Humans talk about suffering as though it possesses some refining quality of its own, but it really doesn’t. Pain isn’t the point of itself, and enduring it can mean everything or nothing. You decide what meaning the pain offers, what point it has. Pain can teach, but it can also deform. Hardship can produce humility, competence, gratitude, bitterness, paranoia, entitlement, or nothing particularly useful at all.

It doesn’t have a perfect, easy answer for everyone, because we’ve developed two strangely compatible cultural responses to suffering: One tries to eliminate it, and the other fetishizes it. On one side, discomfort itself increasingly becomes the “evidence” that something has gone wrong. Failure must be softened, because consequences feel cruel. We protect our kids from them, we shy away from it ourselves, and sometimes we do some pretty crazy things to avoid accountability because it feels “bad.” After all, if we’re already trying to avoid any suffering, we will certainly also try to avoid things like consequences and accountability.

On the other extreme, we have also deliberately engineered adversity: cold plunges, brutal workouts, optimization rituals, endurance challenges, all meant to support the idea that voluntarily doing difficult things must necessarily make us better. We even pay incredible amounts of money to subject ourselves to certain types of hardship. We buy gear so we can suffer longer or in more extreme circumstances. There is an entire industry of influencers performing hard things, and in some cases the emphasis is on the word performing.

If hardship, however, becomes the goal for its own sake, we can become very good at suffering without ever asking why we are choosing it. At that point, is there a point? Does it become an idol that we pay homage to, sacrificing ourselves on its altar? And if so, for what?

Conversely, if compassion means removing every painful consequence, we insulate people from precisely the feedback they need to become more capable, more resilient. The two poles create a balance that we must decide to find, intentionally and with discipline.

This leaves us with a much harder question than How much can I endure? In fact, while that’s a good question, and we should ask it of ourselves, we might also consider the idea that there’s a deeper question to be answered first:

What deserves my endurance?

The ability to endure is a learned and trained skill, that should be cultivated and honed. Before we congratulate ourselves for possessing it, or before we look for something else to withstand, we should probably make very sure we’re pointed at something that is worth suffering for, because goodness and courage are not the same.

The most fascinating example that came up is…folding laundry. Is it even remotely possible for laundry to be a hardship? Yes, and since this conversation, I do it differently.

Not every chosen hardship needs to be yet another trip halfway around the world to someplace that offers a feature of nature waiting to see if you will endure or die. Certainly seeking those things aren’t necessarily bad, and can be incredibly powerful experiences. Hardship, however, can literally just be something you choose to be fully present in, with gratitude and care and intentionality, when you’re used to just plowing through it quickly on your way to your next Chosen Hard Thing.

Many thanks to Sam for coming back for another deep dive into things that truly matter. You can find his work at What Then?

If you enjoyed this, make sure to check out his previous appearance on the podcast last season, because it’s also excellent.

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Welcome to new readers! The Shepard Scale is where we explore how decisions get made, and the realities we often choose to operate in so that we don’t have to be honest with ourselves about the reality we’re actually in.

Note: This essay is not an argument against tissue donation, and I am in no way indicting the industry. This is an exploration of death, infant loss, moral suitability, and the gap between deeply held assumptions about meaning and an experienced reality that cannot easily be reconciled. All of it has lessons for vetting in difficult or high-stakes environments. Please be aware that in this essay, there are elements that may be disturbing.

“The first time a man smells viscera, it shouldn’t be his friend’s.”

That line from Matt Larsen’s essay “The Greatest Mistake in Combat Psychology” got me thinking about a job I once had for a short time, a job that shaped me in ways I’m not sure I like and certainly try not to think about very often.

The actual job title was “Tissue Recovery Specialist,” a clean clinical name for work that was neither clean nor merely clinical. It’s a noble idea: just as organ donation can save a life, donated tissue, nerves, bones, and tendons can also help someone. One person can donate in a way that can help a hundred different people, and that’s not a small thing. I guess not a lot of folks think about the journey those body parts take, or how they came to be available for use in another human. Someone had to go get it out of the body it used to live in, and that’s what a tissue recovery specialist does.

Now that you know, if you need to bow out of reading the rest of this essay, it’s a good time to do so. If you stay, I promise there will be a point to it.

***

I was intrigued by the high pay and the chance to see detailed anatomy. As an EMT, I had seen plenty of sick, disfigured, and even destroyed bodies, so I figured this couldn’t possibly be as bad as that. I breezed through the long list of pointed interview questions about how I felt about dead people and whether I was easily grossed out.

The manager told me that to be hired, I needed to go on a recovery and see it in person. She paused.

“Some people find it…shocking.” Okay, I thought. This is the job. I would be doing good things that helped people.

There was a certain amount of glamour to it; there were go bags and all the rush of adrenaline and even validation that comes with being needed right now. The call came on a Friday evening; I had a set amount of time to get to work, where we loaded up all of our equipment into totes and drove to the airport. A chartered plane filled with snacks and drinks was waiting for us, and I found that the “special-ness” of this was all very addictive.

When we reached our destination, we walked through the emergency waiting room, wearing our special jackets and pulling our special totes. My specialness suddenly took a hit, however, as I made eye contact with a woman in one of the chairs.

In half a second, I took in everything about her: red-rimmed eyes full of terror and dread, white-knuckling a wadded-up Kleenex, her knee bouncing in anxiety like a nervous tic. It occurred to me that in a very short while, I might be taking parts out of someone she loved. That thought was way too much, and I immediately pushed it out of my head, suddenly wishing we’d have gone in some other door. Did she know what we were? I hoped not.

Properly scrubbed in, I stepped into the operating room and found a body bag on a table. There was paperwork, setup, and all sorts of jobs that needed to be done first, and I was told that the choice of music for the evening was one of the most important decisions to be made. That tracks, I thought. Celine Dion would be a bad call right now.

There were five of us, and we would be there for eight hours or more. I was handed a sign that read “Tissue Recovery in Process,” as well as a piece of paper with tape at the ends to block the window on the OR door. No one walking by needed to see this, not even people for whom surgery was a part of everyday life.

Thus began the most surreal experience of my life.

***

You’ll notice that in the literature about tissue donation and recovery, the actual process gets sanitized. After all, no one really wants to know the mechanics of how their Aunt Gladys’ body helped all those people.

…a procurement team from the OPO or tissue bank will surgically recover tissues. Staff often rely on on-the-job training, rather than formal medical training; tissue procurement can be done by any staff the OPO deems qualified.

The tools were mostly those found in any operating room — scalpels, retractors, scissors, and clamps. Sometimes, though…recovery technicians also used metal wedges and mallets to break through the bone.

***

The things I saw and did over the course of that seemingly eternal night are forever etched in my brain. Nothing else existed but the blood and the parts: bones shaggy with meat dropped into labeled bags, long nerves and veins curled like snakes in the bottom of their containers. The sound of this person’s extra fat sliding off the table and hitting the floor like some kind of gross pudding. The fact that a machine exists whose sole purpose is to remove skin in large continuous sheets. The jokes made about everything from their body hair in strange places to the probe that was still in their rectum, a relic of the heroic efforts to save them from having to be on this table. All of it done to a peppy techno soundtrack. They sang and danced as they worked.

At one point, one of the team members pulled out a femur and lifted it over his head, breaking into a rendition of the opening scene of The Lion King before the team lead told him to knock it off. I laughed, because by then nothing was real anymore.1

I looked at this person on the table, their whole body flat except for their head and rib cage, every long bone removed, surrounded by absolute carnage on the table and the floor, and realized that I had now done things no one could understand unless they’d done them too. I knew things that I shouldn’t know. All I wanted in that moment was to go back to being a person who didn’t know any of it.

We “reconstructed” them, putting wooden dowels in place of the bones we took, stuffing cotton inside their hollowed limbs. I stood there sewing their arm back together; there was no fine surgical thread or pretty knots, just a huge needle and thick string. It didn’t matter; the funeral home would put clothes on them, and the family would still get their open-casket service. We did the best we could to make them presentable, to return a recognizable body to the family.

After nearly 11 hours, we made it back to the charter plane. Most of the team either slept or chatted like they were on their way home from some normal activity. I stared out the window, feeling like I was on my way back to a world that I didn’t understand anymore. We had all lived through the same night, but clearly not the same experience.

When I got to my truck, I didn’t even turn it on. I just leaned my head against the steering wheel and cried the deep, wracking sobs where you can’t breathe, and you’re pretty sure you’re going to throw up.

I finally drove the hour home and walked in to find my husband laying out his knives, getting ready to process the deer hanging in the garage. Instead of helping as I have done every year, I walked past it all without a word and crawled into bed, still in my clothes. I had been up for 36 hours and could not comprehend a single thing more, especially not another situation of knives and meat.

When I woke up, the first image in my head was that person’s face. Their name and date of birth. Their next of kin. It was like that for a very long time.

You’d think I would have quit after that, but I didn’t. Against the advice of my husband, who probably knows me even better than I know myself, I decided that what I needed was to throw myself into it. All in. Anything less would be failure, maybe even weakness, and I could bear that even less.

***

A week later, I went to orientation. I had passed the test and been hired, and it was time to learn about the company, its mission, and all of the Good Things™ it was doing. There were videos set to emotional music, people talking about how much they valued the tissue they or their loved ones got, how much it changed their lives. It was all very beautiful, and I found myself fully invested in the effort. It felt like a healing salve on the experience I was still trying to process.

In the tour of the headquarters building, my gaze caught infant clothes on tiny hangers in a large supply room. While funeral homes took on the job of dressing adults after the recovery procedure, I was told we would be dressing infant donors ourselves before returning them to their parents. What I had just done, I would someday do to an infant. That realization somehow short-circuited my brain.

I could not speak. My brain was instantly overwhelmed with images: holding my newborn son as he died, the shade of blue of the blanket they wrapped him in, the last glimpse of his face that I got before they put a flap of the blanket over it and took him away. I smelled the hospital; I was there, not here.

Suddenly my son was lying on a table, his tiny body opened up while some college kid pulled out his femur and made jokes while dancing to techno and singing The Lion King. I managed to reply normally, even while my soul felt like it was coming apart.

“How kind.”

I lasted another month. The final straw came when I opened yet another body bag and saw my husband’s doppelganger. When I recoiled, the team lead shrugged. “Yeah, it happens sometimes. The worst is when it’s a baby that looks like yours.” Even his armor had a breach point. His sentence made it clear in no uncertain terms that I would not be able to withstand what this job would require. Thankfully, I don’t remember the rest of that night.

The next day, I got an email saying that my other job was promoting me. I could not write my letter of resignation to the tissue bank fast enough. I will be forever grateful for what I see to this day as divine intervention.

***

Larsen asks why the same reality can leave one person largely functional and deeply injure another. I cannot answer that from combat experience, and I would not equate this work with combat. But I encountered that question in a very different setting.

Somewhere in the world, a person is walking on a tendon that came out of a body that my team worked on, and their life is better for it. I’ve been the recipient of cadaver tissue myself. The people I worked with were decent folks doing a brutal job. All of that is true.

The jokes set to techno may have been armor that helped people continue. They were a technology of un-knowing. A certain degree of compartmentalization makes the work possible, and is even necessary. When compartmentalization becomes un-knowing, however, when the donor must cease to be a person, it can also become the wound.

For me, the collision was deeply personal. Each of us came with a weakness, personalized to the one who wears it. In that OR, a reality I was not prepared for came face-to-face with the loss I had not fully dealt with.

The body on the table had a face, a name, a celebrated birthday, a next of kin, a woman in a waiting room with a soggy Kleenex who, years before, I had been. The work required me to un-know all of that for 11 hours every few days, and I couldn’t do it.

***

The questions they had asked me in the interview were about things like disgust. Are you squeamish? How do you feel about dead people? Have you seen bad things? Gross things? Horrific things? They’re the wrong questions to ask; I know this because I passed them all with flying colors while being horribly unsuited for the job.

The operational lessons here are huge, and while it might seem that I just told you a gross story for no reason, that experience taught me things that are critical to the vetting process.

My team lead knew exactly where his breach point was: the baby that looks like yours. That was a piece of data that existed only in his head. I had already seen exactly what that would look like for me, standing in the storeroom looking at those tiny hangers, and I knew I would eventually be expected to do it.2

From minute one, I was a mismatch for that job. I couldn’t reconcile how easily a human being, made in the image of God with a soul, could begin to feel like material to be recovered, processed, labeled, and transferred. Donation could be an act of caring; treating the donor as though personhood had ended at the OR door was something else.3

I stayed longer than I ever should have because I was afraid of being seen as weak. They never saw that in me, because their system wasn’t calibrated to see why I was a bad fit.

When you ask the wrong questions, you will get deceptively right answers.

They treated tolerance for graphic material as though it were the same thing as suitability for the work. Leaders routinely screen people for competence, courage, physical tolerance, ideological agreement, and prior experience, and yet will miss someone like me. I couldn’t tolerate the meaning the work acquired once it intersected with my own infant loss.

Before placing someone into morally difficult work, ask questions about capacity rather than exposure level.

• What will this person be required to do, witness, permit, or remain silent about?

• What moral framework makes the task permissible or necessary to them?

• What person, experience, or identity might the task cause them to see?

• What would make the task cease to feel difficult but necessary, and begin to feel like betrayal or complicity?

• Can they identify a point at which they should stop, disclose the problem, or request reassignment?

• Have we created a way for them to do that without branding them weak or disloyal?

These are not questions that reliably produce complete answers in an interview. People don’t always know their own breach points until they’re face-to-face with them. Nor should leaders demand disclosure of every private trauma.

Graphic exposure can prepare people for graphic reality, but it can’t prepare them for every meaning that reality might assume. My decision to throw myself further into the work should not have been mistaken for resilience, because it was an attempt to defeat the warning by overpowering it.

Larsen’s grandfather gave him a rule about sequence: the first time should not be the worst time. By the terms of this rule, I had every advantage. The first time I smelled viscera was not my friend’s, my husband’s, or my child’s. But prior exposure prepared me for the sensory reality, and not for the meaning my mind would attach to it.

So why does a particular experience violate a particular person’s moral expectations? The answer begins with what they bring with them.

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With a resume like that, we could’ve gone a lot of different places, but I wanted to examine the space between suspicion and proof.

How does an investigator decide whether an accusation is credible? What do you do when a witness is broadly truthful but wrong about a detail? How do you keep from becoming attached to your own theory? And what happens when you believe someone is guilty but cannot prove it?

Steve’s answers kept returning to the same principle: if the stakes are high, your process must be stronger than your certainty.

The absolute gem in this discussion is his story about getting soundly, deeply embarrassed in the middle of a trial, by a witness on the stand. It’s a textbook example of adaptation when you get slapped in the face by a far different reality than you think you’re operating in.

Questions Worth Carrying Forward

• What would change my mind?

• Have I independently corroborated the crucial facts?

• Am I evaluating the evidence or defending my identity?

• Have I built the strongest case against my own conclusion?

• Does the proposed consequence match what I can actually prove?

• Am I confusing an understandable explanation with a valid excuse?

• If the process failed, what structural correction prevents a repeat?

Bottom Line

The strongest investigators are the people whose process makes deception harder, whose ego permits correction, and whose authority remains constrained by what the evidence can support..

Steven Neff now leads Neff Strategies, providing training, trial consulting, and investigative support to legal professionals, law-enforcement agencies, and sports organizations.

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On October 22, 1989, Jacob Wetterling’s name became forever etched in my consciousness. I was 15 at the time, old enough to be mesmerized by the news coverage. Paynesville was much less than a day’s drive away, and my parents, who had always demanded to know a “route” when we went on our bike rides, suddenly seemed a bit less overbearing. Jacob, after all, had been taken by a man in a white van while he was out riding his bike, in a town not much bigger than mine.

The case went unsolved for decades, and would have probably stayed that way if it wasn’t for an internet investigative blogger named . Her painstaking work was crucial to Jacob’s remains eventually being found and his perpetrator, a serial predator, being brought to justice. I was excited to find her here on Substack, and you can read her entire journey.

Joy is one of the good sleuths.

Volunteers at the Doe Network and NamUs do similarly important work. They match unidentified remains to open missing persons files, one careful comparison at a time. These people who give the faceless dead their names back are behind the scenes, seeking no credit for themselves.

