You have just been screwed. You may be numb right now, it might feel like you’re tough and you are already over it, you are not.
The anesthetic from the adrenaline and the necessity of dealing with the immediate problems presented from this will fade and you will feel it, hard. You need to prepare yourself for that.
The first thing you should do, determine if you need a lawyer and/or a psychiatrist. Understand that at a neurochemical level you have probably lost your largest source of purpose and sense of community, roughly translating to dopamine and serotonin. You are not yourself right now, and you cannot trust your own judgment, however you likely need to make many decisions right now to defend yourself, get help.
The second thing you should do is write down and thoroughly document the whole story of what happened. This will be painful but you need to do it, your memory will fade faster than you think it will. It is vital you do this to assist professionals helping you and it will also help you process what happened in the future, making sure you don’t rewrite events in your mind.
Right now you need to follow the guidance of professionals and of close friends that are disconnected from this situation. You will want to lash out towards the people that did this to you and towards yourself, that’s why you need help: It will be very hard for you to see the difference between what’s rational and must be done vs. driven by your tortured sense of self. As much as possible, do not make decisions on your own. If you do drugs or drink, don’t do that now, it will make your behavior even more erratic and you will regret it.
Do both of those things, then you can begin to process what happened. Remember that you will recover, your goal is to get to a place where you no longer ruminate and when you do think about these memories, there is no pain associated with them.
Reality check, it is all gone, it is not coming back, and people you thought were your friends, perhaps even your closest friends, may not have actually been your friend at all. You don’t deserve this, but this is reality. The more you struggle against this reality, the more it will prevent you from achieving the peace of indifference towards this situation and these people which will allow you to move on and rebuild your life.
You will wonder if there’s any good in a world that witnesses you and your loved ones be robbed and psychologically tortured and just moves on.
Here’s the painful truth, the world does move on and you are going to see that happen. People that were nearby and witnessed pieces of what happened to you will find a way to rationalize what they saw in order to maintain a comforting subconscious notion that the world is fair. Still others will be incentivized to believe and cooperate with the ones that took advantage of you, and they will. It will hurt you to see this, but know that they’re not doing this to hurt you, they likely have limited information and are just trying to do the best they can for themselves.
Here’s the positive truth, you will move on too, and you should. There’s a sick comfort that comes from wallowing in what you thought was reality and what might have been. This is not useful to you. People you trusted may have taken your money, likely your reputation as well, but they cannot take your mind, you must choose to stop giving it to them. Let go and you will be able to grow into a new and better version of yourself, one that has learned from what happened and can have the scarce gift of empathy for someone that goes through something similar.
There were things about the life you had that excited you and that you loved. It might feel right now like those things are gone forever. They are not, allow yourself to let go of what happened, to be new, to have an open mind, and you can find those things again, the world is full of opportunity.
The saddest thing that could happen as a result of you being screwed is you letting it blight your own passion and sense of morality. The choice is yours to not let this happen, it will only happen if you hold onto what happened and continue to reopen the wound.
You must release the power this has over you and allow your spark to come back to life.
When the first mind breaks, the second begins.
