From Instinct to Evidence: Trauma and Language as Tools for Vetting

The third tenet of the Grey Cell Protocols, an orientation-based vetting system for resistance work.

Every doctrine before Grey Cell had the same warning: watch carefully. None of them told you what to watch for, or why watching wasn’t enough.

Instinct fails. A skilled infiltrator can mimic discipline. A manipulator can fake loyalty for months. Trauma-driven members can look solid until their unresolved needs drag the entire group off course. If you’re relying on gut feel, charisma checks, or “seems like a good guy,” you’re about to get betrayed.

The hard truth is this: orientation is warped from the inside by things like shame, validation hunger, people-pleasing, anxiety, and depression. Like it or not, these are operational liabilities. Shame drives people to hide mistakes and lie about failures. Validation addicts overshare, turning comms into a liability. People-pleasers collapse under pressure, saying yes to manipulators to avoid rejection. Anxiety amplifies rumors and fear. Depression corrodes reliability and cohesion. The list goes on.

This is why psychology and trauma-informed observation aren’t optional add-ons to doctrine; they are the doctrine, because orientation is the system. If you can’t spot when someone has shifted from reality-based orientation to need-based orientation, you’ll miss the inflection point where your group begins to fracture. Infiltrators just activate what’s already there.

The Grey Cell Protocols close the gap, and today we’re looking at the third tenet of robust, orientation-based vetting: psycholinguistic analysis to catch deception in language, and trauma-informed vetting to catch orientation drift before it explodes into sabotage. Buckle up, because this is a deep read.

Why Psychology is Non-Negotiable

You can teach tactics, enforce compartmentalization, even drill security culture. None of that matters if someone’s core orientation is hijacked by unmet psychological needs.

Here’s the operational view:

• A person oriented to truth will adapt under stress.

• A person oriented to shame will deflect, lie, or hide.

• A person oriented to validation will over-share or perform.

• A person oriented to approval will conform, even to manipulation.

• A person oriented to pity will exploit weakness to gain leverage.

That shift from truth to need is the signal you need to be able to see, because once someone’s OODA loop is driven by internal wounds instead of reality, the group inherits their distortion. One person’s shame spiral becomes everyone’s liability.

Every intelligence service in the world recruits assets the same way: find the need, exploit it. The FBI doesn’t have to invent weaknesses in militia groups. They just have to get into it. Once they’re inside, they wait for the member who wants validation, who fears rejection, or who hides a secret past. That person becomes the doorway. In one Utah case, the weak point was the leader.

Will Grigg wrote about this case in 2019:

[William] Keebler had little by way of material means, and even less leverage with public opinion. He still proved useful to the FBI, whose incentive structure requires that its field operatives constantly talent-scout people who can be cast as guest stars in the Bureau’s ongoing Homeland Security Theater.

Keebler wasn’t some bigshot in the militia world; his group was about seven people—including “two undercover FBI agents and other unspecified government personnel” who had infiltrated his group (some group, right?).

Keebler’s perceived lack of numbers, however, didn’t matter because he was friends with much bigger fish at the time. The bottom line is, the FBI put a lot of time and effort into this infiltration (which lasted approximately 18 months, by the way), and all they had to do was gain Keebler’s trust and then leverage his own personality and emotional needs against him.

If you don’t train your group to see those needs early, you’ll mistake them for loyalty, passion, or humility, right up until they get weaponized against you.

The Shame–Validation Scale

Picture a sliding scale with shame at one end and validation at the other. Both ends are dangerous because both orient you away from reality.

• Shame-driven behaviors: hiding mistakes, refusing correction, silence when accountability is needed, withdrawal under stress.

• Validation-driven behaviors: oversharing in chat channels, boasting about minor contributions, performing commitment for attention, exaggerating involvement.

Most people lean one way or the other, and under stress they slide harder to that side. Infiltrators just nudge them further in the direction they already lean. A shame-driven member will hand them cover stories and blind spots. A validation-driven member will hand them information and credibility. Either way, it works if your people aren’t properly calibrated.

The trap is that both ends of the scale feel like loyalty. Shame-driven members look “humble.” Validation-driven members look “committed.” In reality, both are liabilities. You can only catch them if you’re vetting from a trauma-informed orientation.