There are many people like these folks who put their own time, resources, and mental energy toward righting horrific wrongs. Sometimes they do it because they were victims once, and it helps their healing. Sometimes it’s because they have skills that lend themselves well to the pursuit of justice, and sometimes it’s just that a case spoke to them on a visceral level. As Joy put it:

I was drawn to write about Jacob’s case for reasons I’ll never fully understand. The more I learned, the more I cared. The more I cared, the more I craved answers. Like every other Minnesotan who lived through the horror of his abduction, I wanted to know what happened to Jacob. And with each passing moment, it felt like time and opportunities were slipping away. I thought if I could just get his story out there, people might start paying attention. Maybe they could even add details that might help. More than anything, I just didn’t want people to forget.

You might not have ever heard of Joy, and you’ve certainly never heard of many others like her, but they’re out there doing slow, careful, exacting work. They are not the story, and they don’t want to be. In fact, you’ll probably never hear about their contributions.

Unfortunately, they’re often not the norm. I wish they were, but the online sleuthing community has also been beset by people for whom clicks are king, and the destruction they leave in their wake tells you something about their own psychology and unmet emotional needs. What’s more, there’s an operational lesson to be had.

The Failures

In 2013, a Reddit community set out to identify the Boston Marathon bomber, and within hours its members seemed to consider it open season on any young man with dark hair and a backpack. They fixated on innocent people, spread their faces across the internet, and pushed so far that Reddit had to make a public apology for it later, after its members tormented one family whose son was missing and later found to have committed suicide, potentially before the bombing even occurred.

The Idaho College Murders in November 2022 provided online sleuths with a smorgasbord level almost unheard of previously. Instead of one victim, there were four: Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin. All of them were popular and attractive, and their roommates and friend circles offered even more rabbit trails to go down.

There was no private detail left unturned in their lives, right down to the nitty-gritty details of the coroner’s report. While I refuse to link to some of the more salacious things posted, I’ll point out that some literally used AI to model how Bryan Kohberger could have carried out his bloody rampage, wound by wound. Some even used it to “prove his innocence.” Kohberger admitted to the murders in a plea deal in July 2025, but has recently asked to vacate his plea and get a trial. That is basically chum in the water for those who are already making money off of the life-changing horror that the families are enduring.

That’s not even remotely the worst of it, however.

A simple YouTube search shows hundreds, even thousands of videos from true crime podcasters discussing their various theories and picking apart every jot and tittle they can find. I don’t use TikTok, but I’m aware that there are thousands more there. They’re monetized, which means the more views and comments they get, the more cash they make. Having to compete in such a crowded space means having to come up with something no one else has.

Enter the “exclusive.” Exclusive interviews. Exclusive new “data.” I have new information, so come watch my stream. Make sure to like and subscribe! There is no limit, it appears, to what can be considered “true,” or what listeners are willing to act on. The Spokesman-Review, based in Spokane, reprinted a Washington Post article discussing one such streamer show where a veteran suffering from mental health issues became a target for the mob.

In one January video, a listener called in to claim a knife used in the stabbings belonged to [Brent] Kopacka. In a rambling, confusing list of accusations, she alleged – without evidence – that the veteran had been in the victims’ house before.

After several minutes of wide-ranging speculation, host Daniel Jay remarked: “Everything that you’re saying makes a lot of sense.”

Rolling Stone also weighed in on the phenomenon.

While some users have issued apologies for the various allegations, hundreds more videos making unfounded claims are still available to watch on the app. And at least five people—including close friend Jack Showalter, a victim’s boyfriend, a Door Dash driver, a food truck worker, and University of Idaho professor Rebecca Schofield[sic]—have all been accused by random accounts of murdering the students, with zero official evidence to back up the claims.

Scofield went on to sue one TikToker named Ashley Guillard, who touts herself as a “psychic” who solves crimes using her readings and tarot cards.

…Guillard says Scofield was having a relationship with one of the victims and then planned the murders with another student because "(the victim) wanted a break in the relationship" and wanted to "keep from making the relationship public," court filings said.

Scofield won her defamation lawsuit against Guillard, to the tune of $10 million. Whether she sees any of that money remains to be seen. Her win also won’t help the many other families and friends of people who either were close enough to the crime to suffer real loss, or merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were dragged into it by internet sleuths looking for their next “exclusive.”

Even Netflix has gotten into the game, and their 2015 ten-part documentary Making a Murderer built a case for the innocence of Steven Avery, convicted of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. It sent a lot of viewers away thinking Avery had been framed, but it also left a lot out. It drew heavy and specific criticism for selective editing and even omitting evidence that pointed to Steven Avery’s guilt. While the Netflix producers stood by their story, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2025.

The concept that all of these theories and unproven assertions could cause genuine harm to real people is apparently not as important as making that big money. When asked by Rolling Stone about it, Ashley Guillard’s answer was telling:

“I don’t care what harm has happened to Rebecca Schofield[sic] because it has nothing to do with me.”

This brings us to the more disturbing aspects of the machine behind it all.

The Need to Be Right

A good investigator goes where the evidence goes. They can be corrected by new information. They have theories, but they allow the evidence to prove or disprove them. For people like Joy Baker, the truth was the goal regardless of where and to whom it led.

Ashley Guillard, however, started accusing Rebecca Scofield only a few weeks after the murders, and continued to do so until well after Kohberger was arrested, pled guilty, and was sent to prison. In fact, after the verdict in March, Guillard addressed the defeat in a 21-part series of new TikToks, and said, “I still believe my readings.”

This type of attitude says something: I need to be right. Podcasters, pundits, and others who make their living on the internet based on views are often wrong. Maybe they get new information and have to update what they’re telling the public. If they have integrity, they do it. They straight up say, “Hey folks, turns out that what I told you on Monday wasn’t factual, and here’s the info I have now.”

When the truth is the only goal, being wrong is merely a stepping stone to getting it right. Sometimes that means you don’t make the big money, or no one knows your name. Maybe you have to sit on information that you’re pretty sure is true while you double and triple-check it, and when you do that, sometimes someone else will beat you to the punch because they checked faster or didn’t check at all. If you care about truth above all else, that kind of thing stings, but it’s a price you’ll pay willingly.

If your goal, however, is clicks, notoriety, and/or a paycheck, truth will often take a back seat. Sometimes you can’t have it all, and when forced to make a choice, your priorities and values will win out over whatever else is jockeying for attention.

Protecting the Self

The mechanism at play is something I’ve written about before. Identity-protective cognition is the individual version. It’s when a belief becomes part of who you are, or part of the group you belong to. Your reasoning will shift from finding the truth to defending your belief. Instead of weighing the evidence, you’re guarding a piece of yourself.

Once that happens, you’ll keep getting deeper into your beliefs, doubling down until your work is a caricature that anyone can see has long let go of reality. At that point, no claim is too absurd, as long as you’re very certain about it. Someone, somewhere, will buy it and pay you to keep saying it. They’ll even spend an inordinate amount of time online trolling and even threatening anyone who disagrees with you. It’s like having your own little mob.

Of those who said their main podcast is about true crime, the most common major reasons for listening were for entertainment (85%) and to have something to listen to while doing something else (84%).

I follow certain cases myself, so I’m not throwing stones from across the street. Am I learning something, treating the victim as a person and the case as something to understand or guard against? Or am I just filling the silence with someone's worst day? I aim for the first, and I still have to check myself, because the pull toward the darker side is real for all of us, even when it’s part of our professional field.

The greater industry, however, treats a murdered five-year-old as background noise, something to half-listen to while folding laundry, or a story to narrate while the host finishes her eyeshadow. Rape, murder, and oh, this shade is to die for; I’ll leave the product links in the description.

In some cases, they even find reasons to support the killer rather than the victims.

The Lindsay Clancy trial going on now (or should I say, the furor around it) is a classic example. I won’t weigh in on the case itself because already did a fantastic job breaking all of it down.

For some people, a case like Clancy’s isn’t even about her, but about the principle her absolution would set. If an act like killing your children can end with no personal accountability for the person who actually committed the act, then accountability itself becomes negotiable. Anyone who fears or even strongly dislikes being held responsible for their own conduct gains something from that outcome.

This is identity-protective cognition at its root, where the belief that’s being guarded has nothing to do with a stranger’s situation, but the personal hope that responsibility can always be escaped. You can hear it in the arguments being made online; it moves straight to the conclusion that she could not possibly have been responsible.

To be fair, there are two separate groups at play here. One is made up of people genuinely advocating for maternal mental health while still not absolving Clancy of the blood on her hands. The other, however, is not-so-secretly defending a principle that would cover them too; namely, the choices we make are not our responsibility.

Some people even support fellow family annihilators Chris Watts and Scott Peterson, as well as other killers, but for other reasons. Wade Wilson (known as the Deadpool Killer) has received nearly 4000 letters from fans wanting to connect. That doesn’t count the many women who actually wrote to the judge in the case asking for leniency.

The Engine

The Clancy trial, you might argue, has nothing to do with amateur investigators going off the rails, but it’s all the same machine underneath: the attention economy. Incentives drive systems; what a system rewards is what it’ll get more of. Like it or not, society doesn’t reward truth anymore; not like it should. We do, however, reward loudness, certainty, and emotion.

If you don’t believe me, then ask yourself why the phrase “rage bait” is a thing, or why a social media video showing someone cooking some absolutely horrifically bad food gets thousands of views and comments, even if 99% of them are slamming the original poster.

If there’s one thing humans like even more than sharing their own opinions on something, it’s trashing the opposing view. This even ties into the need for “specialness,” which is just the validation engine.

Let’s tie this back to the true crime industry. If I’m a podcaster who knows full well that Bryan Kohberger pled guilty, the evidence shows he did it, and yet I still post my theory (with exclusive info) that there is some conspiracy afoot, I know that I am going to get two entirely different viewer types: one will agree, and one will come just to rage about it. Either way, though, I get paid, so does it matter? If I also trash the victims’ families, I get bonus points because now the supporters of those families will come trash me back. Maybe I even get the families themselves to release a statement or go on a podcast to “expose” me…which will send even more people to my channel.

The system rewards poor behavior. The more outrageous I am, the more narcissistic and uncaring I am, the nastier I am, and the more ridiculous I act, the more money I’ll make. It doesn’t even matter what the topic is; true crime is just one of the many topics that have a high rate of rage return.

What’s the Fix?

Does it even matter? I’d argue that it absolutely matters to Rebecca Scofield, who spent three years having to watch a stranger tell the entire world that she ordered the murder of four college students. It matters to Kevin Gosden, whose son Andrew vanished in 2007 and who now wakes up to AI-generated videos of his boy, made by strangers for sport. It matters to every family who has been targeted by violent crime, only to be trolled, harassed, and even threatened by some rando on the internet who fancies themselves an “investigator.”

You can’t fix the incentive, unfortunately. As long as attention is lucrative, someone will manufacture whatever earns it. Even this article is, to some extent, pointless moralizing because they already know what they’re doing is wrong, and they don’t care.

What you can fix, however, is your position in the machine. You can stop feeding it. You can stop restacking the rage bait or wanting to hear every gory detail of some other human’s suffering. Most importantly for operational purposes, you can learn to recognize the machine at work, even in the arenas where you already live and work.

The true crime mob is merely a visible part of a general-purpose machine. The machine itself can be aimed at your company, a political candidate, a neighbor, or even you and your family. You can recognize it by how it rewards certainty and punishes correction while getting paid either way.

The operational lesson is to turn all of this on yourself. The same standard that Joy Baker chose to hold herself to can be applied to all of us. When a story grabs you, ask what would change your mind. Go look for evidence that proves you wrong. Pay attention to whether the information you’re about to rage-restack is causing an emotional reaction, and whether you’re feeding the machine. Be willing to be wrong; in fact, LOOK for reasons why you might be wrong. Discuss with other truth-seekers. Ignore the ones who obviously have melded their identity with their positions.

Seek truth as the only honorable goal, regardless of the arena…and regardless of the cost.

Welcome to The Shepard Scale! This would normally be an article for my paid members, but I am unlocking this one to show you what members get here every week.

Years ago, I ran into an acquaintance in the grocery store, and as we chatted, she talked about her kids, her work, and a recent disagreement with her sister, whom I also know.

Somewhere in that conversation, I realized I was tracking her pronoun usage, how she referred to her sister, and how her words were preemptively answering questions she thought I would ask. She wasn’t a subject I was interviewing, and no one had asked me to evaluate her. I had zero reason to be analyzing her language, but my brain was doing it anyway.

I quickly formed a hypothesis about what she was hiding, and I could feel myself emotionally distancing from her because of it. She had been tested and found lacking, and as we said our goodbyes and I walked away, I caught myself making a mental note. Shady. Drama. No thanks. We all have a ranking system in our brains for other humans, and she got relegated to the NOPE category. It sounds unfair because it is.

She was really just sanitizing her own role in the debacle, which many humans do without thinking. My analysis engine, however, had started running without any kind of direction, task, or need, and as a result, she got put in a category that was accurate for that moment but maybe not across the board. What’s more, all future interactions with her that I have will be with that category in mind.

Sounds a bit gross, right? A bit judgy at times? It is, and yet a lot of us do it to some extent.

I’ve spent close to two decades in deception analysis. In plain terms, that means I am trained, certified, and I get paid to determine whether people are lying. I’ve done it for law enforcement, for attorneys, social workers, for private clients, and as a volunteer for organizations of all different kinds. I’ve read thousands of statements and taught hundreds of students. I am very good at what I do.

Also, for many years, I’ve struggled to connect with people on a human level. I filed that under ‘personality quirk’ for a long time. It seemed like a trait, one of those things that just are. I’ve had various experts claim that this kind of thing is trauma-based (maybe that’s some of it), it’s autism (it’s not), it’s ADHD (nope, not that either).

You might already see the obvious connection, but it took me a lot longer to figure it out.

Naming the Problem

Vetting is the process of assessing whether a person can be trusted before you grant them access to your organization, your team, your information, your family, or even your life.

Done correctly, vetting is a tasked activity. Tasked means three things are true:

• There’s a defined subject, a person you have a legitimate reason to assess.

• There’s a defined context, a role that requires the assessment.

• There’s a decision to run it. Someone, ideally you, chose to begin assessing.

Ambient vetting is when vetting is running automatically without all three of the above conditions present. It’s when you are always assessing, in every interaction. You’re doing it to whoever happens to be in front of you. That might be your best friend, or your sibling, or even your spouse.

The context becomes every context, all the time, and there doesn’t need to be a conscious choice to assess anymore; it happens automatically. Talking to that woman in the grocery store, for me, meant assessing her because assessment had become my default mode of perceiving and interacting with people.

If you’ve been trained in any evaluative discipline, such as threat assessment, interviewing, security work, counseling intake, fraud detection, even hiring, you may do this by default too.

Maybe you’ve never been formally trained, but you grew up somewhere unsafe or something horrific happened to you. If so, you also have skills that you might be running all of the time. If they’re hitched to a compulsion wagon, and you cannot shut them off, then they aren’t a discipline anymore.

Why You Can’t Stop

Trauma (and training) can permanently change your perception. Once you know what a particular pattern looks like, you’ll recognize it every time you encounter it, for the rest of your life. There’s no unseeing it. The more you practice it, the faster you recognize it in real time, and the more obvious it becomes.

This is a good thing. If you’ve trained for that, it’s the whole point of the training. Recalibrated perception, after all, is what you paid for, right?

Ambient vetting is what happens when that analysis is running by default, as opposed to something you choose to do with a specific subject, in a specific context, for a specific reason.

What it Costs

Ambient vetting has two costs: connection and evaluation. First, let’s talk about the human connection side. Continuous assessment of people is incompatible with connection because real human connection requires (at least sometimes) allowing someone to remain unexamined in your presence.

If you attempt to evaluate people that you should be connecting with, you’ll find that you have relationships that are functional and yet lacking in mutual vulnerability. Vetting is great on a first date; that same level of scrutiny is not necessarily great ten years into your marriage.

The second cost is worse, and this was an extremely painful realization for me. Vetting presumes an evaluator. When you assess someone, you’re claiming the role of judge.

