profoundly and never existed in the form understood (Boss, 1999).

At the same time, discovery activates powerful cognitive and moral responses. The theory of cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort that arises when a person holds incompatible cognitions, and the motivated effort to reconcile them (Festinger, 1957). Betrayal trauma theory addresses the specific injury inflicted when harm is perpetrated by a trusted and depended-upon other, and the distinctive cognitive distortions that can follow (Freyd, 1996). Research on traumatic bonding demonstrates that strong attachments can form and persist toward a harmful figure under conditions of power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement (Dutton & Painter, 1981). Literatures on evaluative ambivalence show that positive and negative evaluations of the same object can be co-active rather than mutually canceling (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994), and models of approach-avoidance conflict describe the behavioral paralysis that results when a single object simultaneously attracts and repels (Miller, 1944). Finally, work on rumination (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008) and on post-traumatic anger and revenge (Herman, 1992) illuminates how repetitive thought and hostility can maintain rather than resolve distress.

What is missing is an integrative account that treats the simultaneous activation of attachment and revulsion as the organizing feature of post-scam fixation, rather than reducing it to any single mechanism. The aim of this study is to develop such an account from sustained qualitative engagement with affected individuals, to name the resulting construct, and to examine its explanatory reach, including its extension from an individual process to a collective social phenomenon.

2. Methods

2.1 Design and paradigm

The study is a longitudinal, theory-generating qualitative inquiry conducted within an interpretivist, constructivist paradigm. Its purpose was not to test a predefined hypothesis but to develop an explanatory account of a phenomenon as it is lived and reported by those who experience it. Because the analysis culminates in a named conceptual model, the design is best described as grounded-theory-informed, drawing on the constant-comparative logic of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Charmaz, 2006) together with the coding and theme-development procedures of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The output is a theoretical construct grounded in participant accounts rather than a statistical estimate.

2.2 Setting

Data were gathered in a naturalistic, practice-based setting rather than in a laboratory or a time-limited protocol. The research environment was the ongoing support and recovery groups, communities, and programs of the SCARS Institute, which provided sustained access to a specialized and otherwise difficult-to-reach population over an extended period. This community-embedded design allowed the phenomenon to be observed in the context in which it actually unfolds, across the natural course of recovery rather than at a single point in time.

2.3 Participants and sampling

Participants were individuals who had experienced relationship scam victimization and who voluntarily engaged with the Institute’s programs over a twelve-year period. Sampling was purposive with respect to the phenomenon of interest, in that all participants had direct lived experience of the process under study, and self-selecting, a form of convenience sampling, with respect to recruitment, in that the sample comprised those who chose to seek support. The extended duration allowed the analysis to draw on a large and continually renewed body of accounts, which supported the accumulation and cross-checking of patterns across many independent cases.

2.4 Researcher positioning

The research was conducted by practitioners embedded within the support setting, an approach commonly described as practitioner-researcher or insider inquiry. This positioning offers substantial advantages, including deep contextual knowledge, established rapport, and access to candid disclosure that external investigators rarely obtain. It also carries a recognized obligation toward reflexivity, understood here as the deliberate and ongoing examination of how the researchers’ proximity to the population and to the subject matter may shape interpretation. That obligation was addressed through sustained comparison of emerging interpretations against the full body of accounts rather than against selected cases.

2.5 Data collection

Data were collected through two complementary streams over a period of prolonged engagement. The formal stream consisted of semi-structured interviews. The informal stream consisted of unstructured conversation and sustained participant observation within the support communities, in which accounts emerged spontaneously in the course of peer interaction. The combination of directed interviewing and naturalistic observation constitutes a form of methodological triangulation, allowing patterns identified through one mode to be corroborated against another.

2.6 Data management and ethical considerations

All data were de-identified prior to analysis, with personally identifying information removed so that individuals could not be re-identified, and findings were derived from the aggregated, anonymized corpus rather than from any individual case. This procedure preserved confidentiality while retaining the collective patterns of interest. Research involving a population recovering from exploitation carries heightened ethical responsibilities, including voluntary participation, the avoidance of further harm, and careful management of the dual practitioner-researcher relationship. Consistent with those responsibilities, no identifying accounts are reproduced, and the findings are presented at the level of recurring pattern rather than personal narrative.

2.7 Analytic approach

Analysis proceeded inductively. Rather than imposing a prior framework, the researchers allowed categories to emerge from the accounts and refined them through constant comparison, in which each new account was tested against previously identified patterns and against the developing conceptual categories. Successive accounts were examined until additional data yielded little new conceptual information, consistent with the principle of thematic, or theoretical, saturation. Coding moved from initial descriptive observations toward higher-order themes and finally toward an integrative core category capable of accounting for the relationships among those themes.

