Bouncing Back from Feeling Betrayed By Ex

I have a story for you today! I was scammed. Once I figured it out and had processed what was going on, I thought, “Wow, this is what so many women feel like who are getting divorced.

” You don’t understand how you got into this situation. You feel as though the person you’re divorcing isn’t the one you married. And you feel betrayed—as if the wool was pulled over your eyes.”

Feeling Betrayed and Being Deceived Creates Trauma

During a divorce, many women talk about vows. You try to make sense of the situation. You ask: “How did I not see this coming?” You are embarrassed and feel taken advantage of.

Vibrational Match for Getting Scammed

In all honesty, I was a vibrational match for getting scammed. I didn’t understand this at the time, but I am much more aligned today than I was when it happened a few weeks ago. Let’s explore that…

Raising Vibration to Manage Anxiety and Heal Trauma

When we women heal in our life after divorce, when we rise and move our vibration to the next level, we attract more and more and more good stuff.

However, it takes a lot of intention, a lot of energy, and a lot of honesty with oneself for women to achieve thi

Being scammed is not a reflection of who I am as a woman. It’s a reflection of how ungrounded I was in a moment in my life.

It shows that I have a hard time managing anxiety during certain triggers and how it’s difficult for me to embody my belief system when I’m in a fight-or-flight state.

Vibrational Match for Divorce

When we’re constantly not feeling good, we attract shit that can be hard to wrap our minds around. If we women had a device where we could go around and measure our vibrations, it would be a mixed bag for all of us.

There are many things in life where your heart is open, and you are joyous, happy, and free. Then there are subjects and situations where your vibration drops to shit.

When we aren’t intentional about managing our vibration in those moments, we keep attracting negative things.

Feeling Out of Control

So, how was I scammed? Let’s rewind six weeks. I received a jury summons in the mail. The idea of jury duty excites me, and I think it would be so cool to sit on a jury. I love being with people and understanding how they think and what motivates them. However, what I don’t love about the prospect of jury duty is missing work because I’m self-employed. For me, jury duty invokes a scarcity narrative.

I called the office to try and get out of it. Surely they’ll understand this is my situation and I can’t do it? Nope. There is no exemption for being self-employed.

My normal belief system is that everything always works out for me, my higher power has things in hand, that I am blessed, I am cared for, and that everything is on purpose.

Well, that went out the window. I was anticipating something bad happening. The lovely woman on the phone offered me many dates to push back jury duty, which made me feel slightly better about it as I was more in control. I was grateful for her assistance, and I rescheduled it. I did all the paperwork, and I received my new jury date in the mail. I had it calendared, and I planned my work schedule around it happening on a Monday.

Good Girl Syndrome

Now, it’s the Friday before I’m heading out on vacation, and I get a voicemail from a fairly local phone number. It wasn’t anybody I had programmed into my phone. I check my voicemail, and it’s a law enforcement officer saying that there is a warrant for my arrest because I did not attend jury duty when I was scheduled. My heart starts racing. I’m angry, and I’m scared. My ‘good girl’ programming is activated. I’m a good girl, and now I feel like somebody thinks I’m a bad girl and I’m in trouble.

Somewhere in these moments, I had a fleeting thought that I should verify that this phone number was a law enforcement phone number, but I didn’t follow through because I was in a triggered state.

I called back, and a man answered the phone. He said, “Ma’am, I am simply trying to help you.” He had a perfect answer to every one of my questions: Why I couldn’t hang up the phone, why I couldn’t put him on mute, why I had to handle this right then and there, and ultimately, why I had to go buy a bunch of gift cards for the total of $1,500 to get my bond. If I didn’t do these things, I would be arrested and in jail for up to 72 hours. I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack.

Now you’re reading this story and thinking, “Dawn, you are an idiot.”

Just as my husband and I are ready to virtually turn over $1,500 worth of gift cards to this guy, we look at each other, and it clicks for us both at the same time. And so I never actually lost any money, so thank God for that!