When you have a subject, context, and decision, that’s not a problem. People interviewing for a job expect to get evaluated. So do your dates, new friends, and anyone else in the first stages of a relationship. Vetting is something we all undergo in various forms throughout our lives, and in specific contexts, we are usually okay with being the subject of it.

When you are allowing ambient vetting to run as your default, however, you’re claiming that role of judge in every interaction, over people who never consented to be evaluated and were never even told they were being evaluated. In some cases, you can’t even explain why you’re doing it.

People can often feel it. They may not be able to put their finger on what exactly is happening, but what it reads as to them (accurately, might I add), is emotional distance and unavailability at best, and in certain cases, it comes across as arrogance. In fact, it’s also a bit self-fulfilling; you’ll find what you’re looking for in every case because humans are messy, no one is perfect, and if you’re calibrated and practicing the skill of finding flaws, you will always find them. And the more time you spend looking for these flaws in others, the less time you’re spending fixing the flaws in yourself.

If your actual work depends on people trusting you, then this becomes an operational issue, because people do not trust someone who they constantly feel like they’re being scored by.

When I tell people what I do for a living, the immediate question, usually spoken with a nervous laugh, is, “Oh, are you analyzing everything I say?” For several years, I would invariably respond with, “Well, yeah.” I am special, can’t you tell? Be wary of me, because I see things.

Quite frankly, I was a jerk, and my response said a lot more about where I was emotionally at the time than about the people who didn’t feel like being evaluated in a normal conversation.

Is This You?

Here’s how to find out whether your vetting is ambient or disciplined.

Pick a context in your life and decide to shut off that evaluator part of yourself. Maybe you choose to have dinner with your spouse and make yourself the promise that you won’t analyze everything. Or you go hang out with friends and make a conscious choice to just be present for the moments that occur.

Next, watch what you end up actually doing.

If you can adhere to the boundary you set for yourself and just be with those people in that moment, then your skill set is an actual discipline, as it should be. You own it, and it runs when you task it.

If, however, you catch yourself assessing motives and language and whatnot after deciding an hour ago that you wouldn’t, then what you have is a compulsion. You’re a slave to it. The dividing line is voluntary control of the off state. Who cares how good you are at reading people; can you stop yourself from analyzing everyone? Can you just be present in the moment? Can you be authentically yourself? More importantly, can you allow them to remain unexamined in your presence, and connect with them as fellow humans?

If you can’t, there’s only one way to rectify that: accountability, self-honesty, and conscious, intentional change. I know this because I had to do it.

What follows is how I did it. There’s a way to keep every bit of the capability, get back what the ambient version was costing you, and make a clean decision about the rest.

I’ll also take apart the three conclusions you might be reaching right now. One says easing off would be negligent, so the lens stays up all of the time. Another says the skill itself is the problem, so the skill should go in the trash, and the third says, “But you teach continuous vetting!” Yep, I do, and while this article might seem contradictory, it’s not.

I’ll show you how all of that fits together and how to turn your vetting skills from ambient to disciplined, so you can still build meaningful relationships without sacrificing your vigilance.

Perception and Tasking are Different

Your perception is recalibrated for good now, whether that’s because of training or trauma. You’ll register the tense shift, the deflection, the story that’s too rehearsed, all of that, forever. You can’t turn that off, and you shouldn’t want to. The goal here isn’t going back to blissful ignorance, and anyone who says that’s where you should be is probably someone you SHOULD be analyzing.

Tasking is a choice. Registering a signal doesn’t cost anything, and it’s not a problem. Opening an assessment is a separate act, and it can be governed. The whole practice below amounts to moving that act back under your control. You’ll keep the signal recognition skill, but be able to be intentional about what you do with it.

What Should You Do?

It might seem like you only have two choices:

• Keep doing what you’re doing, and let the vetting stay your ambient posture.

• Stop doing it at all.

Let’s go over why both of these are the wrong choices.

Assessment is effortful; it requires intentionality and discipline to do well. If you’re assessing everyone by default, you will dilute that effort and redirect emotional resources to it without realizing it.

There’s another, potentially even more important, pitfall that often happens when you’re always assessing. I often tell students that when I was in training, one of my instructors told me that I was uniquely talented in spotting the liar. As I felt my chest puff up in prideful accomplishment, he said the other half of it: …but your desire to protect yourself will cause you to miss the truth-teller.

Oof. If I can’t see truth, what am I even doing?

In counterintelligence, we need to decide what is critical information. What exactly are we protecting? If everything is critical, nothing is. We cannot protect every single thing effectively, so we deliberately choose the things that MUST be protected and focus our attention and energy on those.

To some extent, our ability to read people comes under the same awning. If we are always reading, we are never connecting, and over time our skills dilute. Humans like shortcuts; after a while, the rigorous process of intentional analysis becomes more like this abbreviated thing where you hear one signal and immediately think, “GOTCHA!” That’s what I did in the grocery store.

You might be asking, “What’s the big deal? If you catch the lone signal, you’re way ahead.” Maybe. But if you remember correctly from the last five years of my writing here, one signal does not an analysis make, and people who think it does are either sloppy or trauma-driven.

Continuous suspicion also generates noise. When everything gets scored, everything produces flags, and you lose the contrast that makes a real flag stand out. I’ve talked before about this, but when I was an EMS instructor, I would tell my students to listen to as many normal, healthy lungs as possible. Calibrate to what sounds normal, so that sick lungs stand out. If all you listen to are unhealthy lungs, it will redefine what is normal for you. If you always look for the reason not to connect, you will always find it. Someone’s insecurity will sound like deception, or their fear will come across as something else.

If you find yourself doing it all the time, the question you need to ask is why? Chances are, you’re protecting yourself from something, and that needs an analysis of its own.

The other option that gets touted is to just stop reading altogether. Just trust people; they’re basically good. They mean well. No need to be looking for the lie all the time; trust your gut.

This is also a horrible take.

First off, you still need to make decisions about things like who’s watching your kids, who’s handling your money, who you hire, who gets access to you. If you simply stop assessing people, it just means you’ll make those decisions blindly (and probably wrongly).

Secondly, think about who benefits if you stop assessing people. Predators select for environments where suspicion is treated like unkindness, and no one wants to be seen as “unkind.” When we make bad decisions about people, often those who pay the price for our negligence are not just us. Our kids pay that cost, or our friends, or our teams. Choosing not to assess at all is a genuine breach of the duty you hold as a leader, a parent, even a friend to others and to yourself.

Lastly, not assessing at all is the same thing as ambient vetting but in reverse. You’re still ignoring context. At your core, you’re refusing responsibility for intentional, disciplined reading of the people in your world.

“But You Teach Continuous Vetting!”

I absolutely do. It feels contradictory because the word “continuous” sounds like you’re always analyzing, but here’s how it works.

As we saw earlier, you need three things. I’ll reiterate them here:

• There’s a defined subject, a person you have a legitimate reason to assess.

• There’s a defined context, a role that requires the assessment.

• There’s a decision to run it. Someone, ideally you, chose to begin assessing.

Continuous vetting replaces the old practice of reinvestigating a cleared person every several years. It doesn’t mean being suspicious of them all the time. You are always running two of the three things necessary.

Let’s look at your spouse or significant other. This person has total access to you, your money, your kids, your life, etc. Obviously, you can’t say that you’ll never analyze your spouse because that’s how people end up being willfully blind to things like abuse or betrayal. You always have a defined subject with a legitimate reason to assess. You also always have a defined context and role that requires assessment. What you might not have is a decision to begin assessing. If you’re running it all the time, you’re analyzing things that maybe don’t need it. You might be unconsciously looking for reasons not to connect with them or build that relationship because something inside you won’t let that happen. This is why you MUST analyze yourself before you analyze others. Quite bluntly, you might be the problem.

If, however, your spouse does something that is outside of their baseline, or is engaging in acts that follow a betrayal pattern, now you make the conscious choice to analyze.

In a group, that looks similar. You are keeping the first two points open, and you’re noticing signals, but you haven’t made the choice to start assessing yet. You choose it when you decide that there are multiple signals or a pattern that points to orientation drift.

The Fix: Restore Tasking

The practice is still task-based. You’re going to define, explicitly and in advance, where the vetting lens has authority.

Write down your tasked contexts, and be concrete about it. Mine include candidate assessments, client casework, and any situation where I hold formal responsibility for who gets access to something. I’ve also used it for evaluating sources of information. Yours might be hiring, intake interviews, volunteer screening, or evaluating a contractor. The test for a legitimate context is simple: do you hold a role that requires the assessment, and is there a decision the assessment serves? If both answers are yes, the skill has jurisdiction, so run it fully and without apology.

Everything else is off-duty by default, and you lean toward connection instead of assessment. You don’t assess until something gives you a reason to do it, and that is true even in the places where you keep the right to assess.

Now let’s talk about the failure mode. You’ll be “off-duty,” and something will ping. A friend’s story won’t add up, or somebody’s affect will sit wrong with you. Your spouse says something that you recognize as shady. The old wiring will turn on, and that is okay. Registering the ping is perception, and perception is free. Starting the assessment, however, is a tasking decision. You can sit on it for a bit and assess yourself first. Ask things of yourself like:

• Why is this pinging for me?

• Are there other explanations for what’s happening?

• What am I feeling that is causing me to jump to assessment?

If you can handle all of this in yourself, then sure, make the conscious decision to analyze.

Conversion and Price

There are two things you need to do to make this work.

The first is conversion: getting the off-state under voluntary control. That’s where you’re choosing the jurisdiction that your analysis will run in. If your posture is trauma-rooted, conversion takes longer, because you’re overriding wiring that was installed for survival and it will feel dangerous to change it. Some people will want a counselor’s help with this stage, and that’s a sound operational decision.

The second move is pricing. Once the skill is genuinely optional, and you’ve taught yourself to do it as a discipline rather than a compulsion or automatic act, you get to decide what you’re still willing to pay. You get to choose what you’re willing to deal with and what you need to call out, or what kind of person you’re willing to connect with and which ones you need to distance from, because you are being intentional about what you’re analyzing.

That also, by the way, means you have to own those choices.

I am never going to connect with people as easily as the average person, and I accept that. The point is that I can choose to do so, with the full information of what I know.

In my personal life, that might mean that I choose to accept certain things about my spouse, my coworkers, or my friends; I get to decide what my threshold is. I choose NOT to accept certain things about other people, even if others tell me that I SHOULD accept those things or that they’re not a big deal. In short, I get to choose what I accept out of the things I notice. And whatever my choice, I can fully own it without apology, and most importantly, without compulsion or fear.

Here’s how it all looks in practice.

I find myself able to be present in conversations that I would have been too busy processing. I have a few relationships that possess more depth than I would have thought possible, and I’ve discovered that my “guarded” trait was a lot less fixed than I had believed.

My baseline tolerance and propensity for connection are still lower than most people’s, and I’ve decided I’m fine with that. The difference is that it’s all a choice instead of a symptom.

What is it for you?

This is a sample of the kind of deep-dive, practical tools you get as a paid subscriber. Become a member now to keep getting them, as well as access to training courses that will help you create a group or team that vets itself.

Become a Member

We talked a lot about the identity protective system. You adopt a label, which then becomes a membership card. The membership comes with social proof and status. Once your sense of human value fuses to the label, you can no longer tolerate a single question about it, because a challenge to the claim now registers as an attack on your soul. The label becomes who you are, and you’ll defend it voraciously.

We spend a good stretch on this; the classic example is the midlife neurodivergence wave, which seems to be made up largely of women who are roughly 40 to 65, wearing diagnosis lists as armor. Some of that is real and deserves resources and attention.

A large share of it is Cluster B behavior using neurodivergence as a mask, which, as Michael points out, is one of the most Cluster B moves possible.

The cost of all of this posturing falls on the genuinely autistic and ADHD people who watch attention and funding drain toward people performing disability for currency.

The mechanism underneath is even worse, and we talk about that as well: The brain wires to whatever you rehearse. We walk through the veteran who claims PTSD from a non-event, then has to manufacture the symptoms to justify the claim, strengthening the neurological connection every time he feeds it until the disability becomes physically real. You can talk yourself into the exact condition you are collecting compensation for, and the monetary incentive ensures that you’re never motivated to get better.

Then we turn to what you actually do with any of this. The short version: the entire system runs on accountability, or the refusal of it. Maturation means moving from the “I” ego to the “us” ego, and every identity protective system is a way to skip that work while appearing to do it. The tools are ordinary and difficult (which is why so many people ignore or straight up refuse them):

• Insatiable curiosity.

• The humility to assume you are probably the one doing the thing you resent in someone else.

• Intentional reframing.

These are parts of Michael’s Mixed Mental Arts model.

It’s a pretty interesting conversation, and I hope to do more of these with Michael and others! In fact, if you’d like to bring a contrary position to the table, let me know! Let’s have a conversation.

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We all evaluate people: a potential new hire, or someone you’re on a first date with, or even the person who might end up being your next boss if you make it through the interview. You ask each other questions, and when you’re done, you each have an impression of the other. Usually, your take will fall into one of three buckets.

• They seem solid, and you like them.

• There is an obvious problem, and they’re an obvious no.

• They seem to check the boxes, but you have this vague feeling you can’t articulate.

The first one can still be a problem because you might be missing something. The second one is usually the easiest.

That third one, though, where you instinctively feel something is wrong but you can’t put your finger on it; that’s a doozy. People often treat that uncertainty as a feature of human nature. After all, we can’t know someone instantly, and gut instinct doesn’t explain itself in a lot of cases. You feel something, but you can’t explain what the something is.

The good news is that the uncertainty is not as total as it seems. What you were listening to while talking to that person was a data stream; if you have the tools to read it, you’ll understand what you’re hearing and be able to explain it. That means you’ll be able to make informed decisions about it.

Language reveals more about orientation, priorities, and the internal model a person is actually running than most people have any training to see.

The Problem with Impression-Based Evaluation

The standard approach to evaluating people relies on a combination of observation and intuition. Does this person seem to know what they’re doing? Do they seem honest? Are they saying what I want to hear?

These are reasonable questions, but they’re answered by impression, and we all manage our impressions. A person who’s intentional about how they come across can produce the appearance of trustworthiness, alignment, and competence even if they don’t actually have those things. They’ve just figured out what you’re looking for and give it to you.

It’s not always malicious, and it doesn’t mean deception every time either. Plenty of well-intentioned people have a claimed model of themselves that does not match their operating model. They genuinely believe they are flexible, mission-focused, collaborative, and honest. Their language patterns tell a different story (and later, their behavior will, too).

The gap between what they say about themselves and what their language structure actually demonstrates is not necessarily intentional. It might just be the distance between how someone imagines themselves and how they actually function. After all, everyone lies to themselves about themselves.

Either way, that gap is a problem for you, and it is traceable in the language if you know what to look at.

What Language Actually Is

Language is not primarily a communication tool. That sounds counterintuitive, but bear with me for a moment.

Communication is language’s function, but structurally speaking, language is the outside surface of thinking. When someone talks, you’re watching their thinking because they are translating their internal model of reality into words. We can’t control every piece of how we do that.

When we generate language, we also have to generate the relationship, navigate social pressure, protect our self-concept, and run all the other processes that go into a conversation. We can’t simultaneously control all of those things and also maintain full conscious oversight of every linguistic choice. The result is that our language leaks things about us without us realizing it.

The choices a speaker makes, such as about which pronoun to use, which verb tense to reach for, what to be direct or indirect about, which relationships to claim and which to distance from, all reflect the orientation the person is actually operating from, not the orientation they are presenting.

You’ve probably met someone who seemed incredibly confident and self-assured at first, but when you talk to them more you realize that they’re actually quite insecure. Imagine being able to see this up front, along with much more.

Psycholinguistic profiling is the structured examination of that language. It reads how a speaker perceives events, relationships, priorities, threat, and responsibility, and how much distance they place between themselves and each of those things.

The word “profiling” has gotten a bad rap in recent years. The word has negative connotations for many, and interestingly enough, that shows their orientation as well. This type of profiling is disciplined analysis, and it excludes emotion, bias, and personal preference by design.

It answers a very specific question: Who is this person and what does their language reveal about how they think, what they value, and where their identity is anchored?

