Weaponizing the Wound: The Target of Modern Influence Operations
How infiltrators seek to use the one thing you may be pretending is healed.
Welcome to new readers! This is Part 2 of my series on the role of social psychology in counterintelligence and why you need to understand the first to effectively use the second. You can catch up on Part 1 here.
We all have wounds; it’s part of being human. People and situations harm us in visceral ways, and while we get to choose what we do about that, we don’t always choose a healthy path. Most of the time, we put it away in a box deep inside ourselves. We build entire kingdoms to protect those boxes, and we defend them like a grizzly protecting her cubs.
During my time in underground resistance groups and militias, I saw wounds leveraged against their bearers by government-paid infiltrators, grifters, sociopaths, and people lost in their own hurts and needs. In my work as a trauma counselor, I have come to understand the mechanisms underneath it all: how those wounds formed, why people protect them so fiercely, and why manipulation works so reliably even on intelligent people.
That is the bitter irony of human nature. The wounds we can clearly recognize in others are often hidden in ourselves.
Around 1100 BC, the Philistines sent Delilah to seduce Samson and uncover the secret of his strength. More than three thousand years later, the mechanisms have barely changed, because human vulnerabilities remain remarkably consistent across time.
Influence operations work because they target enduring aspects of human psychology: the need for love, validation, belonging, certainty, status, purpose, identity, and emotional safety. The same person who can easily identify manipulation targeting someone else can remain completely blind to the manipulation targeting themselves.
That blindness is usually connected to our own wounds. If you want to see clearly, eventually you have to confront what hurts you, what drives you, and what you are unconsciously protecting.
The Daddy/Mommy Issue Problem
The phrase “daddy/mommy issues” has become shorthand for “unsalvageable.” Whether it’s the manosphere mocking a woman seeking validation or the feminist crowd mocking men, the focus seems to stay on the arrow itself instead of the bow that launched it.
Where does it come from? How is it affecting the battlespace? How does it change the way people show up for their group?
First, let’s define the phrase. Daddy and mommy issues, in most cases, are attachment issues. They come from parents who may be overtly abusive, but may also be:
Emotionally or physically absent
Unpredictable or chaotic
Overly authoritarian
Addicted to substances or porn
Weak or passive
Conditional with love and approval
Using shame instead of connection
Overly engulfing or enabling
Sexualizing the child through dress, pageants, etc.
Manipulative
Children adapt to survive these environments. We like to say children are resilient, but resilience implies they bounce back easily to their “factory condition,” which isn’t the case at all. Children are not resilient; they are adaptive. They build systems that allow them to function inside unhealthy environments, and those systems become the architecture of adulthood.
Before I go any further, let me say this clearly: we can and should hold people responsible for their choices. No matter what happened to you, it belongs to you now. You can let it be what it is, a chapter in your story, or you can make it the cover image, title, and even its marketing package.
That said, healing does require naming the wound honestly. You cannot confront what you refuse to acknowledge. You are not unsalvageable, but you do have to accept that you’re in charge of the salvage operation; if it doesn’t get done, it’s because you didn’t do it. That’s simply a fact that exists.
The Systems We Build and How They Show Up in Groups
There are four major attachment styles, and while people often lean primarily toward one, most carry traits from multiple categories. This is the operating system running your machine. The issue is that the software was often written by a frightened child adapting to a dysfunctional environment, and many adults never realize they are still running the same code.
Secure Attachment
This person can trust without clinging, tolerate disagreement, and survive rejection without collapsing psychologically. They do not require constant validation and possess a stable sense of identity. If this describes you, then either you had an unusually healthy upbringing or you have done substantial internal work as an adult.
Anxious Attachment
This person is hypervigilant to rejection and constantly overanalyzes social cues. They need continual reassurance and tend to fuse their identity into relationships or groups. When you encounter someone who cannot tolerate disagreement or interprets questions as threats, this is often the system driving the behavior.
Disorganized Attachment
This person simultaneously craves and fears connection. Their relationships become chaotic, unstable, and emotionally volatile because they are rooted in unresolved fear and trauma. In groups, they often consume enormous amounts of emotional bandwidth and create cycles of instability.
