I got scammed. Last month a professional scammer was calling around our town posing as the utility company’s ”Interruption of Services” crew. He said that I had failed to pay my business’ utility bills for a few months, and therefore a crew was on their way to turn off our power. The only way I could stop this interruption of service was to go to their office and pay cash within 30 minutes before the disconnection crew arrived at my facility.
I know... I know... just recounting and writing this out I can see how foolish I was to fall for this. 😣 Yes, in hindsight there were several clues this was a scam! But, that’s not the point I want to look at here. Just stay with me...
Scammers are brilliant in that they are playing a trigger game. They call down their phone list using the same scam story, which will be a trigger for some people, like this one was for me. Then once they have you triggered it’s hard to think clearly through guilt, self blame and panic, or whatever delightful cocktail of emotions is in your own personal ego shame kit.
Think about my poor ego that day...they were going to cut off my power ASAP. In the middle of the work day. In the middle of our operations. We had staff and students attending classes then and there! My ego could NOT let this happen!! Oh shit let me think...maybe I did fail to pay the bills?! I not sure now, because I’m now so freaked out and desperate to avoid looking foolish with the power going off during operations that I do something REALLY foolish and I go and pay as they instructed. 😐🤯
After I pay and avoid the “impending catastrophe” I share what happened with my friend and work associate. She immediately recognizes this as a scam and starts pointing out the signs to me. What’s really weird to me, in hindsight, is that I remember resisting her reasoning at first. I was in disbelief that I could fall for a scam. My ego fancies herself savvy and street smart. No way what friend was saying could be true! I unconsciously resisted her facts at first because what she was pointing out, that none of this stress had been real and that I had been scammed, was at that moment even MORE SHOCKING AND PAINFUL to my ego than the initial threat had been of getting the lights turned off during business hours.
What I had been through that morning had been really stressful for me, but at least it felt solid and real. We had a problem (impending interruption of service) and I solved it (paid that late bill). But what my friend was telling me left me feeling like my life rug had been just pulled out from under me, I was free falling, there was no up or down, as I was unsure momentarily of reality. I had been scammed and there was no way to fix this. The crisis hadn’t been real. I’d wasted my morning. The money was gone. After a few minutes this weird, free falling, nauseating feeling subsided, but the point is this: it was so incredibly uncomfortable letting go of my false story at first and reacclimating my reality THAT I INITIALLY HELD ON TO WHAT WAS BEING PROVEN UNTRUE.
Okay, so stay with me because we are getting to the best part here. After my newly clarified reality sank in for 10-15 minutes, that this had all been a scam, the scammers called me back. 😳 They said, “It seems there has been a mistake and you didn’t pay enough....” Apparently this works on some people, and they can retrigger the panic and get more money out of people? But this time I could see right through their flimsy story. I told them they were rude, and to go to hell, and to remove me from their calling list. You see a shift had occurred thanks to my friend giving me a reality check. The same exact scam was run on me twice, but my response was vastly different because I saw through the story the second time around.
This scam experience was a metaphor for life. Innocuous little interactions happen constantly, and our unique little cocktail of emotions stored down in our ego shame box get triggered and interprets reality through our filtered lenses. Our internal shame box scammers come and whisper nasty untrue things to us all the damn time to see if we will fall for it and do the ego’s bidding from a place of panicked reaction. Shit like, “you don’t belong. You’re not good enough for (whatever....) they don’t like you.” Etc
How often do we get scammed by our internal stories from innocuous circumstances? How often do the old tender and bruised emotions that we keep hidden in our emotional shame box get triggered and take the wheel driving us into unreasonable reactions? How can we regularly check our reality to make sure we are seeing clearly rather than through a cloudy shame and self-doubt coated ego lense?
How do you check your reality? I have several practices that help me check my truth. One is I go for a jog outside or go to my yoga mat. Movement clears out cluttered thoughts so that I can then feel the truths my body is trying to tell me. Another process when I’m troubled is that I write it out. Just free rambling thoughts, written to share with no one but myself. Eventually this process almost always helps me suss out the truth. Finally, I share my struggles and my findings with someone I trust unconditionally. My Man is my guide and my ultimate reality checker.