2.8 Trustworthiness

In place of the reliability and validity criteria of quantitative research, the study is evaluated against established trustworthiness criteria for qualitative inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Credibility was supported by prolonged engagement, by triangulation across the two data streams, and by the continual comparison of interpretations against a large body of accounts. Transferability is supported through contextualized description of the phenomenon and the setting. Dependability and confirmability rest on the derivation of the construct from the aggregated data rather than from preconceived categories.

3. Findings

Analysis identified a single organizing conflict expressed through a set of related themes. The themes are presented below and are drawn together in the core category described in Section 3.8.

3.1 Two simultaneously active emotional realities

A relationship scam does not present the affected individual with a partner who merely behaved badly. It presents the discovery that the entire identity around which the relationship was organized was fabricated: the name, the images, the biography, the crises, and the shared future may all have functioned as instruments of manipulation. The emotional experience of the relationship, however, was not fabricated. Over months or years, the individual communicated repeatedly with a figure they believed to be real, developed daily routines around that contact, anticipated it, was reassured by it, and incorporated it into ordinary life. The attachment system responded to those experiences as though a meaningful relationship existed, because from the individual’s standpoint one did.

Discovery revises the interpretation of those experiences but does not instantly erase the emotional learning that accrued while the relationship was believed genuine. Accounts therefore commonly reflected a state in which factual knowledge and emotional attachment changed at different speeds: the individual could know that the identity was fraudulent while continuing to miss the figure that identity represented. Discovery simultaneously activated defensive and moral responses, including anger at the deception, disgust at the manipulation, and a sense of violation at the deliberate use of trust and affection as tools. The same internal representation that had signaled comfort and possibility came to signal danger and betrayal. The two orientations were repeatedly observed to be co-active rather than sequential.

3.2 Dual psychological representations: the believed identity and the offender

The conflict becomes tractable when the believed identity and the actual offender are understood as two distinct psychological representations. The first is the figure the individual experienced during the relationship: attentive, affectionate, and committed, connected in memory to intimate conversation, comfort, and hope. This representation became bound to attachment because the individual responded to it as a real person. The second representation emerges only through discovery: the offender who fabricated the identity, exploited trust, manufactured crises, and maintained the deception deliberately. The offender may differ from the believed figure not only in personality but in identity, history, and intention.

Recovery required integrating these two representations into one coherent understanding, a task that relationship scams render unusually difficult. In an ordinary relationship, an individual may struggle to reconcile a partner’s admirable qualities with harmful behavior. Here, the loved figure was itself substantially fictional, so the task is not only to understand why a loved person caused harm, but to understand how a figure experienced as psychologically real could, in the sense understood, never have existed.

3.3 Fixation as attempted reconciliation of contradiction

Because the mind seeks coherence, contradictory experience is characteristically revisited in an effort to resolve it. In relationship scams this process was observed to become especially persistent, since the contradictions implicate identity, attachment, trust, memory, and moral judgment at once. Affected individuals repeatedly asked whether anything had been real, whether the offender had ever cared, and whether some authentic relationship might have existed within the deception, and they searched images, accounts, and records because each fragment appeared capable of resolving the larger question. A point was frequently reached at which the activity was no longer primarily an investigation of the crime but an attempt to resolve an emotional contradiction through factual information. Because the conflict is not wholly informational, additional information could not fully resolve it.

3.4 Simultaneous approach and avoidance

The conflict produced a characteristic approach-avoidance pattern. Attachment drew the individual toward the offender, while self-protection pushed the individual away. Accounts described wanting the offender to make contact while fearing it, wishing for acknowledgment that the relationship had mattered while recognizing that renewed communication would be unsafe, and wanting to know the offender’s real identity while recognizing that such knowledge could not restore the believed figure. Neither direction produced relief: approach threatened safety and could reactivate manipulation, while moving away could feel like surrendering the attachment, the imagined future, or the possibility of answers. The individual therefore remained psychologically suspended, and the fixation functioned as the visible expression of that stalemate.

3.5 Hatred as a preserved connection

A particularly consequential finding is that hatred did not necessarily indicate that attachment had ended. Anger after victimization can be adaptive, supporting the recognition of injustice, the restoration of boundaries, and the rejection of self-blame. The difficulty arose when hostility became the primary means through which the offender remained psychologically central. In such cases the romantic relationship ended while an adversarial relationship continued internally: in place of imagined reunion, the individual imagined exposure, punishment, or confrontation, and in place of awaited affection, awaited news of the offender’s downfall. The emotional content had reversed, but the offender still occupied the center of attention. This finding qualifies a common assumption that movement from love to hatred constitutes detachment; hatred can instead constitute the final remaining connection.