Let’s look back at when I first got the jury summons.

I felt angry, entitled, and in scarcity mode. So rather than pausing to get grounded, to breathe, to trust that everything is going to work out the way it’s meant to, I blundered ahead from a triggered state.

A scammer is looking for someone who they can manipulate and take advantage of so that they can get what they want. I was a vibrational match for being scammed.

Becoming a Vibrational Match for Trauma

For many years, I had a lot of unprocessed childhood and divorce trauma. If you scanned my vibration on relationship skills, conflict resolution, and self-esteem, I was a match for a relationship breakdown.

Developing Relationship Skills

If you want to be in a loving, committed relationship, you have to figure out how to become a vibrational match for that.

I had to learn how to stay loving, kind and cool, and collected in an argument. I had to learn how to say, “I’m really sorry.” I had to learn when to let things go and when I needed to ask for help from a therapist. I had to learn so many things to have the healthy, functioning marriage I have today.

To develop these skills, it was vital to believe in myself, know my worth, and not feel insecure all the time.

Where are you on the scale of self-acceptance? Where are you on the scale of open-heartedness? Understanding this is a crucial part of your journey after divorce.

Bad Things Happen

Bad, unfortunate things happen to all of us because life is a series of learnings. We change, grow, learn, and we don’t stay the same.

We, women, have to make space for our humanity, and when painful things happen in our lives, it’s not because I was a bad person or because you were a bad person, or he was a bad person. It’s because that is the journey of life after divorce. Living, learning, growing, and figuring out how to have a fun, amazing experience and feel good about ourselves and each other.

Turning Pain Into Power

So back to me getting scammed. Now I have all these gift cards. I’m so annoyed and embarrassed. I feel like such an idiot. But I decided to take that pain and turn it into power.

We went to the store, and we bought a handful of household things, some art supplies for my kid, and gardening tools. And a beautiful thing happened. When we went on our family vacation, my daughter made little art things for all of our wait staff and our servers. She gifted people beautiful pieces of art with the art supplies I bought her on the gift cards.

Next thing, I just intuitively knew that I should give some of these away. I gave one to a person who works for our family, and they said, “Dawn, you have no idea. I don’t know how you knew, but you have no idea.” It happened again with my producer Joy. She founded a charity, and that charity needed donations.

Doing good with something that started as a negative vibration and making the absolute most out of it wasn’t just me finding acceptance about the situation but turning it into something to be grateful for.

I want you to see the steps I went through so you can take this pain and get your power back. Many of us got stuck in a post-divorce trauma phase for years. Stuck in scarcity, stuck in resentment, stuck in fear about the future, or feeling like good things just aren’t coming to them.

I want you to hear how once you realize what you’re a vibrational match for, you now have way more clarity to what you’re a vibrational match for.

Focus on the Positive

When we women focus on the things we’re negative about, we embody that low vibration, and it increases how much negative shit we’re attracting to us. When I feel myself dropping into a topic that I feel negative about, I often work to change the subject in my mind and body to go do something that feels better. It is my intention to transmute that negative into a positive.

Don’t call your girlfriend and talk over and over and over again about what an asshole your ex is. Don’t sit in your journal and write over and over again about all the ways that you’ve been hurt by infidelity. The victim mindset keeps you stuck.

Yes, we women have to process the depths of our grief, but in the day-to-day moments, we want to focus on the good stuff. We want to turn that pain into power. We want to make a gratitude list until it becomes second nature.

And you better be darn sure the next time I get a phone call from law enforcement, I’ll verify it. We want to be careful that we don’t let these experiences of getting scammed or hoodwinked ultimately poison us.

Moving Forward, Not Backwards

What you’re going through doesn’t feel fair.

But everything we experience in life, good, bad, and indifferent, is because we are a vibrational match for it. And I don’t know about you, but it feels much better for me to take these experiences and turn them into feelings of power, as well as acts of love toward myself and others.

Sending love!