That question is distinct from what deception analysis asks, which is: Is this statement reliable?

The two disciplines use some of the same tools: both examine verb tense, pronoun use, omission patterns, and sensitivity markers, but they produce different outputs and serve different functions. In a vetting context, you want both.

The Markers

If you've spent any time here at all, you already know that there is no such thing as a smoking gun in language. You’re creating a cumulative analysis.

If you understand the markers, however, you will see things about people that you’ve been missing, and that knowledge can keep you from hiring the wrong person…or dating them.

Pronoun use

Pronouns reveal how a speaker locates themselves relative to events, relationships, and responsibility. In most first-person accounts, the speaker will use “I” when describing their own deliberate actions. When “I” disappears from a part of the account where the speaker was clearly present and active, that’s something you want to zoom in on. The distancing may suggest discomfort with ownership. It may indicate that the speaker does not want to claim the action they took, or that the relationship referenced is more complicated than they’re telling you.

If you’ve spent any time in the hiring fields, you’ve seen this in action even if you couldn’t verbalize exactly why you notice it. This is when you ask a prospect to tell you what their responsibilities were, and they respond with, “Well, we did XYZ.” I had a boss back in the day who would invariably respond with, “Did you have a mouse in your pocket? Did they do all the work? I’m asking what you did.” Curt but effective; I think he reveled in the instant discomfort he created with the question.

Excessive use of “we” in contexts when you’re looking for personal accountability is a flag. The question is always: is this pattern consistent across the speaker’s language, or does it appear specifically in certain areas?

This is also true in the reverse; sometimes people use “I” when “we” is appropriate. You’ll see this when people are taking credit for team accomplishments, or inflating their own role. That’s also very useful information.

Verb tense

Verb tense indicates how a speaker is processing time; specifically, whether events are fully resolved or still live on for them in some way. When a speaker shifts from past to present tense in the middle of a narrative about a completed event, the shift marks a moment that is still emotionally or cognitively active. This is a sensitivity marker.

Present-tense intrusions into past-tense narrative suggest the event is not fully past for the speaker; it’s still current for them. Whether that indicates unresolved guilt, ongoing concern, genuine difficulty, or something else entirely is dependent on the surrounding pattern of the language. The tense shift tells you to look more carefully at that part of the account.

Omission patterns

What is absent from a statement is often as structurally significant as what is present. A person giving an account of an event while not mentioning the most consequential part, even if the question clearly invited it, is making a structural choice.

Sometimes that choice is conscious avoidance. Sometimes it is genuine difficulty naming something. Sometimes the omitted content is exactly where the operating reality diverges from the claimed model.

Omission analysis does not assume deception in every case, and assuming it does will make you sloppy. What omission gives you is data. An account that skips over a period of time, or describes a relationship without any verbs of action, only verbs of being, or narrates a conflict without mentioning what the speaker did during it, is generating structural information whether or not the speaker intends to.

Sensitivity markers

Sensitivity markers are linguistic events that indicate a point in the account is more emotionally or cognitively loaded than the surrounding material. They include: excessive qualification on ordinarily simple claims; sudden hedging in an area previously stated confidently; unprompted explanations of why the speaker did something; references to the listener’s potential disbelief; changes in sentence length; interruption of a narrative to provide context that explains rather than describes.

A sensitivity marker is not proof of deception or concealment either, but again, it’s data. It is a signal that the speaker’s internal processing is more active at that point.

Narrative gaps

A narrative gap is a discontinuity in an account. This is a place where the logical sequence is missing a step, where the speaker moves from A to C without accounting for B, or where events are described in a sequence that raises questions about causation. Gaps can indicate missing time, omitted events, or simply a speaker who tells stories in a non-linear way. What makes a gap significant is its location: is it at a structurally unremarkable point in the narrative, or is it in the region where accountability, conflict, or consequence lives?

I often tell students to imagine they’re biking a trail. They come to a place where the trail is washed out. They have a choice now: they can try to jump the hole in the trail, and that’s what most people might do. What you should be doing, however, is pausing to investigate the hole: how deep is it? What caused it? What’s down in there? That’s what an analyst does with a narrative gap.

What gets named vs. what gets implied

The specificity with which a speaker names things tells you something about their relationship to those things. You see this often in “church” language, where people might describe something evil that they committed as a “storm” they’re going through. Note that; it tells you that they do not claim the failure or act. You also see it in corporate language as well. Mistakes were made. Things happened. This reduces conscious choices to an event that happened TO them instead.

The Claimed Model and the Operating Model

Every person has two models: the one they think they’re running, and the one actually running.

The claimed model is the self-concept and the self-presentation. It is usually sincere. Most people believe their claimed model is accurate. They think they are loyal, competent, accountable, mission-oriented, and honest. The claimed model is what gets presented in interviews, evaluations, and first conversations. This is when they are looking to convince you of who they already believe they are.

The operating model is what the language reflects. The speaker can't fully control it, because language production is not fully conscious. The operating model shows up in the verb tenses that slip, the pronouns that disappear at key moments, the things that go unmentioned even when they are the obvious center of an account, the unnecessary explanations.

Psycholinguistic profiling is the practice of reading the gap between these two models. When someone says they take full ownership, but their account of the failure contains no 'I,' that gap is data. It doesn’t automatically mean deception; the person may not know there is a gap (remember, intent doesn’t matter if the effect is the same). The diagnostic value is being able to realize that “this person’s stated orientation and their functional orientation do not align in this area, and that misalignment is worth understanding before I extend trust.”

This is useful in vetting. It is equally useful in ongoing evaluation, where you are reading someone who is already in the system, tracking whether their language pattern has shifted, noticing whether the person who used to claim ownership is now placing actions in passive constructions, etc. Language changes when internal reality changes. The change appears in the language before it appears in behavior, and if you’re good, you’ll catch it even before they do.

This can result in your being right about them early, and there’s a specific pitfall involved with that.

It takes a certain amount of courage to stick to your guns when you recognize something that others aren’t seeing yet. This is why it’s so important to be able to quantify what you see, and have a system that you can explain for what you see and why you see it.

1. Do the analysis with the right parameters and process.

2. Understand and be able to explain your conclusion.

3. If you can do those two things, then stand on it.

Keep in mind that just because you do these three things doesn’t mean people will believe you. You might not be able to convince them. I’ve been in the unenviable position of seeing something too early, and even though I could explain the process, the results, and my rationale, others didn’t believe me. They chose to explain away my findings, or rationalize them. If that happens, you need to be very intentional about how you handle it.

Choose what you will do, yourself, because that’s all you control anyway. This might mean you find a new workplace, friend group, or other type of group for whatever activities you’re involved in. In my case, it has meant distancing from that person and accepting that not everyone will understand why. In two cases, it’s meant leaving a workplace or group. You’re not responsible for what other people do; you are, however, responsible for what information you are aware of and what you choose to do with it.

Psycholinguistic profiling produces an orientation picture at a level of confidence that is proportionate to the evidence, and the analytical language used to describe findings must reflect that. Its value is that it tells you where to look, what questions to ask, and which parts of the picture require additional scrutiny.

Careful analysis should produce findings at the level that looks like this:

The language structure in this account demonstrates significant pronoun distancing in the area covering the speaker’s decision-making, which strongly supports discomfort with ownership of those decisions. That's consistent with either deliberate concealment or unexamined avoidance of accountability.

The goal is to stay there, not to move prematurely past it and start making judgments like “This person is a narcissist.”

Where This Belongs in the Operational Cycle

The standard approach treats analytical tools as incident-response instruments. By that point, the damage is done.

Psycholinguistic profiling belongs in the ongoing, continuous reading of language and behavior across normal organizational life. It should be a standard part of how an organization understands the people inside it.

The question it is always answering is orientation: Who is this person actually, and what model are they running? That question matters at entry, during high-stress decision points, when responsibilities shift, when external pressure changes the environment, and whenever the stakes attached to someone’s mission alignment are high.

A team that reads language continuously can see when an orientation shifts. The changes in language are signals that the internal model may be changing, and that the changing model is worth understanding and potentially handling, preferably before it produces consequences.

Organizations usually ignore this entire realm. Instead, they build vetting systems for entry, accountability systems for failure, and assessment systems for promotion, and then wonder why things are still going wrong. Psycholinguistic reading as an ongoing practice is something different; it’s a standing orientation to language as evidence and data. Language is always there, which means the signals are always there too, if you have the tools to read them.

If you are evaluating people, building a team, managing a partnership, or trying to understand what is actually happening inside a relationship you depend on, you already have access to more information than you are currently using. The tools in this piece can help you start using it.

What you have here is the starting point. The full method is inside the Grey Cell Protocols Library. Paid members get all of it, including the full courses.

Become a member and turn the feeling about someone you can’t explain into a defensible conclusion.

Become a Member

I’m not what you’d call a rabid fan of women’s sports. Outside of Olympic events like gymnastics, in fact, I don’t watch them. I don’t watch men’s sports either, save for a deep and abiding love for the Green Bay Packers that was instilled in me while growing up in the Wisconsin Northwoods. At this point, I think that is almost as genetic as my eye color.

You don’t, however, need to be a sports fan to know who Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham are. I do happen to be a fan of them both; Cunningham because she’s a honey badger and Clark because she is quite simply amazing to watch.

Speaking of honey badgers, Cunningham found herself in the middle of a mess recently for saying something true, and sums the whole mess up pretty well:

Indiana Fever shooting guard Sophie Cunningham told ESPN she wants women’s sports protected from men and got booed for it days later. Seattle Storm center Stefanie Dolson showed up for a game in a “trans rights are human rights” shirt. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve wore “Trans Kids Belong” while coaching against Cunningham. Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase said her own version of the same thing. Reporters spent a week trying to get Caitlin Clark to referee all of it, and she wouldn’t.

Kaeley went on to draw a line between three things that were getting collapsed into one: the coaches who used their platforms to undermine women’s sports, Caitlin Clark declining to referee a controversy, and Sophie Cunningham saying one true thing and then wanting to go back to playing basketball. She is right that these are different, and that we lose something important when we can no longer tell them apart.

I pay attention to mechanisms more than controversies, and in this case, the same one is rearing its ever-present and always-ugly head. What’s more, it’s not even about women’s sports at all. Once you see the pattern, it starts showing itself for what it is: Connection Leverage.

What is Connection Leverage?

Public denigration works by attacking connection. Look at the tactics, here and everywhere.

• Calling someone’s job and “reporting” them for their political, religious, or cultural opinions.

• SWATting people (calling in a threat to their local law enforcement in the hopes that they will be killed by the responding SWAT team).

• Booing them on the basketball court.

• Going through someone’s online presence looking for anything “problematic” that can be used to shame them.

• Harassing someone online, calling them all manner of filthy names, threatening them, wishing horrifying things to happen to them, etc.

• Contacting advertisers, sponsors, or a Patreon or Substack to pull the revenue underneath someone.

• Pressuring payment processors, banks, or crowdfunding platforms to cut a person off (demonetization).

• Filing bad-faith complaints with a licensing body, bar association, or medical board to threaten someone’s license or professional credential.

• Pressuring a venue, publisher, or conference to cancel a booking, or tank a book deal.

• Review-brigading a person’s business to sink its rating.

• Loyalty tests on social media: “If you believe/follow XYZ, I will block you.”

• Morality attached to political positions: “Every decent human knows that…”

All of these things happen every day, and with a ferocity that might surprise you. It’s not tied to one political side or the other, either. While the left might seem to corner the market on trying to ruin someone’s livelihood, the number of times I’ve seen Kaeley told by conservative men, in public, that she’s a whore and they hope she gets raped is staggering, and those are not even the worst messages. I will never stop being disgusted by it, but I’ve long since stopped being surprised.

The target in all of these tactics is human connection. You’ll notice that the people who booed Cunningham didn’t somehow assemble an online rebuttal to her position on males in female sports. The people angered when someone like Kaeley speaks up about things like sexual abuse in churches and sexual deviants in women’s locker rooms aren’t interested in having a discussion. Criticism engages the argument. Exclusion pressure threatens the standing.

What you see over and over here is the threat of removal. The message underneath the filth and the rageposting and wishes for them to be assaulted is, “Agree, or be cast out.”

Humans are wired for connection, so we are built to feel that kind of threat at the level of survival. For nearly all of our history, regardless of how long you believe that history is, belonging to the group was often the difference between life and death. No one on their own survived well for long.

I was discussing this with someone this morning, and he brought up the woman named Karana (later christened Juana Maria), immortalized in the book Island of the Blue Dolphins. She spent eighteen years alone on San Nicolas Island, perfectly self-sustaining. It’s proof, my friend told me, that humans are not wired for connection, and the answer to all of this cancel culture stuff is to simply not need people. If you don’t need people, his argument was, you won’t care if they ‘cancel’ you. Karana, he said, is the example we could aspire to. After all, she was able to survive for nearly two decades on her own.

Karana’s story, however, actually proves my point; she never stopped being a social creature. She kept her rituals, she named the animals around her as stand-ins for connection, and she never stopped watching the horizon for ships. Her isolation didn’t break her, but it also never stopped her from wanting other humans. She did survive eighteen years alone, and then died less than two months after being brought back to society, among people who could not understand her language and with whom she could not communicate…with whom she could not connect.

There is something else interesting about that story. There was no negotiation happening; she wasn’t ostracized for her beliefs or opinions. There was no path back to connection for her if she would only fall in line, so there was nothing with which to coerce her compliance to anything.

That tells me that the actual leverage is the negotiation. When the crowd removes you, their power is actually found in their offer to take you back…as long as you accept that the price is your own integrity.

This is why it’s so effective. Kaeley describes the retreat that happens so often: the carefully worded apology, the promise to “educate myself” and “learn.” There’s no real change of conviction; these people probably didn’t somehow change their belief system. They simply have been made afraid of being socially alone, and they are paying the price (however willingly or begrudgingly) to be readmitted to connection.

When a public figure caves, I don’t think the question is whether they actually changed their opinions, because I doubt that they did. I would look underneath that and ask different questions:

• How much is their sense of safety resting on the approval of the crowd?

• Which crowd?

• Why is that? What is within them that makes it so emotionally mandatory to acquiesce?

And because I am always looking for ways to improve my own thinking and decision-making, I invariably turn these questions inward. What situations would cause me to acquiesce? How can I shore that up? Where am I finding my own identity and connection? Am I subject to these same weaknesses somewhere in my own life? There is always more to work on.

Compliance and Refusal

Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase built careers inside a protected female category and then used their platforms to undermine it. Kaeley explains that with the condemnation it deserves:

Cheryl Reeve played four years at La Salle in the 1980s, when Title IX was technically a law but a poorly enforced one. The WNBA didn’t even exist until 1996, eight years after she graduated. She had to build a career in a sport that barely made room for women at all. Now she’s helping give that hard-won ground back.

What I see underneath that, however, is the mechanism. Reeve and Nakase (and many others like them) are preemptively paying the cost of acceptance. They know what it took to build their careers, they see the price of keeping them, and they have decided to acquiesce up front.

Meanwhile, Caitlin Clark refused to take the bait, and a mob formed to punish her silence the same way it’s punishing Sophie Cunningham for not being silent. It has to. The mechanism requires universal compliance; if Caitlin Clark can opt out of it completely, that signals to others that the threat isn’t as existential as it seems. Therefore, people who don’t pick a side must be stomped on as hard as the people who picked the “wrong” side. To the crowd, they’re both a threat to its negotiation power.

Emotional Health as the Variable

Even as people fold, some continue to stand. Kaeley is one of these. No matter how much the crowd calls for her assault, abuse, or even murder, she keeps going. J. K. Rowling is another. Years of onslaught have not changed either of them. I don’t necessarily agree with every single thing they say, but that’s not even the point.

I am more fascinated, again, by mechanism. What separates people who fold from the ones who stand? We could throw up the word “courage,” but I don’t think it’s that simple. In fact, I think courage is far downstream of the actual mechanism, and I’d argue that the mechanism is anchoring.

A person whose belonging is contingent on approval, or who is dependent on the crowd (ANY crowd) for their validation and human value, has an exposed attack surface. This includes the crowd that applauds them. The counter-mob is still a mob. People who anchor to a supportive crowd are just as susceptible to its whims. The threat of exclusion is still existential for them, and their decision cycle is owned by it.