3.6 Moral revulsion and shame regarding residual attachment

Because relationship scams involve deliberate exploitation, the coexistence of affection and disgust was frequently accompanied by shame. Individuals who recognized that the offender had knowingly manipulated their trust often found their own residual affection humiliating and interpreted it as weakness or as evidence that they had failed to understand the crime. This interpretation tended to deepen the fixation, as the individual began to scrutinize not only the offender but their own emotional responses. Analytically, however, residual attachment reflects the mechanisms by which attachment forms, repeated interaction, perceived intimacy, shared routine, anticipation, and reassurance, all of which can operate even when the other party is deceptive. Residual attachment therefore does not demonstrate that the offender was genuine; it demonstrates that the individual’s emotional participation was genuine. This distinction was observed to reduce shame when it was understood.

3.7 The unanswerable question of authenticity

Many accounts converged on a single question: whether anything in the relationship had been real. This apparently simple question contained several distinct questions concerning the identity, the narrative, the expressed affection, and the offender’s inner experience, some of which cannot be answered with certainty. The search for evidence that the offender had cared was especially powerful because it appeared to offer a way to rescue part of the relationship from total fraud. Yet even evidence of genuine affection would not have resolved the central problem; it would have generated a further contradiction, since authentic feeling would sit uneasily beside continued exploitation. Recovery was observed to stabilize when the individual no longer required the offender’s feelings to validate their own experience, recognizing that their own love, hope, attachment, and grief were real regardless of what the offender felt.

3.8 Core category: Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict

The themes above are unified by a single core category, here termed Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict. The construct describes an internal struggle in which the individual remains psychologically drawn toward the believed identity while simultaneously being pushed away by knowledge of the deception and harm, with the two orientations remaining co-active rather than resolving in sequence. Fixation, whether expressed through longing, investigation, rumination, or hostility, is the observable manifestation of this unresolved conflict. The construct accounts for the persistence of attachment after discovery, the approach-avoidance stalemate, the capacity of hatred to preserve rather than sever connection, and the limited efficacy of purely factual information in achieving resolution.

4. Discussion

4.1 Beyond cognitive dissonance: an integrative account

Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict includes cognitive dissonance but is not reducible to it. The individual does hold incompatible cognitions, believing both that the figure loved them and that the offender exploited them, and that the relationship was meaningful and that it was fraudulent (Festinger, 1957). Yet the conflict is simultaneously affective, relational, moral, and physiological. Attachment remains active in the sense described by attachment theory, in which bonds persist beyond separation and beyond the discovery of unworthiness (Bowlby, 1980). The loss carries the structure of ambiguous loss, in which the figure is at once psychologically present and factually absent and closure is resisted (Boss, 1999), and it engages the processes of continuing bonds rather than clean severance (Klass et al., 1996). The injury is intensified by its interpersonal source, consistent with betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996), and the persistence of attachment toward a harmful figure is consonant with traumatic bonding (Dutton & Painter, 1981). The simultaneity of positive and negative orientations is well described by models in which positive and negative evaluations are separable and can be co-active (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994), and the resulting behavioral suspension is the signature of approach-avoidance conflict (Miller, 1944). This integration explains why the presentation of evidence, while capable of establishing facts and defeating denial, does not by itself reorganize attachment: the conflict is not exhausted by its informational component.

4.2 Implications for recovery

Two implications for recovery follow directly. First, recovery does not require emotional purity. A common and burdensome assumption holds that recovery demands the elimination of every positive feeling toward the offender and its replacement with unbroken anger. This assumption sets the individual against their own memories and converts residual tenderness into a source of shame. The present construct suggests instead that affection, grief, anger, and revulsion arise from different facets of the same experience and can coexist without dictating conduct; attachment can persist temporarily without licensing renewed contact, and anger can serve its protective function without becoming permanent.

Second, and correspondingly, recovery is more accurately understood as the reduction of the offender’s psychological centrality than as the substitution of one emotion for another. Framing letting go as forgetting, forgiving, or ceasing to think about the offender sets an unrealistic standard that can itself intensify distress. A more sustainable understanding is that the offender gradually ceases to occupy the center of the individual’s psychological world, such that memories may remain without organizing daily life, questions may remain unanswered without demanding continuous investigation, and anger may arise without requiring extended rehearsal. On this account the terminal movement of recovery is not from love to hatred but from psychological occupation to psychological freedom.

4.3 Collective elaboration: anti-scammer hate communities

The construct extends from the individual to the collective and, in doing so, offers an interpretation of certain online communities that move beyond scam awareness, victim support, fraud reporting, and legitimate advocacy to organize primarily around hostility toward offenders. The distinction is consequential. Prevention and advocacy organizations educate the public, support victims, document criminal methods, and press for enforcement without organizing their identity around hatred. A hate-centered community differs in that its emotional center becomes contempt, sustained through repeated exposure to offender-focused material, fantasies of punishment, and, in some cases, an increasingly generalized hostility toward the national, ethnic, or socioeconomic populations with which scam operations are associated.