Mental Health as Orientation Drift

Groups like to pretend mental health is a private matter, but it’s not. In a resistance or high-stakes group context, things like anxiety, depression, and people-pleasing aren’t just “personal struggles,” and they’re not something that you as a leader should look at as “just working through things.” They are observable signals that someone’s orientation has already shifted away from truth and toward survival needs. That shift is what compromises the group.

Here’s what you can expect.

• Anxiety: Turns minor mismatches into crises. Someone with anxiety becomes a rumor amplifier, escalating tension, spinning scenarios, and pushing rash decisions to relieve their own internal panic. They orient the group to fear management instead of reality.

• Depression: Looks like disengagement. Deadlines slip, responsibilities aren’t met, they stop communicating. A depressed member is unreliable. They reorient the group around compensating for their absence.

• People-Pleasing: Shows up as constant agreement, fear of dissent, and boundary collapse. A people-pleaser can’t say no to manipulation. They hand control to whoever pushes hardest, often under the banner of “keeping peace.” Additionally, people-pleasing is a type of covert narcissism, and I’ve written about that specifically here.

• Shame and Guilt: They drive secrecy. Shame makes people hide failures, ‘fake it til they make it,’ or refuse any kind of teaching or correction. Once shame is in play, you can’t trust feedback loops inside the group.

• Validation Addiction: Breeds oversharing. The member who needs to be seen, praised, and acknowledged will eventually hand over details to outsiders just to prove their worth.

None of these dynamics mean that a person is malicious; in many cases they have the best of intentions and are “good people.” But what you need to understand is this: the intent does not matter if the effect is the same.

If you ignore these, you’ll treat liabilities like assets, and it WILL come back to bite you.

Why Trauma-Informed Vetting Matters

Traditional vetting is comparatively shallow: you check someone’s ideology, watch how they behave in the field, run a few stress tests. Trauma-informed vetting goes deeper: it asks what needs are actually driving this person’s behavior? How can those needs be leveraged? How much do these needs control them?

In short, you’re planning how to manipulate them—not so you can do it, but so you can understand how someone else will come at them.

Here’s why this matters:

• Needs distort maps. An anxious person reads their own fear instead of the situation. A people-pleaser is constantly assessing other people’s view of them, and putting emotional labor into controlling that view.

• Needs are leverage points. Infiltrators exploit unacknowledged need. If someone fears exclusion, the infiltrator offers belonging. If someone is drowning in shame, the infiltrator will offer them secrecy.

• Needs spread. One person’s drift warps the group’s OODA loop. Anxiety spreads panic. Shame spreads silence. Validation hunger spreads loose lips.

A trauma-informed orientation doesn’t treat people like diagnoses; far from it. We aren’t psychiatrists, and we aren’t looking to offer people therapy or validation in our groups. It is critical, however, that you recognize their needs and treat them as data. Every behavior either aligns with truth or reveals drift; there is no middle. And once you recognize the pattern, you can correct it or remove it before it compromises the whole.

The Group-Level Cost

If you don’t address mental health as part of vetting, the group inherits every unprocessed issue:

• Meetings become therapy sessions instead of planning sessions.

• Leadership energy gets drained into managing crises instead of advancing mission.

• Members start walking on eggshells to avoid triggering shame-driven withdrawal or anxiety-driven spirals.

• Discipline collapses, because pity and approval become the currencies of cohesion instead of truth.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying you should only keep perfectly healthy people with no issues. Let’s be real; if that were the criteria, no one would be in your group, including you. We all have issues, and baggage, and trauma, and stuff. You are looking for people who recognize their stuff, know how it affects them, and can still orient to truth.

You don’t need a perfect team; you need a calibrated team. That means you must read the signals of shame, validation, people-pleasing, anxiety, depression, etc., not as “bad traits,” but as early warnings that orientation has shifted or maybe even wasn’t there to begin with.

Now that we know what it is and what its effects on your group are, let’s talk about exactly how to find it and get it handled both in your vetting process and your existing members.

Below the paywall you’ll find:

• The exact markers you need to look for.

• The exact countermeasures you need to use.

• The 7-question assessment you can use to map shame, validation, approval, and pity needs in both prospects and current members.