Interestingly enough, this ties back to my work on identity-protective systems. Those who are value-linked to their labels, their groups, and their diagnoses are often just paying the price of belonging to something.

I can’t speak for whether Rowling takes her identity from her supporters, but I suspect not. I’ve met Kaeley; I can vouch for the fact that she doesn’t get her human worth from any crowd, including those who agree with her. If she did, she wouldn’t be the force of nature that she is. That’s the rub, really; the more approval you need, the less effective you are.

Someone whose connection needs are met by something other than the crowd, whether that be their faith, their strong family structure, or even their own character and self-discipline, is standing on a different kind of ground. The crowd doesn’t control that, and even if they threaten to take away their approval, it doesn’t matter because that person wasn’t relying on it anyway. Their innate need is met elsewhere.

This means that emotional health lowers your susceptibility to the screaming of the fickle crowd, and anchored belonging is a direct defense against their threats.

It also doesn’t mean that you are on your own San Nicolas Island, singing Simon and Garfunkel’s isolation anthem to yourself about how you don’t need anyone. We do need others; that is baked into our psyche. But we also get to decide what kind of people we choose to need around us. We can choose to forge the real relationships and connections that will sustain us. We can decide to foster real, face-to-face authenticity that protects us against the ever-changing tides of the mob.

Change who you belong to, and you change what you can afford to say.

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People don’t decide to become resistant to feedback. There’s no conscious moment where someone says, “You know, I think from now on any feedback will be considered an existential threat.”

The change is slower than that, and more structural. At some point, the role a person occupies in a group can stop being something they do and become part of what they believe themselves to be. The consequences of that are staggering, and yet often overlooked.

In Grey Cell terms, this is called identity-role fusion, and it functions as a degradation mechanism inside otherwise capable people and systems. The term is used here to mean specifically what the label says: the merger of a performed role into self-concept, so much so that challenges to the role are processed as threats to the self.

This is not the same construct as Swann’s identity fusion research, which concerns individual-group merger in extreme group behavior. The GCP usage maps more precisely to what Ralph Turner called “role-person merger.”

How It Forms

The pattern often begins early, especially in family systems where roles were assigned and then calcified. But it can form anywhere a role becomes heavily rewarded, repeatedly reinforced, or necessary for survival.

Think about the kid who was always “the responsible one.” When you look at the structure around them, you often see that they didn’t choose that role. They assumed it because the family needed someone to become it. Eventually, it stopped being something they did and became something they were. Decades later, that person is a senior leader who can’t delegate, can’t show uncertainty, and can’t receive feedback without experiencing it as an indictment.

These designations serve a real function in the systems that generate them. They organize unpredictable environments and distribute psychological labor in ways that let the system survive. The problem is that survival mechanisms don’t automatically dissolve once the person is out of the situation that assigned the role. They become expectations, then defaults, then identity. And once a role has been absorbed that deeply, stepping outside it feels dangerous, more like a structural violation instead of a choice.

Adults carry those templates into organizations, where the pattern replicates. The framing changes, but the architecture doesn’t. “I’m the one holding this together.” “I’m the person people count on.” It can morph into something even more explicit: “I am the one responsible, so I am the one who must control everything about it.”

At the surface, this reads as ownership and commitment, and it’s not wrong. Not all strong role identification is dysfunctional; people with high investment in a role can outperform their less-committed peers for years. The problem is fusion: when the role stops being something you do and becomes something you are. The threshold marker is the question being asked internally: does a challenge trigger the question, “is this accurate?” or is the question more like, “what does this mean about me?”

That shift is what distinguishes high role investment from fusion. The person is protecting their identity within the role, rather than the role itself or the outcome. Those are different objectives, and over time, they produce different behavior.

The Feedback Problem

Once identity is fused with role, feedback stops being data to be considered and starts being a threat. The logic works like this: if you are the role, then a challenge to your performance or even your beliefs is a challenge to your coherence as a person. That shift is invisible to the person experiencing it, which is what makes it so difficult to surface and address.

A 2023 multi-source field study found that employee voice, simply speaking up with ideas or concerns, was significantly associated with leader identity threat, which in turn predicted abusive supervision. The effect was strongest among supervisors higher in traditionality, meaning those most invested in hierarchical role expectations. That sounds like it requires a classic correlation-isn’t-causation caveat, but the study models a coherent path from “someone is questioning my performance” to “I should punish them for it,” with identity threat as the mediating variable.

The defensive response fires the moment a challenge is perceived. Whether the challenge is true or false makes no difference to the trigger, and the leader will act on the trigger either way if the reflex takes over. This reflex is most entrenched in hierarchical and status-protective systems, where correcting the record matters less than protecting position.

The behavioral signals tend to cluster, and the cascade tends to follow a characteristic sequence. Here are a few of the tells:

• Feedback is deflected or reframed before it’s even considered.

• Correction gets interpreted as an attack rather than information.

• Roles get defended, even when outcomes are clearly degrading, because it’s really an identity being defended.

• Questions about process are treated as questions about loyalty.

• The person doubles down rather than recalibrates.

This is one reliable path to a pattern most leaders recognize: the person who raised a concern gets treated as the problem. The leader might seem obtuse for “ignoring” the concern, but they’re just running a protection routine against something that registered as a threat to who they are.

What This Does to the System

This is where the individual psychology becomes a structural problem.

Orientation depends on continuous calibration. Your internal model of reality has to update when reality changes, or you’re navigating on a map that no longer corresponds to the terrain. In high-stakes environments, that update process is the mechanism keeping decision-making functional. But if updating the map threatens who you are, the update doesn’t happen. The map stays fixed, and you start drifting from reality. Since the person holding the map is also the one evaluating whether it’s accurate, the error compounds without a visible correction point.

That’s the individual failure mode. In a group, it propagates. When a leader cannot process correction as information, the people around them figure that out, even if it’s not a conscious thing. The ones who raise concerns get sidelined, talked over, or quietly reassigned. The ones who affirm get favored status and access.

They’ll soften a report before the leader hears it, or reframe a problem as a win. The leader continues to receive reports, continues to hold briefings, continues to believe they’re oriented. What they’re actually receiving, however, is a curated version of reality that their team has learned to provide for its own protection.

The result is an organization that has lost its primary correction pathway. It can still function for a long time, but it can’t improve, and it can’t adapt when the environment demands it. The capable people around that leader are directing their efforts toward managing the leader’s sense of stability. That is not what an organization is for.

There’s a further cascade. Once the feedback loop breaks down around the leader, the norm propagates. What the leader tolerates becomes normalized. What the leader punishes becomes known. Eventually the group itself may begin selecting for compliance over accuracy at every level, restructured around protecting the leader’s identity rather than the mission’s integrity.

Why This Is Not an Individual Problem With an Individual Solution

The temptation is to treat identity-role fusion as a personal development issue, something the fused individual can work on, reflect on, and resolve through better self-awareness. Unfortunately, while the individual psychology described above is accurate, the vulnerability it creates lives at the system level, where it does the most damage.

In organizational terms, a leader whose identity is fused with their role is a structural vulnerability. The relevant question is whether the system has built-in mechanisms to constrain the damage that any single person’s cognitive limitations can do to shared decision-making.

A fused leader is more vulnerable to manipulation specifically because their identity can be leveraged. Flattery targeted at the role is more effective, and challenges to the role register as threat. Someone who understands this dynamic can exploit it, reinforcing the leader’s identity investments in exchange for access or influence, while competitors or critics who raise accurate concerns get filtered out as threats. The manipulation doesn’t require sophisticated tradecraft. It requires recognizing that the leader is protecting something more important to them than the mission, and acting accordingly.

Developing better self-awareness sounds appealing, but awareness alone doesn’t constrain behavior under stress, when the reflex is strongest. The solution is structural, and that’s what we’ll talk about next.

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In any organization, failure will happen eventually. There will be a betrayal, or an infiltration, or someone will make a wrong choice that is costly on levels impossible to foresee beforehand.

The first question is always “Who is responsible?” Whose fault is this? Those are important questions, and they need to be asked. People need to answer for their actions, and if they screw up, they have to own that choice and its consequences.

That’s only half of the operation, however, and it’s reactive. The act is done; you can’t go back in the past and change it. Removing the person who committed the act is a good thing to do in some cases (and depending on the situation, it might be the very best thing you can do), but it still won’t change the outcome you’re dealing with. More importantly, it won’t give you the framework to prevent it from happening again.

This is where we have to separate the concept of justice from the concept of wisdom. Justice fixes responsibility on the actor. The orientation audit examines the model you were running at the time the outcome happened.1 These are separate operations on separate variables; the first assigns responsibility, and the second protects your future exposure.

Outcomes Are Orientation Data

Your orientation is the running model that governs how you read a situation and what you decide to do about it. John Boyd put it at the center of the decision cycle for a reason.2 Orientation shapes what you notice, what you discount, and which options look available to you. Action follows from that. Outcomes follow from your actions. Then the outcome feeds back into the model (or at least, it should).

A hostile outcome may be a signal that your model missed something. The existence of a bad outcome does not prove that your orientation was wrong, but it gives you sufficient cause to test it. Today, we’re going to show you what that test looks like and why you need it.

The Higher the Stakes, the Less You Can Afford to Stop at Blame

When you conclude the event wasn’t your fault or you’ve identified whose responsibility the incident is, the examination usually stops. You’ve answered the justice question, and it feels finished. The orientation that produced your exposure survives unexamined, ready to produce the same exposure again. You’ve protected your innocence in terms of the incident, but kept your vulnerability.

The audit is a separate operation, and it doesn’t touch the actor’s responsibility. It runs on your model. That distinction is the whole discipline. You can be blameless in one aspect of the situation, blameless in the incident and the outcome, and still bear responsibility for the beliefs and behaviors that got you up to that moment.

Higher Stakes Mean a More Valuable Audit

Let’s say that a daycare worker is found to be abusing the children in their care. Justice says, “This person is at fault for their choices and they must be removed.” That is true and appropriate. It also, however, does nothing for preventing another predator from getting hired.

If the daycare were to do a proper autopsy on the matter, they would uncover the the gaps, beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors that created or preserved the employee’s access to the opportunity. It might look something like this:

• Process Gaps: only one person does background checks and she was on vacation so it was set aside just this once so the applicant could get hired. Additionally, they normally don’t allow an employee to be alone with any child, but everyone was outside and one child needed to go to the bathroom. Because of them being short-handed, the new employee was told to take the child to the bathroom.

• Beliefs: It’s just this one time. This new employee is safe; I really like them. It’ll be fine.

• Behaviors: Making exceptions to the documented processes. Engaging in emotional trust behaviors and substituting it for the structural variety. Assuming that gut instinct is a good enough basis for trust.

The outcome was that a child was harmed, and yet the daycare stopped their investigation once they answered the two justice questions: What happened, and who is responsible for it? By ending their investigation at justice and not engaging the wisdom process, they have left the vulnerability wide open for another incident, and left the children in their care at the mercy of their next predator employee.

That’s a structural trust failure. Process over personality is a component of structural trust, and it was suspended for a man people liked and therefore trusted.

This happens in all sorts of group and relationship types. Another example is a company where justice says the employee stole proprietary information. He’s fired, the company does some damage control, and then they move on.

You’ll notice something about that damage control. It’s geared toward controlling the impact of the current incident, not preventing another one. This happens often in corporate world; you’ll see a mad scramble to mitigate fallout, maybe a cursory nod to “our process,” but no real substantial change. They are focused on fixing the consequences rather than fixing the situation that allowed the consequences to even occur.

The orientation audit, the seeking of wisdom, asks how one employee could download the entire customer database to a personal device without triggering an alert. It examines access controls, assumptions about trusted staff, approval processes, and monitoring. The goal here isn’t to also assign blame to the company, because the responsibility for that theft belongs solely in the lap of the employee who committed the act. The company, however, can only control certain variables going forward, and they need to close to the gaps before it happens again.

After an aircraft accident, investigators identify pilot mistakes, but they keep investigating. They examine cockpit design, training, fatigue, communication procedures, maintenance schedules, weather reporting, and organizational culture on top of many other things. You cannot stop once responsibility is assigned, because justice and wisdom require two separate investigations and question sets.

These ideas are not some new concept; in fact, Chris Argyris was writing about “double loop learning” back in 1977.3 As he explains, single loop learning seeks to correct surface behavior. Double loop is when you also examine the underlying variables that governed the situation. Another way of looking at this is the pursuit of justice and wisdom.

What You Do With It

When something goes wrong, by all means ask who is responsible. Ask what repercussions need to happen, what actions you need to take in response.

Also ask how it happened. How did you get there? What conditions existed?

• What did we go into this situation believing, that ended up not being true?

• What factors went into the situation that we didn’t see at the time?

• What did we see but choose to ignore or rationalize?

• What exceptions did we allow?

• What personalities or relationships affected our decisions or caused bias?

• What could we have done upstream that would have prevented this cascade from occurring at all by not making an environment conducive to the act that caused the outcome?

Pay attention to the shift there. The goal is to establish an understanding of the conditions that caused the outcome in question. That means looking at facets instead of people. When you’re done, you have a specific understanding about who did what, why it was done, where the gaps were, what needs to get fixed, and what your failure points are.

If you stop after accountability for the act or incident, you will miss all of that critical data, which means you can’t act on it, which means you can’t fix it…which means that incident, or one like it, will occur again.

For a real-world example of a company that chose not to pursue justice OR learning, you can check out my analysis of the statement made by Astronomer in the wake of the viral scandal featuring two of their leaders at a Coldplay concert.

Remember: Justice looks backward to render a verdict; wisdom looks forward to reduce continued exposure.

Don’t let the assignment of responsibility terminate the learning process.4 You need both if you don’t want the situation to repeat.

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If you’ve already dug in, great. If you opened the library page, felt overwhelmed, and closed the tab, that’s okay too! That’s why I’m sending this email.

Here’s how I’d suggest using it.

Start with GCP 101. Everything else in the library builds from or alongside the doctrine in that course. If you go straight to Deception Analysis for Vetting without it, you’ll get the method but miss the framework that makes the method make sense. GCP 101 is the foundation, so start there.

The archive is part of the library. The four courses are the structured doctrine. The archive, which includes everything in the Shepard Scale going back to 2021, is where the doctrine gets applied, tested, and demonstrated against real cases. The two work together. The courses teach the method; the archive shows the method in motion.

One more thing: in early August I’m publishing a …

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Note: I’ve been working out this piece for about a month, and in that time, two excellent pieces have been published that look into related aspects of the topic. I am linking to them as well because I think they are important.

***

What kind of system produces adults who are emotionally grounded, reality-oriented, resilient under stress, capable of receiving correction, capable of self-reflection, and capable of tolerating discomfort without collapse?

That’s the question we tackle today, and it’s a doozy.

The Claim: Gen X Is Awesome

There’s a belief of sorts that could be titled “Gen X is the best generation because we had a real childhood.” The evidence for this statement is in the anecdotes; every Gen Xer has them. Many of them seem to be so universal that they’re amusing; no matter where in the US you were raised, you can find a whole bunch of people who understand certain phrases and stories because it was their experience too.

All of this shared experience creates a group, maybe even an identity. There is moral superiority attached to it, and with that comes social proof. According to the lore, Gen Xers are better than Millennials (the term attached to everyone younger than us, regardless of their birth year) because we were feral kids who had to learn to problem solve, feed ourselves, maybe do our own laundry, and didn’t get coddled. It made us better, stronger, more resilient, and therefore more able to handle the world.

If you’re a Gen Xer, you probably have stories with elements that are ridiculously familiar to your generational cohorts.

• An injury of some kind, gained while being outside and engaging in some dangerous activity, after which your parents told you to “rub some dirt on it” or “walk it off.”

• Being told that you need to “either stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

• Being locked outside during the summer and expected to fend for yourself.

• Being left at home for large swaths of time alone at a very young age, often while being responsible for much younger siblings.

• Being expected to perform well. Not performing well means being a loser.

