The Thing You Don't Understand About Vetting
This one piece of info will change how you go about it in every area of your life.
It’s kind of an internal joke for me that some of the same people who had no issue with me being a profiler suddenly think I went off the deep end when I moved into trauma counseling. The joke, of course, is that both jobs are kind of two sides of the same coin—or at least a decently involved Venn diagram.
I know plenty of folks who think psychology is a load of poppycock, to put it mildly. They are usually the ones who often tell me “how people work,” even though they kind of miss the part where they’re describing—you guessed it—psychological concepts. It’s no surprise, then, that those same people struggle to choose the right friends, often find themselves in short-lived or even bad relationships, and can’t seem to find the ‘right’ kind of people. This is where vetting comes in, and it’s really important that we understand what the word means.
At its core, vetting is the ability to understand and predict someone’s behavior before it happens.
This is true for every kind of vetting, from whether you want someone in your activism group, to whether you want to date them, be friends with them, etc.
In order to let someone into your circle, you’re essentially trying to get to a point where you know this person can be trusted to do GOOD things, and also be trusted NOT to do BAD things. So yes, you’re looking to get familiar enough with how they think and act to be able to predict how they’ll react in a given situation—and be confident enough to trust your prediction.
To be able to do this effectively, you need to understand what is driving their choices…and that means understanding psychology and some basic things about how humans are built, plus the specific additional factors that go into the specific person at whom you’re looking.
The Key to All Human Decisions
Whether we like to admit it or not, our past is responsible for how we view the world. We can change that worldview, but it requires us to actually address things like trauma that we have experienced or witnessed.
A friend once told me that “people don’t need to go talk about their trauma; no one cares about what happened to them. Suck it up and let’s move on.”
Before you applaud his sentiment, just know that he was severely abused his entire childhood, and he has learned to weaponize his pain against himself and everyone around him through rage, depression, and alcoholism. In short, his mantra of “suck it up and let’s move on” isn’t really working for him, and it’s certainly not working for his loved ones, who have been devastated by the effects of his choices.
Interestingly enough, even as a trauma counselor myself, I tell my clients all the time that I will never expect or push them to tell me the nitty-gritty of what happened to them. I don’t need a play-by-play—unless, of course, they’ve never talked about it at all and WANT to. I focus on the tension in their bodies, the emotions attached, and most of all, the shame they carry.
Why? Because the very delicate balance of validation vs. shame is what is making all of their decisions for them—and my friend with the weaponized pain is drowning in shame.
Here’s how it works.
Imagine a scale, like what you often see depicting justice or the law.
On one side is validation; the good things you hear about yourself, your positive beliefs, whatever value you believe that you have as a human being. Your resilience, your emotional health, all of those things serve as weights on this side of the scale.
On the other side is shame. This is where you put the things you carry. Past trauma that’s unresolved, bad choices that you’re ashamed of, things you don’t want people to know about you. Things you believe about yourself, way down deep where no one goes but you.
As long as these two sides are balanced, or the validation side is the heavier of the two, you feel safe. You feel like you matter. In short, your two biggest needs are met and you can function.
The problem, however, is that the weights are constantly shifting. Validation is put on or taken off, which makes the shame side get weighted down or lifted up. The imbalance is visceral—you feel compelled to fix it immediately. In fact, there is nothing more important to you, whether you realize it or not, than ensuring that the shame side never weighs more than the validation.
If you’re emotionally healthy, you generally can tolerate some validation removal before the weight balance shifts; one or two hits of dopamine aren’t going to make or break your stability for the day. If you have unresolved trauma, however, or if you find yourself chasing a lot of external validation, you’re constantly living on the razor’s edge, just one careless remark or petty incident from sending you into overdrive as you scramble to restore the overweight side of shame.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that you don’t control the validation source, and therefore you’re living at the mercy of whatever thing/concept/belief/desire you’ve decided determines your identity (read: value) as a human being. Finding that in external objects, however, is fleeting and temporary—which means the weight quickly evaporates off the scale and you find the shame side getting weighty again…and you’re back to frantically trying to find something to put on the validation side again.
This simple analogy explains just about any major decision a human being makes—and sometimes their minor ones too.
Why are there so many ‘influencers’? Why are so many people seemingly dependent on a constant stream of likes and follows?
Why do we all know people who desperately want to be seen as younger than they are?
Why do people hold onto certain beliefs even though they can be proven factually incorrect? Why does it seem like their very identity is tied to it?
Why does infiltration consistently work, over and over, on a large swath of people, using the exact same tactics repeatedly, even on people who have the tools to understand HOW it works?
Why is it that sometimes people will parrot talking points over and over as though their life depends on it, even though there is obviously nothing of substance behind it?
The short answer is that emotionally unhealthy people will do just about anything to avoid shame.
Now let’s put this into an activism context.
The Scale at Work in Activism Groups
There are several historical examples of people for whom fixing the scale imbalance led to them moving past a line they would have never expected to cross. I’ve already written about the Oath Keepers and their ultimate implosion at the hands of their leader, and I won’t belabor that here.
We can, however, talk about the QAnon folks. I’m not here to mock them—they get enough of that elsewhere on the internet. What I do want to talk about is the reason why QAnon got so big, and why its adherents are so militant. If you understand the scale concept, then you already see where I’m going here.
Many adherents to QAnon were everyday conservatives who had a nagging sense that something wasn’t right with the country. Conservatives were getting mocked, ignored, and increasingly marginalized in mainstream discourse.
Then Q gave them a mission. Suddenly, they were special. They were “in the know.” They were heroes in a shadow war. That was pure validation—and it worked. People who had never before engaged in political activism started making YouTube channels, running Telegram groups, even running for office—clinging to the validation like oxygen.
Even when predictions didn’t come true, the need to maintain that balance was so strong that people couldn’t walk away. To do so would mean facing the shame of being duped or irrelevant again. That shame was heavier than logic. So they stayed, even as the theories got more extreme. The emperor is naked, but no one has the balls to say it—because to speak it means to accept that the validation source instantly dries up.
A modern-day, softer version plays out when someone in an activist space is confronted about toxic behavior—maybe they were controlling, or dismissive, or dishonest. Rather than self-reflect, they double down, accusing others of “purity politics” or “horizontal hostility.” What’s actually happening is that the confrontation dumps a bunch of shame weight onto their scale. To rebalance, they seek immediate validation: rallying allies, reframing the narrative, or creating new terms to deflect critique. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about survival of the self-image.
Sometimes the validation people seek is belonging. This is how agent provocateurs operate so effectively. They identify the person with shaky self-worth and a scale teetering on shame, and they offer a heavy dose of validation—"You’re the real deal. You’re hardcore. You’re the only one who gets it." That person becomes easy to direct, because keeping that external validation becomes everything. Before long, they’re pushing violence, leaking information, or sowing division—convinced they’re doing it for “the cause,” but really just protecting the balance on their internal scale.
In the end, every single activist group is just a collection of people—each with their own scale. Understanding how that scale works, and how it can be manipulated or weighted, isn’t just some pop-psychology trick. It’s the key to group stability, security culture, and resilience.
How many people in your group are living on that razor’s edge of shame? How much would it take to tip the balance? Are you absolutely positive that no one is working on doing just that?