Avoidant Attachment
I know this one intimately because it is where I spent much of my twenties, as a recovering “Daddy Issues” girl. Avoidants distrust closeness, suppress their needs, and withdraw emotionally. The irony is that we mistake emotional distance for strength. In groups, we often appear calm and highly functional under pressure while remaining emotionally inaccessible to the people around us.
You can imagine how this all plays out in romantic relationships, but they don’t stay confined to dating. You bring your attachment style into churches, leadership structures, activist organizations, workplaces, friend groups, and resistance movements.
If you have children at home, keep in mind that you are currently writing the code they may run for the rest of their lives.
How Your Attachment Wound Becomes Part of Your Group’s Dynamics
The phrase “attachment wound” sounds like pop psychology nonsense until you understand what it actually means. It is the hidden box in your mind containing everything you do not want to confront or have not healed about your relationship with your parents. If you never open that box, it leaks into everything around you.
And to be clear, having a wound does not automatically mean you had a monstrous or intentionally abusive parent. Sometimes the wound comes from cruelty, neglect, addiction, or chaos, yes. Sometimes it comes from emotional absence, inconsistency, passivity, poor emotional skills, generational trauma, or a father who genuinely loved his children but did not know how to connect with them in healthy ways. Intent and impact aren’t the same, and a father can love his child deeply and still leave wounds the child must deal with as an adult.
We often deny that we have these wounds because admitting it can feel like we are indicting our parents as abusive or ‘bad.’ This is where we must hold two truths in tension. Our parents can do the very best job they are capable of doing, for the very best of reasons, and still harm us without meaning to. It’s not an accusation or a judgment on their parenting skills; it is merely a fact that exists.
Here’s how those unhealed wounds show up later when they get to a group.
The Approval Seeker
Jack joined the group, looking for belonging and validation far more than mission clarity. He becomes emotionally dependent on leadership, vulnerable to manipulation, and highly susceptible to behavioral steering because he desperately needs recognition. An infiltrator sees him as low-hanging fruit because he is. When the group implodes, Jack will need to find another one quickly.
The Authority Chaser
Frank is searching for a strong authority figure to replace the father who wounded him. He excuses abusive leadership because his internal calibration for what constitutes abuse was distorted years ago. He surrenders critical thinking to stronger personalities and becomes the guy who is “just following orders.” In extreme cases, abusive dynamics actually feel emotionally safe because they are familiar. He will stay in the group no matter what happens because emotionally, he has to. If he does leave, you’ll find him in another group too, just like the one he left.
The Performer
Sara learned early that love and acceptance were conditional on performance. Achievement became attachment. Inside groups, she becomes the workhorse. She says yes to everything, burns herself into the ground, and resents the people with healthier boundaries, viewing them as less committed than she is. Leaders who don’t realize what’s driving her will overuse her and overrely on her, contributing to her resentment AND her identity-melding.
The Detached Cynic
Amanda uses emotional distance as armor. Because she distrusts connection-based relationships, she never fully integrates into the group. She views emotionally connected people as weaker than she is, and she completes the tasks assigned to her, but never truly invests relationally. She trusts no one, and even though she has a high level of integrity, she doesn’t know how to connect on a human level, so eventually, no one trusts her either. The group will eventually lose her or kick her out.
Unresolved Attachment and Reality Distortion
Unresolved attachment wounds make you stop seeing reality as it is and begin interpreting reality through the expectations of your nervous system.
When the group does not match what your system is accustomed to, you unconsciously try to force it to match. Familiarity becomes confused with safety, even when what is familiar is unhealthy.
Now imagine all of these systems colliding inside the same organization.
The anxious approval seeker may try to attach to the avoidant or create drama and chaos because it’s where they feel most comfortable.
The performer resents the sycophants while in some ways being one themselves.
The authority chaser enables dysfunctional and even abusive leadership.
The detached cynic withdraws from trust-building entirely and functions as an Other.
It does not take long before the mission itself gets pushed into the background while unresolved emotional systems begin driving all of the group’s behavior.