The list goes on and on. Anyone who is a Gen Xer gets it, and many of us credit that upbringing for who we are. We were the feral kids, the daredevils, a generation that both grew up without computers and yet still became proficient at them. It was the land of no Karens, no nanny state, when you could sit in the middle of the back seat of your dad’s old Pontiac and hang over the front bench seat because seat belts weren’t mandated yet. Also…what lifejackets??

And to be fair, there really were some good things in that childhood environment.

Many Gen X kids learned competence early. We learned how to solve problems, improvise, navigate uncertainty, entertain ourselves, and tolerate discomfort. We learned that the world was not obligated to rearrange itself around our emotions. We learned that honesty and integrity matter, that bullies exist and can be dealt with head-on, and that life is often unfair. These are lessons that are critical for a kid learning to live in the world.

There is, however, a problem in the story.

The Contradiction: We Refused to Reproduce It

Gen X often romanticizes outcomes while refusing to examine the conditions that produced them, and nowhere is that contradiction more obvious than in participation trophies.

If there’s one thing that Gen Xers like to complain about, it’s that. Only winners get trophies. Just showing up is literally the bare minimum; you don’t get an award for that. Or at least, you didn’t until the Millennials and Gen Z came along. Suddenly, every kid, no matter how lazy, uncoordinated, unathletic, or unmotivated they were, got a trophy too.

The idea that you get to be valued without doing anything to earn it is proof that society has become soft, delusional, and emotionally fragile.

If you cringed reading that last sentence, you’re not alone. I am ashamed to say that those words used to escape my lips with a fearsome regularity. It’s not that simple.

The scaffolding was actually built by Boomer-era institutions while Gen X were children and adolescents. Gen X inherited it as parents and league organizers through the 1990s and 2000s, and rather than dismantle it, we expanded it.

That raises the harder question. How did we get here? What would make an entire generation take a set of practices it did not invent, extend them, and then rewrite the story until we could claim we had nothing to do with any of it?

We didn’t want our kids to feel what we felt.

Parenting writer and psychologist has described this shift in his own work. Born in 1947, he has said that he and his wife consciously chose to raise their son in a way completely different from how they themselves had been raised, only to reverse course when the results became impossible to ignore. Rosemond’s conclusion is largely that the older system worked and the newer one did not. I think the harder question is why an entire generation was so ready to reject the system that formed it in the first place. Reaction tells you what to run from, but it can’t automatically tell you what to build.

Rosemond’s work underlines a critical point: The shift did not begin with Gen X. We inherited a rebellion already underway, then reinforced and expanded it for reasons of our own.

That inheritance creates the specifically Gen X contradiction. observed the same pattern last year, arguing that Gen X often romanticizes the rough independence of its childhood while simultaneously building highly protective systems for its children. The exact generational boundaries are blurrier than internet discourse usually admits, but the broader pattern is difficult to ignore.

We glorified independence and then closely supervised our children. We bragged about surviving boredom and then overscheduled them. We mocked emotional sensitivity and then built increasingly protective systems around their feelings. We complained about participation trophies while expanding the culture that used them.

That leaves us with a question that needs to be sat with to really answer:

If our childhood was so healthy, why were we so determined not to recreate it? Let’s dig into that.

The Reality: Gen X Had a Challenging Childhood

There are questions that make Gen Xers uncomfortable because they force us to separate resilience from adaptation. We will explore those questions today and also put the answers in an operational context. If you’re a Gen Xer in a group of some sort, the answers to these questions might be shaping how you show up to it.

The first question is “why?” When you read these, I want you to think about them at a deeper level than the standard “because our parents were teaching us resilience.” Were they? Or was the resilience a byproduct of something else?

• Why were we locked out?

• Why were we told to go away?

• Why were we given responsibilities far above our age?

• What did we actually learn from all of that?

Yes, we learned competence and problem-solving skills, and all of those things that are part of the Gen X self-mythology, but we learned things that are a lot darker, too.

We learned that nobody really cares if you’re struggling and that reaching out is pointless at best; in fact, it’s evidence that you couldn’t handle it, and “not being able to handle” something is proof that you are weak. We learned that if you’re not performing, that means you are less. We learned not to advertise anything that could be considered “weakness,” including vulnerability. We learned how to shove pain so far down that eventually it leaks into decisions, relationships, anger, cynicism, addiction, and emotional distance, and we learned how not to admit that we do any of that.

We learned that getting mocked and mocking others was normal. We learned that self-protective sarcasm was safer than vulnerability, and real, authentic connections are dangerous. We learned how to survive emotional and even physical neglect, and then many of us turned around and called that survival “strength.”

Adaptation is more complicated than we usually admit.

We lacked support, and many of us now interpret that lack of support as proof that support itself is unnecessary. After all, we didn’t get it, and we turned out “just fine.” This surfaces the first uncomfortable truth:

Competence developed through survival adaptation is not the same thing as integrated resilience developed through calibrated challenge, support, and recovery.

I am all for teaching your children to choose and even love the hard path. I wonder, however, how much of our childhoods were parents being intentional about raising resilient and strong kids, and how much of it was simply our parents doing the best they could with what they had: their own unhealed trauma, their own struggles, and their own pain.

Vox Day calls Boomer parenting “appalling,” and there are certainly Gen Xers for whom that assessment fits. In my own life, though, the transmission pattern was more complicated. I learned functionality but not care, rules but no relationship. Compliance was valued far more than seeking. In fact, it was deeply ingrained in me that as a female, I was destined to be the weaker and lesser sidekick of a man, who, if I performed well enough, would love me.

These attitudes and ideas did not form in a vacuum, and a simple perusal of my family’s history shows a pattern. My grandfather, born in 1924, was a tormented beast of a man who rained such unspeakable violence on his wife and children in his constant drunken rages that at one point, the kids hid their mother in a cupboard in the barn for several days, sneaking her food so that he wouldn’t find her and kill her.

One of his children, at the ripe old age of about 8, hid in a tree as his own father stood underneath it with a shotgun, calling his name, too drunk to realize the target he was searching for with his murderous intent was right above him. No one asks the question of why my grandmother, who suffered multiple miscarriages and yet still gave birth to 11 children in 13 years, was always pregnant. The answer is as horrible as it is obvious. He eventually died after years in a VA hospital, numbed out by Haldol and Mellaril and hollowed out by a lifetime of alcoholism and whatever demons nobody in his generation knew how to name.

My other grandfather also spent most of his time in the bar, while my grandmother took in sewing to make ends meet. I remember a man with perfect hair who made the best pancakes and sausage ever, and yet that was pretty much his sole contribution to “being grandpa.” Mostly, he sat in his chair, watching sports, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It wasn’t until many years later that my mother admitted he had been drunk most of the time we were there.

These stories might sound horrifying, but when dysfunction is repeated across a family system, the children inside it experience it as normal because they have no other reference point. Is it any wonder that the children in these two families grew up to be rigid, emotionally absent parents who managed to feed and clothe their children while also inadvertently ensuring that they knew how little they were valued?

Agency is a HUGE deal; we always, always have free will to make different choices. Orientation, however, tells us what choices are available and whether they are valid. We do what we see. We model what we’ve seen modeled. We don’t HAVE to; we can seek other options and ways of doing things, but that requires self-honesty, intentionality, and conscious choices.

These are not the childhoods that naturally produce emotionally available adults capable of secure attachment, vulnerability, and calibrated support. How would they know how to model those things?

Many Gen Xers, especially older Gen Xers, were raised by Silent Generation parents who had themselves grown up under the shadow of the Depression, World War II, economic uncertainty, rigid social expectations, alcoholism, and largely untreated trauma. Younger Gen Xers were increasingly raised by older Boomers, but the transmission pattern remained similar: survival-oriented systems produced adults who often knew how to provide materially, without necessarily knowing how to connect emotionally.

The generational lines here are blurrier than the cultural mythology admits. Generations do not reproduce in neat blocks, with one cohort simply giving birth to the next. Historical orientation moves through families on a delay. What matters is the transmission pattern: emotionally deprived systems often produce overcorrections in the generations that follow.

Many of us Gen Xers viscerally understand the concept of a larger-than-life dad we secretly wanted nothing more than to connect with… and never could. Reba McEntire's song “The Greatest Man I Never Knew,” released at the height of Gen X's coming of age, was a hit because we could relate. It describes a father and a child who lived under the same roof and greeted each other every day without ever making real contact, and a child who learned only after his death how much she had mattered to him. It said the thing we all understood and couldn't name about our own dads.

One of the hallmarks of Gen X is that what happens in the family stays there, because no one cares about your story. Whatever happened to you is in the past; there’s no point in talking about it. Get over it. But in our effort not to create excuses, we created walls and secrets. We made barriers to growth and healing.

Obviously, this is not every Gen Xer’s experience. It happened enough, however, that Reba’s song about not being able to connect with her father reached #3 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.

This is where the contradiction starts to make sense.

Gen X knows what it’s like to lose publicly, to get picked last, get laughed at, to be treated as disposable. We know what it’s like to only get noticed when we succeed, and shamed when we fail. We know what real exclusion, humiliation rituals, invisibility, and isolation feel like. Even without realizing it, we shifted to ensure that our children would never know that because we instinctively understand it isn’t healthy at that level.

…but we overcorrected.

The Outcome: We Struggled to Build a Healthy Replacement

The impulse, the goal, was a noble one: ensure that our kids know they matter. That we are present for them, we support them, and we are rooting for them. Of course, we never fixed our own stuff first, and never realized how far we were going.

One plausible explanation is that things like participation trophies functioned as emotional buffering, whether the adults creating those systems consciously understood them that way or not. Adults who remembered humiliation, exclusion, invisibility, and conditional worth attempted to build systems where children would never experience those things at all.

The problem is that developmental systems require calibrated friction. Consistently remove manageable friction, and people lose opportunities to learn the difference between discomfort, failure, frustration, and actual harm.

Instead of teaching our kids to deal with discomfort in a healthy way, we increasingly created systems designed to prevent them from experiencing it. The “unfairness” that we felt as kids had to go too; our children would not be subjected to it.

We were locked out of our houses and had no structure, so we swung toward helicopter parenting, a practice usually credited to Boomers and carried forward by us, and we overscheduled our children’s every moment; no need for them to be bored. We removed competition because we didn’t want them to be excluded. And we worried so much about how our kids felt that we often failed to teach them how to function.

To be fair, some of these changes corrected legitimate problems. But we went too far. We removed friction and healthy embarrassment, and in doing so, we also removed major sources of information leading to growth.

The kicker is that we didn’t always know how to actually connect with our kids, either. So we filled their schedules, parked them in front of screens, and outsourced too much of their emotional development to schools, coaches, activities, and entertainment. We could be intensely involved in managing our children’s lives without necessarily knowing how to be emotionally present inside them, and we thought it was all the same thing.

People who do not examine how they adapted to one dysfunctional system will eventually build those adaptations into the next system they control.

Developmental systems and operational ones are not separate categories. The same distorted feedback mechanisms that damage families eventually damage institutions, churches, leadership structures, and organizations.

And that brings us to the operational tie-in. Without friction, groups lose their calibration to reality, resulting in orientation drift. The members now treat discomfort as dysfunction, to be “fixed.” We wanted to fix the stunted emotional system we were raised in, but what we did was create a culture where emotional discomfort carries moral weight.

Not all discomfort is trauma, criticism isn’t always abuse, and exclusion isn’t always oppression. Hierarchy doesn’t always mean domination, and embarrassment isn’t always harmful. Operational systems require accurate feedback loops, but we took those out too, in an effort to spare our children what we went through.

Now the generation that helped remove the friction runs the systems that require it. Gen X holds the eldership, the boards, the command billets, and the leadership layers of the organizations we say we care about. Whatever we failed to resolve in ourselves is built into the feedback loops of those organizations, and the people operating inside them did not choose it.

The Opportunity: What Can We Learn?

This is where people tend to split into caricatures and absolutes. One side romanticizes the past and leans into the Gen X mythology, and the other romanticizes therapeutic overcorrection, holding that all discomfort is harmful.

What if both systems are wrong?

The older system often (not always) produced emotionally disconnected adults who struggled with vulnerability, emotional literacy, intimacy, and self-awareness. The newer system increasingly produces adults who struggle with resilience, frustration tolerance, competence calibration, and stress adaptation.

Neither of these systems works very well, and I think most people intuitively already know this. That’s why the discourse around Gen X is both conflicted and defended. We simultaneously glorify our childhoods while joking about surviving them. We criticize the younger generations while refusing to admit that we expanded the emotion-based scaffolding that they’re operating in.

We know something is wrong, but we can’t seem to agree on what.

wrote a stunningly good piece on this recently, pointing out that “whenever you criticize [Gen X] for something, they throw huge temper tantrums online, or go into denial mode.” She’s not wrong, and yet I think it’s worth asking: Why is that?

I think Gen X correctly recognized that children do need more emotional support. They need guidance and structure, balanced with safety and room to fail. We were right about that. Where we went wrong was confusing resilience-building with cruelty, and then trying to eliminate all of it from developmental systems.

Resilience is built through supported exposure to manageable difficulty. Push the limits, yes, but frame failure as a necessary and supported part of growth. Success is not a currency to be traded for love and approval, but the result of many supported failures.

Healthy systems require support without indulgence, challenge without humiliation, feedback without shame, structure without domination, independence without abandonment, emotional literacy without emotional rule, and failure without loss of belonging. That’s a lot of work. It is a harder system to build because it requires calibration. Neglect is easy; you can just do nothing. Overprotection is also relatively easy. You remove every obstacle you can reach and run interference against what’s left. It sounds exhausting (and it can be), but it’s still easier because it doesn’t require you to look at yourself.

The real answer means figuring out which obstacles develop people and which ones harm them. And understanding that requires you to examine your own adaptations first. Which traits are genuine strengths? Which are survival mechanisms that served you once but now distort your relationships? Which experiences taught competence? Which taught you that asking for help was dangerous? Which lessons should you preserve? Which ones should stop with you?

If we want healthier families, institutions, churches, organizations, and operational groups, we have to stop treating this conversation as a binary choice between hardness and softness or one generation’s model over another. It’s too primitive a framework and doesn’t serve the deeper questions. We aren’t even asking the deeper questions, let alone answering them.

That brings us back to the original question:

What kind of system produces adults who are emotionally grounded, reality-oriented, resilient under stress, capable of receiving correction, capable of self-reflection, and capable of tolerating discomfort without collapse?

That’s the goal. Neither neglect nor overprotection produces it, and the balance costs more than either of them. A generation cannot build a healthy replacement system until it understands which parts of its own formation were strengths, which were adaptations, and which were wounds.

We Gen Xers knew enough about what hurt us to avoid reproducing it, but we didn’t fully understand what made us strong, so we removed both. We knew enough to react, but not enough to reorient. Now, as we move into the position of society’s elders, we have an opportunity to do something hard:

We can stop romanticizing the dysfunction that formed us while holding on to the competence we gained from surviving it. We can teach people to tolerate discomfort without teaching them that performance is the price of belonging. Most importantly, we can examine the adaptations that we brought with us to adulthood and installed in the organizations we lead.

Orientation is inherited until someone interrupts it. That decision belongs to us, and it is overdue.

All four courses, as well as everything else in the Premium Content Library, are included in your paid membership. No additional purchase required.

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When I started writing The Shepard Scale in 2021, I was trying to answer a question that doesn’t often get asked in this way:

How do you become someone who is genuinely difficult to deceive?

Plenty of people answer that question politically, socially, or emotionally. You'll find endless articles about avoiding toxic people, spotting narcissists, or winning arguments online, and yet that’s not what I’m pursuing.

I’m asking what makes a person like you or me structurally resistant to manipulation.

That makes it a lot more difficult to answer, because the answer we’re looking for can’t be summed up in a viral TikTok (and thank God for that!). It’s not a “life hack” or whatever other phrase is trending for common sense these days. Being structurally less susceptible to manipulation, behavior steering, and deception means thinking in a way that changes how you evaluate people, organizations, information, and especially yourself.

This Wednesday, I am releasing four courses that teach you exactly how to build that very structure, and these four courses make up the pieces of a system.

The Grey Cell Protocols: GCP 101

Learn to think structurally instead of emotionally.

This course introduces the tenets of GCP, which is an applied counterintelligence doctrine meant to help you build the structure that makes you harder to deceive, harder to manipulate, and less likely to find yourself wasting time and effort in a group that will eventually fail.