For some individuals, participation in such communities is initially experienced as validating, offering a movement from confusion to certainty and from a residual affection that now feels humiliating to a hatred that feels morally safer and socially sanctioned. This transition can appear to represent recovery, because its emotional direction has reversed. Yet the psychological centrality of the offender may remain largely unchanged. Before discovery, the offender occupied attention through affection, anticipation, and concern; afterward, a hate-centered environment can allow the offender to continue occupying attention through investigation, condemnation, and imagined justice. The organizing subject remains the offender even as the emotional content changes.

Viewed through the present construct, hatred can thus provide a socially acceptable means of maintaining engagement with a figure the individual knows they must reject. It can be less painful to declare the offender contemptible than to acknowledge residual longing, and easier to join others demanding punishment than to grieve the relationship and its imagined future. Anger offers clarity where attachment produces ambiguity, and the group reinforces that solution: when a community rewards outrage, each new offender-focused account becomes an occasion to reactivate the emotional relationship, and disengagement becomes difficult because continued activation is treated as participation. A further hazard attends the transition from individual to collective hostility. Trauma encourages categorization around perceived danger, and group environments can intensify such categories by supplying confirming examples while discouraging nuance (Allport, 1954; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Hostility toward a specific offender can thereby broaden toward offenders in general, toward those who resemble them, and ultimately toward whole populations, so that a legitimate moral response to exploitation hardens into generalized prejudice.

None of this implies that anger, advocacy, investigation, or demands for accountability are inherently unhealthy; each can be a constructive response to victimization. The decisive question concerns the function the activity comes to serve. Where anti-scam activity helps the individual understand what happened, protect others, and then return attention to their own life, it supports recovery. Where it requires repeated emotional activation, rewards contempt, intensifies generalized hostility, or becomes constitutive of personal identity, it can preserve the very psychological relationship that recovery must ultimately diminish. In this sense, some anti-scammer hate communities can be interpreted as a collective manifestation of the same unresolved conflict observed at the individual level: the affectionate pole is suppressed as unacceptable while the revulsion pole is amplified and socially legitimized, so that an apparently complete rejection of the offender may nonetheless sustain an intense psychological relationship with the offender. True disengagement is characterized differently, by the capacity to condemn the crime, support accountability, and retain moral judgment without requiring the offender to remain emotionally central.

4.4 Clinical and programmatic implications

The construct carries practical implications for those who support affected individuals. Interventions that seek to resolve fixation solely by supplying facts are likely to be partially effective at best, since factual certainty does not reorganize attachment. Normalizing the coexistence of affection and revulsion, and explicitly distinguishing the genuineness of the individual’s emotional participation from the genuineness of the offender, may reduce the shame that deepens fixation. Reframing recovery around the reduction of psychological centrality, rather than around emotional replacement or the attainment of complete answers, offers a more attainable and less self-punishing objective. At the programmatic level, the analysis of hate-centered communities suggests that support environments should be structured to channel legitimate anger toward closure and re-engagement with the individual’s own life, rather than toward sustained activation that inadvertently maintains the offender’s centrality.

5. Limitations

As a qualitative, single-organization study, this work is intended to generate conceptual understanding rather than statistically generalizable estimates. The sample was self-selecting and comprised individuals who chose to seek support, which may differ systematically from those who do not. The accounts were retrospective and self-reported, and the setting was singular. The practitioner-researcher positioning, while affording depth of access, introduces the potential for interpretive bias, addressed here through sustained comparison against the full corpus but not eliminated. Consistent with the aims of interpretivist inquiry, the appropriate form of generalization is analytic and theoretical, concerning the transferability of the construct to comparable cases and settings, rather than statistical generalization to a defined population. Further research employing independent samples, prospective designs, and mixed methods would be valuable in testing the construct’s boundaries and its applicability across cultural and demographic contexts.

6. Conclusion

Post-Scam Attachment-Revulsion Conflict offers an integrative account of why some individuals remain fixated on offenders after a relationship scam has ended. The fixation need not indicate a refusal of reality or a covert wish to restore the relationship. It can instead reflect a mind attempting to reconcile enduring attachment to a believed identity with anger, disgust, and rejection of the person who fabricated and exploited that identity. The individual may have loved what they believed was real while coming to understand that the relationship was built upon deception, may hate the offender without denying that attachment existed, and may grieve the believed figure while rejecting further contact with the person who caused harm. Recovery becomes possible when these realities are no longer required to compete for dominance, and it is completed not by transforming love into hatred but by allowing neither to keep the individual psychologically bound to the offender. The terminal aim is not emotional erasure but psychological freedom, and the same movement, from psychological occupation to psychological freedom, applies whether the conflict is expressed privately as individual fixation or collectively as organized hostility.

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