We cover concepts like:

• Orientation

• Structural trust

• Trauma language as a vetting tool

• Emotional vs structural thinking

• The archetypes of infiltration, how to see them, and how to counter them

• Counter-narrative control

By the end of the course, you'll have a practical plan to take back to your group and start using right away.

Deception Analysis for Vetting

Learn to recognize manipulation before it becomes your problem.

We often trust too quickly, ask the wrong questions, or ignore subtle warning signs.

This course teaches you how to evaluate people more accurately through structured observation rather than intuition.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify deception red flags

• Separate appearance from orientation

• Recognize manipulation strategies

• Evaluate trustworthiness

• Avoid common vetting mistakes

• Make better decisions about who should—and shouldn’t—have your trust

Whether you’re choosing leaders, volunteers, employees, friends, or business partners, the ability to vet well is one of the highest-leverage skills you can develop. This teaches you how to see what you need to see in their language.

Psycholinguistic Profiling

Learn to hear what people reveal without realizing they’re revealing it.

People leak information constantly because language reflects thought.

This course teaches you how to answer the question “Who is this person?”

You’ll learn to recognize:

• Linguistic leakage

• Hidden assumptions

• Rationalizations

• Identity statements

• Manipulative framing

• Changes in language that signal changes in thinking

• Unmet emotional needs

It’s not enough to know whether someone is lying; you need to also know what they want and need, because that’s where an infiltrator will attack them.

Advanced GCP: Applying the System

Put everything together into a complete operational framework.

Advanced GCP is where the individual skills become a system.

You’ll learn how to integrate structural thinking, deception analysis, and psycholinguistic profiling into real-world decision-making.

Topics will include:

• Complex organizational dynamics

• Advanced infiltration patterns

• Building resilient teams

• Vetting yourself first

• Performing an “autopsy” of your own motives and needs

• Stress-testing people and systems

Why Become a Paid Subscriber?

The free newsletter will always contain ideas worth thinking about, but the paid subscription is where you learn how to apply them.

Every worksheet, case study, course, diagnostic, and framework I publish is designed around a single objective: helping you perceive reality more accurately and make better decisions.

Whether you’re protecting your family, leading a church, building an organization, hiring employees, evaluating relationships, or simply trying to understand yourself better, these tools are designed to help you think more clearly in situations where clarity matters most.

If you join before July 15, you’ll receive all four courses as they’re released as well as the entire Premium Content Library.

A monthly subscription is $15 per month, or you can choose the annual plan for $99—a 45% savings, which works out to just $8.25 per month.

In the end, every decision comes down to one question:

Does the structure you’re using lead you closer to reality or further away from it?

That’s what these courses are designed to help you answer.

Become a Member

This article started when I read this note from :

Me: I’m not convinced that one political party more closely aligns to the ethics of Christianity than the other

My wife: without missing a beat* that’s probably because one idolizes self-preservation and the other idolizes self-expression which means both have the idol of self at the center.

That’s a view of the battlefield that we don’t often admit, and regardless of your faith tradition or lack thereof, there’s an important concept here.

People keep trying to turn politics into debates about policy, moral alignment, and which side is closer to the truth. Orientation asks a different question:

What is the system calibrated to?

Behavior follows values. Values follow orientation. Orientation follows a reference point. If the reference point is self, the system eventually serves the self, regardless of how moral its language sounds.

The False Dichotomy

The modern political binary sells a convenient delusion, and each side says it the same way:

Our side is the moral high ground, and their side is a moral hazard.

Orientation looks beneath that. A system can defend moral boundaries while still treating the self as its operational reference point. Preserving status, tribe, identity, or power can look remarkably similar to defending truth, even when truth has become secondary.

The opposite drift exists as well. A system can celebrate freedom, authenticity, and personal expression until the self becomes the standard by which reality itself is judged.

When you strip away the branding, you find two versions of the same posture.

• Preservation of status, tribe, or identity masquerading as righteousness.

• Self-expression masquerading as liberation.

Two approaches, same center of gravity. Both sides increasingly function as though their own tribe is the final interpreter of truth, but if you want to identify a system’s reference point, look at what it rewards.

Increasingly, both major political coalitions appear to calibrate around self rather than an external reference point. One political coalition increasingly rewards preservation of tribe, identity, and internal loyalty. The other increasingly rewards personal autonomy, subjective identity, and removal of external constraints.

Neither orientation remains stable because both calibrate against something that constantly moves: the self.

The Operational Layer

If you want to understand why political tribes behave the way they do, don't stop at their policies. Ask what functions as their fixed point. Politics operates as a religion here, because these questions have existential, even religious answers:

• What must be protected?

• What deserves sacrifice?

• What earns belonging?

• What becomes unforgivable?

• What “truths” are actually negotiable, and who gets to negotiate?

These questions give you the orientation map. And in both parties, that map points in the same direction: inward.

Self becomes both the compass and the object being served. That’s why their moral output looks different but rhymes; it comes from the same root.

The Hard Truth

We like to assume that whatever side is opposite to ours lacks all moral high ground. In reality, both sides built their systems on the same foundation: self-referential morality.

If your ethics are dictated by a political platform, something besides truth has become your reference point.

And that’s how entire communities end up treating political allegiance as spiritual identity: because both systems have inadvertently agreed on one premise: the self is ultimate.

Bottom Line

People oriented toward reality tend to refuse to let political tribes define what is true. That doesn’t mean we are rejecting politics; it just has its proper place. Reality has to remain the fixed point, NOT the party in question. Changing parties is fashionable and makes for dramatic podcasts and fodder on X, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like changing sports teams because you moved. There will be folks who say that you were never really a fan. Your values, however, are still driven by whatever your reference point is. If that shifts, so will your values.

We like to think that our political positions come from careful logical reasoning, but they often don’t. Sometimes they’re visceral because they’re deeply personal.

When your emotions become your calibration standard, your orientation has drifted. And yet we often tend to build our politics around our own situations and our own feelings:

• “I’m anti-gun because I know someone who used a gun to kill themselves.”

• “I’m pro-open borders because my stepmom is from Mexico.”

• “I hate ______ group because one of them harmed me.”

• “My experience proves that men/women are…”

• "We have to support our side no matter what, but I cannot explain why because researching it deeply is inconvenient and uncomfortable.”

People rarely admit these out loud. If they did the self-work to ask why they hold a position, and actually dug beneath the answer that Self immediately supplies, they’d often face a gross truth. The position traces to something personal. A wound, a relationship, or maybe a grievance. Feeling got relabeled as principle, and the decision stopped tracking reality. Instead, it tracks the self, the actual thing functioning as deity.

Self fails as a reference point for a mechanical reason. You can edit it. You can lie to yourself about it; in fact, we are all lying to ourselves all the time. Self moves with your mood, your wounds, your situation, and even your relationships or groups. It’s often shifting based on what protects or benefits you.

Anything you can rewrite to suit yourself will never hold a steady position, especially if you’re never intentional about evaluating and refining it. A reference point has to sit outside you and stay fixed while you move around it. This is why calibration to reality is so critical. It’s why trust must be structural to work.

If you simply ask, “Why do I believe this?” the self supplies a clean answer on demand, and that answer will always exonerate you, justify your conduct, and paint you as the hero. Go beneath that, and ask what that same belief will do under a high price.

Take one of your visceral positions and find the point where holding it costs you money, status, a relationship, or membership in your tribe. A belief anchored to reality will survive that cost. The bill comes, and you pay it because reality matters more than comfort. It survives recalibration because it is itself calibrated to reality.

A belief anchored to self moves to protect you, because you are more important than the value you claim to hold. In fact, in a self-anchored system, nothing is more important than you.

The idol doesn’t change based on whether it’s red or blue. As long as self sits at the center, the system produces exactly the leaders, conflicts, and distortions it was built for.

You can’t fix your political party; regardless of which one you claim to be part of, the truth is that it’s corrupt. Its incentive structure rewards loyalty over truth, image over honesty, and power over principle. Loyalty to a party or person always ends badly, and that’s true whether you’re loyal to a political party, an ideology, or a bad leader.

Start looking at your own positions. Where do they come from? What anchors them?

Would you still believe it if it cost you everything?

If this challenged the way you think about politics, the next step is learning to recognize the reference points behind every decision.

That’s what I write about here every week.

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For the last five weeks, we’ve been taking groups apart and showing you the failure mechanisms in both yourself and the group’s structure. The point of learning how a group breaks is so that you know how to build one that doesn’t. To that, let’s look at how the build takes all of that into consideration.

Follow the Path and Reverse It

Start with where we started this series: Trust is a structural property of a group, and every failure of trust traces back to a failure of design. Groups come apart because they were built (or changed over time) in a way that made the failure inevitable, and the design flaw can be traced back to whoever built it.

From there, we moved to the people you let in. Conventional vetting checks whether you like someone, whether other people will vouch for them, and whether their background fits, and a capable person can meet all of those even if they’re a threat. Deception analysis can find what you need to know in the words they use. You set aside your own feelings and look at the evidence that they themselves give you.

Next, we read the same statement with a different question: who that person is. The words that carry deception also carry a profile; the drivers and needs underneath their words. Even a completely truthful statement can still tell you important information about who you’re dealing with.

We zoomed out from the person to the group because attacks go after the group’s orientation to reality. Narrative distortion, leverage, and tempo control can dismantle a group in ways that everyone will blame on personalities rather than the real culprit. You have to understand how those tactics work, and run continuous checks for them.

And finally, last week we turned all of that onto the person who always passes all of your vetting checks: you. Reading the structure that you are building will show you what you actually value, regardless of what you tell yourself.

If you read all those essays in order, you can see exactly how groups get infiltrated or destroy themselves. If you reverse them, you can see a build order.

A screened group has a vetting process to get in, and once you’re in, it’s almost a free-for-all. Trust is fully given, access is less closely monitored than it should be, and everyone assumes that the people there are committed and capable.

A deliberately built group is designed so that trust is the reward for a properly built structure.

You vet yourself first, because your orientation becomes the architecture, and everything will inherit it. You design for structural trust instead of fostering emotional trust based on likability. Read the people you bring in, and keep reading them no matter how long they’re in the group. Guard the group’s shared picture of reality the same way you would guard anything someone wants to take from you.

If you do these things, trust shows up on its own because you build the conditions that create it. If you assume your good intentions are enough, then you will have the predictable result that we’ve talked about a thousand times here over the last five years, and it will not be a good one.

That is the doctrine, start to finish, and the courses opening on July 15 will teach it in full so that you can start deploying it immediately. Here’s how they are laid out and how to approach them.

The Courses

GCP 101 - This is the foundation of everything. It explains why groups fail by design, what structural trust really is, what orientation is and why it matters so much, and why the build starts with you. If you’re new to GCP, start here; if you’re already familiar with the framework, this may be a good refresher.

Next, you pick up the tools. Deception Analysis for Vetting teaches you to read a statement for where it’s false, incomplete, or hiding information. Psycholinguistic Profiling teaches you to read a person’s language for who they are and what drives them.

Advanced GCP is where you take the knowledge and the tools together and start applying them. I will show you how to run them on the group you already have, how to hold your group’s orientation together, and how to vet yourself. It assumes you understand GCP 101, and then puts the tools to work.

A group stays sound when it is built to tell the truth about itself, built to detect pressure early, and built so that trust has to be earned by structure rather than assumed by warm and fuzzy feelings.

That is the full doctrine in sequence:

1. Start with yourself

2. Build for structural trust

3. Read the people you bring in

4. Keep reading them after they are in

5. Protect the group’s orientation to reality as if its existence depends on it, because it does.

The four courses opening on July 15 are designed to take that doctrine out of abstraction and into application. GCP 101 gives you the foundation. Deception Analysis for Vetting and Psycholinguistic Profiling give you the tools. Advanced GCP shows you how to apply all of it to a real group under real conditions.

They are included with a paid subscription because none of these pieces work properly in isolation. A paid subscription is $99 per year right now, which gives you the full Premium Content Library, the case studies, and all four courses the day they open. On July 15, that price goes up.

If you want access at the current rate, become a member before then and keep $99/year for as long as you stay subscribed.

Become a Member

The full doctrine is built to be applied. If you want the courses, the case studies, and the Premium Content Library at the current rate, become a member before July 15.

Welcome, new readers! The Shepard Scale is where I publicly work on the Grey Cell Protocols, an applied counterintelligence doctrine for building groups that survive compromised and contested environments.

For four weeks, you've been learning to read other people. Now we will flip the script and turn these tactics on the one person who never has to go through your vetting process: you.

It’s a strange paradox that we humans find ourselves in, where we spend inordinate amounts of time scanning our environments and groups for threats but ignore the biggest threat of all. The rules we operate on came from us, and the chain of who we answer to is self-designed. For some reason, however, the standards we apply to others never quite apply to ourselves, and yet that is where they must be applied with the most rigor. Too often, we judge others on outcomes while judging ourselves on intent.

A few weeks ago, I said that anyone who wants to compromise your group can read the structure you built and find your weak points in it, often before you can.

That means you are a target, just as Joe, the guy in our deception and profiling exercises, was a subject. Someone working against your group can work backward from what you built to what drives you, hunting for the need they can leverage. The only way to close that opening is to get there first. You must read yourself the way an adversary would, through the thing you made.

You can't read yourself the way you read Joe; you're standing inside your own baseline, so your distortions feel like good judgment because you can explain them. Your blind spots will tell you that you’re operating in clarity because blind spots are, by definition, the things you can’t see.

Ask yourself directly whether you have a problem, and you'll get an honest-sounding answer that protects the problem. Introspection is the one tool that fails here, because the thing doing the looking is the thing you're trying to look at. Just like an addict will tell you that they can quit whenever they want, you’ll tell yourself that you are seeing clearly.

This might sound like a catch-22, but there is a way to get past all of this and find your own weaknesses. As odd as it may sound, you have to treat yourself as a subject you cannot interview honestly because you won’t be honest with yourself. In short, you have to treat yourself as a liar.

Every single one of us is a liar when it comes to certain things about ourselves; it’s a fact that we all have to wrestle with. You cannot change what you cannot admit, and you cannot admit what needs changing until you’re willing to see that you’ve been lying to yourself about its existence.

What does this look like in practical terms? Do we start beating ourselves up? Of course not. In fact, emotion has no place here because emotion is part of what got us here. Set it aside, and let’s analyze the evidence.

Look At the Structure Itself

Since we know that the group orientation is patterned after its leader and you can analyze a group’s structure to find the leader’s weakness, that’s where we start.

I’ll give you the first two questions to show you how it works.

In what areas are you as a leader never challenged or questioned, and is that because you’re right, or because members know better?

Find the subject that no one ever disagrees with you on. Maybe it’s one of your decisions, or a rule you’ve put in place. Start with whether they own it too or are just complying with you. In a group that actually agrees and is properly aligned, anyone can argue the case, and a few of them can argue the other side and tell you why the group still ultimately chose to agree. In a group that's merely complying, people can give you the conclusion but not the reasoning behind it, because they either don’t understand the reasoning or don’t agree with it.

Then turn it on yourself, which is the important part. Picture someone making a serious, competent challenge in that area tomorrow, and note your immediate pre-sanitized reaction. If it's some version of "good, let's hear it," the alignment is probably real. If you find yourself designing your answer while they’re still talking, or if you’re feeling exposed and defensive, then you have your answer. You made disagreement expensive somewhere along the way, and you did it because some part of you can't sit with being challenged in that spot. That need is load-bearing in your group now.

The next step is to find out what need of yours is driving that, and you do that by asking “Why?” The first few rounds will seem reasonable, but keep going. The next few will seem circular because it’s your reaction guarding itself. You know you’re done when you get to an answer that stops being a fact about the decision and directly names a fear about yourself.

Here’s what a sample might look like.

• Why was I so quick to defend it and slow to listen? Because I know they’re wrong.

• Why am I so sure? Because I am the one who made the decision.

• Then why am I bothered that they’re asking the question? Because if they turn out to be right, I was wrong out loud in front of my people.

• Why is that a problem? Because being the one who’s right is how I keep my standing here.

• Why is my standing connected to being right? Because I am afraid they won’t follow me if I am ever wrong.

You see the switch here; we’re moving from the decision or position itself toward a question of your own value. Would you still have value if you weren’t the smartest person in the room? Does your human value depend on your group defining it and maintaining it? That’s the need.

Different leaders bottom out in different places: fear of being exposed, fear of being unnecessary, left behind, or even rejected. The method works regardless of what fear you eventually find under the rocks you’re turning up.

In this case, you could even go a level deeper and ask Why is it so important to me that they follow me? That’s an incredibly difficult question.

Keep asking why until you get an answer that is not about the situation anymore, but about you.

The second question is just as sharp, just as uncomfortable.

Look at the person you rely on the most in your group, and ask: Did I give them this position because the mission needed it filled by them, or because they meet a need in me?

Before you chuckle and say of course the mission needs them, stop and sit in that for a moment. Skip the question of how much it would personally hurt to lose them because we aren’t looking at emotion right now. Instead, look at data.

A need will show up in the accommodations; you might let them get away with things others cannot (and you have a perfectly good reason for that). You might let them have access they don’t really need. There are unspoken and unwritten exceptions for this person that wouldn’t fly if it were anyone else.

When you have multiple exceptions and explanations pointing to or benefiting one person, that is a pattern, and that belongs to you.

Then look at whether they can be replaced, and at what you've done about it. A mission-run group builds a backup for any critical seat, including your own. If this person is a single point of failure and you've never moved to fix that, that’s time for another set of “why” questions, because the honest answer is often that you didn't want to.

To check one more thing, think about training their replacement right now, or making them one of several capable people instead of your right hand. If your instant reaction is that it would be a loss (other than any emotional connection you might have), you just found the gateway to surfacing the need.

Let’s apply another set of “why” questions to drill it down.

• Why does making them replaceable feel like a loss? Because nobody else can do what they do.

• Why can nobody else do it? Because I never let anyone else get close enough to learn it.

• Why didn’t I? Because they’re the one person I don’t have to manage, the one I can hand something to and stop thinking about it.

• Why do I need one person like that this badly? Because the alternative is either carrying it all myself or losing control of it.

And there it is. What you’re protecting is the relief of not having to carry it all, while also protecting the control you think you have over it. What you might not realize is that the person you brought into the structure to make you feel better about yourself or carry out your wishes without supervision is the single biggest target besides you. An adversary can get to you by getting to them.

Is This Enough?

No. I showed you the method, and those two questions will probably surface a place or two where a driver of yours is passing as a sound decision. A real self-vetting runs that process across every structural choice you’ve made: who has access, what you measure, what you avoid, where and who you trust. More importantly, it runs that process until the “why” is reached; until you find the why, you can’t (and won’t) change anything.

As you saw in our why ladders, our brains will rationalize whatever we find unless we push past the defenses and keep going. That’s why it has to be a structural part of your own character, a process that you run many, many times.

That method is the core of Advanced GCP, one of the courses opening July 15. Reading other people is the easy half. Reading yourself truthfully, without a personality test, a neatly created one-size-fits-all package, is much harder.

Next Week: How a Sound Group Gets Built. We put the whole thing together. Subscribe now to get it for free in your inbox.

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For the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about reading people: both whether their account is truthful and who they are underneath it. You need to understand both and be able to do both because the most effective attacks on a group go after the members’ ability to see reality.

In other words, if you miss the cues in someone’s language, you will not see the reality about that person clearly, and that will lead you to make potentially dangerous decisions about them, such as letting them into your group when you shouldn’t, or not dealing with the signs that something has changed in their orientation.

commented something on a previous piece that’s worth mentioning here because it sets up a foundational piece of the mindset.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I’ve written about the complacency that comes with thinking you’ve handled all your threats and how that’s a gateway to groupthink. But today I want to talk about how disorientation and infiltration go hand in hand.

You must understand concepts like validation, drivers, and transactional interactions because they form the basis for how this works. A capable adversary, or even someone already in your group, leaves the arguments and the decisions alone and goes after the raw material they're built from: the people and what drives them. They poison what the group believes is true, they lean on how its people see each other, and they let the group do the rest of the damage to itself, because in most cases, it will.

This is what infiltration looks like far more often than the version in the movies. There’s usually nobody stealing documents or engaging in some kind of shady subterfuge. It often just ends up coming down to humans being humans, letting their own needs and drivers get in the way of what they’re doing.

Since we are specifically talking about malicious intent today, however, we’ll dig into how that comes into the group once the wrong person gets in.

As you read these, I want you to think about the groups you’re in, whether they’re political or not. What do you notice about these things? How many of them are present to some degree in your group? What, if anything, has your group done to stop it? CAN you stop it? Do you know how?

How to Disorient a Group

There are a few things that someone can do to disrupt the group, and each one looks harmless if you view it as a singularity; once you catch the pattern, however, it becomes much more insidious.

Narrative Distortion

This is when you are attacking the story the group believes about itself. This story is often already a combo of mythos and exaggeration, designed by people with unmet needs.

Scrambling a group rarely takes an outright lie, and coming up with the lie and its contextual backstory is often far more work than just using what’s already there. You give the group selective truth, two versions of the same event, a little ambiguity in the right place, and you let it work. Once every fact has a competing fact and every account has a counter-account, the group can't settle on what happened, which means they will spend their time arguing about that rather than making a plan of action.

Leverage

The second way a group can be disrupted is leverage, and it runs straight off what we covered last week. Everybody has drivers, and drivers are levers. If you know someone needs to feel important, or is afraid of being cut out, or carries an old grievance about being told what to do, you can hand them a version of events shaped to that exact nerve, and they'll take it as the truth. Do that to five people in a group of twenty, and now the group is five people looking at five private versions of the same situation, each version bent around what that person needed to see.

That’s not even counting the part where you can use the classic tactic of using their private behavior against them. Which, by the way, is also a form of weaponizing the validation/shame balance.

Other forms of leverage include using action currency, which is the social capital members earn or spend through visible effort, initiative, or operational contribution. The keyword there, by the way, is visible.

As you can see, there is no One Way(tm) to use these tactics; even though you might have a leverage ‘umbrella,’ what goes under that is only limited by your creativity and the material you can find to work with.

Tempo

One more thing that gets used to disrupt a group is their tempo. You can keep them busy with a small trickle of crises and contradictions. To see this in a different arena, let me give you an example.

Let’s say that I have a counseling client who says she wants to heal from the trauma she endured throughout her childhood and young adulthood. Each week, however, she comes in with a litany of things that went wrong in her marriage that week, or the things that went wrong at work, or the ways she self-sabotaged. What ends up happening is constant management of whatever the new crisis is that week; no work ever gets done on any of the deeper issues driving all of that.

I can either keep getting stuck in that cycle, or I can stop it, step back, and ask what is really happening in our dynamic. I can reorient to the truth, namely, that we are not actually achieving the goals that we agreed to pursue. You might also recognize this if you're spending time fighting with your spouse about how you fight, rather than working through the meat of whatever issues got you there. While these examples come from a two-person “group,” it also works at scale.

Someone who is looking to disrupt your group can use any variation on these three things, because once it gets started, the process runs itself. Once a group gets disoriented and doesn’t catch it, they will start to distrust each other: structurally, because they can no longer see consistency in the system, and emotionally, because the feel-good emotions are no longer present. The distrust makes people start withholding information and concerns, and that creates more distrust. Eventually, the person who started it all can disappear because it’ll keep going without them there to fan the flames. If they’re especially devious, they can give a reason for their withdrawal that lets them appear more virtuous than others:

I just can’t be part of a group that’s so rife with infighting. I want to do real work and not deal with drama.

This is where it ties back to where we started. Trust grows out of a system that produces predictable outcomes, honest feedback, and a shared sense of what's real. Disorientation destroys all three. Outcomes stop being predictable, feedback gets polluted, and the shared picture comes apart. Attack a group's orientation, and you are attacking their ability to maintain the conditions necessary for trust. The group loses its trust as expected, and everyone will go on to their next groups, convinced it was a people problem. It was structural the whole time.

How Do You Fight It?

Reading a statement for deception and reading a person for who they are is one of your best tools in how you fight this. Those skills belong in the group and are part of your internal culture as much as they belong at the door before you let someone in.

Narrative distortion becomes clear when you can read the accounts people are giving you. Leverage can be caught and stopped when you know your people's drivers well enough to notice which one is being played. You're using the same skills as any ‘bad actor,’ but you’re doing it as a constant process on everyone, not just the new folks, as part of a gatekeeping strategy.

That’s the work Advanced GCP is built around, and it’s one of the courses opening July 15. The readings from the last two weeks are the tools; advanced application is knowing where to point them, how to tell manufactured confusion from the ordinary kind, and how to keep your group deciding and moving as one in a chaotic environment, preferably without giving in to wild paranoia.

So, of course, vet your people. It’s a big deal, and you should keep doing it. Just don’t stop the day they get offered membership or a job. The thing most worth protecting in your group is the shared picture of reality that every decision rides on, and no traditional vetting process will show that to you, nor will it teach you how to create the conditions for it.

There’s one more place this whole problem starts, and it’s the one nobody wants to look at. It starts at the top, with the person whose own orientation the entire group inherits. We’ll look at exactly how to look at your own orientation next.

Next Week: The First Person You Vet Is Yourself. Subscribe now to get it for free in your inbox.

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Four courses are dropping July 15! If you become a paid subscriber now, not only will you have access to them all, but you’ll lock in your price before it goes up. Right now, becoming a member is only $99 for the whole year.

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You can also get a copy of my book, co-written with Donald Vandergriff, Mission Command and the Grey Cell Protocols: Creating the Conditions for Decentralized Leadership, and see the arguments behind GCP.

Welcome new readers! The Shepard Scale exists to explore the intersection of counterintelligence, trauma psychology, and systems thinking to help you build more resilient and infiltration-proof groups.

Please note that Leila and Janice are both composites drawn from many different clients with similar stories. Details have been altered, combined, or omitted to protect confidentiality, but every dynamic described here is real. Today we are exploring not just the viability of “daddy issue girls” in your group, but a deeper and even more pervasive threat.

***

Leila is folded into an upright fetal position on a chair in my counseling office. She is pretty, employed, and well-dressed. Her hair and nails are perfect, and she has a certain type of surface energy that comes across as self-assurance but is immediately recognizable as a facade. She always takes her shoes off, sometimes tucking her feet under her as if to make herself as small as possible. She is both brilliant and idiotic, street smart and immaturely naive.

She is what you’d call a hot mess.

Listening to her story, I hear things that I have heard a hundred times over: the sure-fire formula for a damaged and broken human being. Grooming by her second and third foster dads before the age of 10; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse spanning much of her childhood; conflicting spiritual messages gleaned from a home that preached religious ideals but didn't live them, and a list of male suitors in her adulthood who engaged in various forms of harm. The "best" one merely cheated on her and then claimed she was crazy for recognizing it. The worst one did other, more disgusting things that no human should ever do to another, things that the average person's brain would not even be able to conjure because they exist so far beyond ordinary cruelty.

She tells me some of these most horrible things in a whisper while staring at the floor. It took many sessions to get here, and she has never said all of the words before.

She wonders aloud if maybe she was being overly jealous for ending her “best” relationship over his cheating, and says that if you can’t be there for someone when they’re at their worst, is that even love?

She says she is prone to isolating and suicidal thoughts. She asks me what the point of trying is, but also doesn’t want to live like this anymore.

“Why does this keep happening to me?”

When you read that question, what emotion did you feel?

Did you immediately conclude that her biggest problem is that she is blaming everyone else? Did you decide that she is simply refusing accountability? Did you mentally file her away under some category of damaged people who never take responsibility for their own lives?

After all, there’s an entire section of the internet that has a label for women like this.

Daddy issues.

The phrase functions as both diagnosis and dismissal. It tells us everything and nothing at the same time.

Leila is the woman who repeats destructive relationship patterns, who seems drawn to unhealthy men. She becomes dependent on attention, confuses validation and enabling with love, or mistakes intensity for intimacy. She makes decisions that appear to violate common sense. Sometimes she breaks herself, but she is equally good at breaking other people, and there is a long line of them in her wake.

The more severe Leilas self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, sex, ideology, or whatever else allows them to stop feeling for a few hours.

This Leila isn’t quite there yet. She is highly intelligent and deeply curious, and the fact that she is sitting across from me says there is still hope. She might be asking the wrong questions, but at least she is asking, and genuinely wants to know the answers. She is young enough to still have a good life, if she wants it badly enough.

Fast-forward a year. Leila has been making a lot of healthy changes and asks if she can bring her mother to her next session because she wants support as she sets some boundaries. I already know what this session will be like, because patterns have signatures. When you’ve seen enough systems, you start recognizing the builders in the output.

Her mother, whom we’ll call Janice, is exactly what I pictured. Mid 60s, dressed provocatively as if she is a 21-year-old about to hit the club, with two-inch nails and four-inch heels. Her heavily made-up eyes are glittery-hard like a cobra, and narrowed in constant appraisal. Rather than engage in pleasantries, she leans over my desk, trying to tower over me while pretending to look behind me at my credentials. She questions me, rapid-fire, on my qualifications. Finally satisfied, she settles into the chair and sends an opening salvo:

“I’m sure Laila has told you all sorts of things that aren’t true about our family.”

Okay, so out of the gate, she calls her daughter a liar. She follows that up with what, for Janice, is an example of caring.

“She doesn’t even take care of herself. I mean, look at her. She could be so pretty. I used to put her in these tiny bikinis when she was little, and she was just so sexy. Everyone looked at her.” She smiles proudly at the memory.

Like Leila, Janice represents a recurring pattern rather than a single individual, but I have heard variations of those remarks many times. I have met many of those mothers.

Is it becoming clear yet? Some of how Laila became?

Certainly, this girl in my office has agency, much more than she knows. She has free will; she has options. She has value.

She doesn’t know any of that.

You might be rolling your eyes at this, thinking that I am giving Leila a free pass because she has trauma. Au contraire. She is every bit as responsible for her choices as anyone else, and harming others is not okay. Full stop.

I am, however, going to ask something uncomfortable in a moment, and then we’re going to bring it all back to operational doctrine.

The manosphere seems to believe that these girls are unsalvageable. It’s pointless to talk to them, be in relationships with them, or even see them as human. The lists of “Women You Should Avoid (But Still Use For Sex)” are everywhere, and Daddy Issue Girls(tm) are always near the top.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that this is true: women with daddy issues are broken beyond repair, utterly unfit for any kind of healthy relationship. Let’s say that it’s all true: you’ll spend years trying to fix what her father broke.

Then why aren’t we absolutely invested in preventing it?

I would argue it’s easy to write these girls off. It’s highly UNcomfortable to go even one level deeper:

Where did they get these daddy issues? The uncomfortable answer is from the first man they knew.

Now, let’s make sure that we aren’t swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum. This is in no way a treatise on how awful men are, and the feminist man-hating trope is just as stupid.

I’m arguing something more nuanced, and yet still simple:

Fathers are the first person to tell their daughters what they are worth, and they do that through their time, attention, and action. In fact, if you have a little girl, you are teaching her who she is and what she is worth, even if you never openly tell her.

At this point, someone is probably objecting.

“Wait a minute. I thought this article was about daddy issues. You’ve spent the last ten minutes talking about her horrible mother. Her dad isn’t even mentioned.”

Exactly.

One of the problems with popular labels is that they oversimplify complex systems. “Daddy issues” is one of those labels. It compresses an entire developmental environment into a single person and then acts as though the rest of the system doesn’t exist.

The thing that far too many of the Leilas I see have in common is that they have fathers who did not do their job. They were absent, or they were too busy, or they were the predator themselves.

The father's emotional or physical absence created a vacuum, and the mother helped define what filled it, often in terrible ways. One created the wound; the other helped shape its expression. Neither dynamic operated in isolation because human beings are formed by, create, and exist in systems.

This isn’t a cultural essay, however, so let’s talk about this from an operational standpoint. Leila cannot function in a structural trust system and should not be in your group; that much is obvious, and that’s the easy lesson. But the bigger threat is one that you’re probably missing, and I can nearly guarantee that it’s already in your group.

What This All Means in Your Group

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