What’s more, the people in your inner circle often want you to stay wounded. That sounds like hogwash, but let’s parse it out. If you heal, you stop being subject to the dysfunction of the people around you. That means you stop accepting their chaos and poor conduct, and if you have to, you’ll potentially end whatever relationship you have with them. You might leave your job, set boundaries with your family, get new friends, or even have some uncomfortable conversations with your spouse.
It also means you stop contributing to that dysfunction. Once you’ve identified and healed your wound, your decision-making process changes: you stop making decisions based on your nervous system and finally start making them based on the reality you haven’t been able to see.
You can connect with people authentically, hear feedback without feeling like they’re attacking you, and your identity is no longer based on what people think of you or how they make you feel about yourself. In fact, the more you heal, the less anyone can control your emotional state.
How simple would it be for an infiltrator to disrupt this group in its current unhealed state?
Now let’s add the final and most uncomfortable layer.
The System Itself Wants You to Stay Wounded
A hundred CI tools won’t do you any good if you don’t understand the absolute core premise: Not only do the people around you want you to stay wounded, but so does the greater societal system.
A shocking amount of modern culture is economically, politically, sexually, socially, and ideologically dependent on your remaining wounded. That includes:
Manipulative romantic dynamics. When discussing this article series with my friend, pilot Scott MacLean, he pointed out that there is an entire section of men “whose romantic aspirations depend on the existence of those issues.” Certain men specifically target women with severe abandonment issues because they know that intermittent affection will create emotional dependency. By alternating validation and withdrawal, he can keep her chasing his approval.
On the other side, women sometimes pursue emotionally unavailable men because the instability recreates their childhood attachment system. The anxiety/relief cycle gets confused with love.
Influencer culture. There are influencers who, without overtly saying so, position themselves as the “strong father figure” that young men never had. He provides certainty, identity, belonging, and moral clarity to followers who feel directionless and disconnected. Over time, followers stop thinking critically because disagreement feels emotionally threatening, almost like disappointing a parent. It’s no surprise that these influencers also often teach men exactly how to target the women above.
Cultish political movements. If you immediately thought of whatever the opposing side to you is, then you’re proving my point.
Rage-based media ecosystems. “Content creators” learn fast that outrage and fear keep audiences emotionally activated and engaged. Audiences become psychologically addicted to anger because anger creates certainty, stimulation, belonging, and identity reinforcement.
Abusive religious systems. Church leaders who teach that questioning leadership is rebellion against God are betting on your wound to keep you compliant. Members who have strong attachment wounds are especially vulnerable, because spiritual acceptance gets fused with emotional survival. For the record, God can handle whatever questions you have, and if your spiritual leader can’t, that’s some pretty important data.
Exploitative leadership structures. This isn’t limited to a specific kind of group, but it can be seen pretty easily in political campaigns, activist groups, and many other teams. In these, the leader keeps members uncertain, emotionally dependent, and competing for the approval they need to feel secure.
Consumer identity marketing. This is when a company acts like it’s selling a product, but it’s really selling identity, belonging, status, and emotional currency. Multi-level marketing companies that ostensibly sell makeup, skin care, or wellness lines might be selling those things, but the real core of their revenue is the identity and emotional support they are selling to the people who sign up to sell their products. Interestingly enough, many of these MLM companies also fit the exploitative leadership structure type.
Finally, we have therapy ecosystems. Some therapists create identity fusion around victimhood or dysfunction. They defer actionable healing because, well, if you heal, you don’t need them anymore, and you stop paying them. Not all therapists are like this, obviously, but if your therapist or counselor has become someone for you to “talk to” instead of “work with” (emphasis on the word WORK), you might want to look at that.
What do all of these things have in common? They want something from you. Your money, your dependence, your votes, your body. If you heal, you become immune to so much of this.
When the Group Becomes the Family
Healthy groups, teams, and relationships provide community, support, accountability, and even a shared purpose. There is nothing wrong with that; these are good things.
The healthiest groups are made up of sufficiently self-aware people, so that unresolved wounds are not unconsciously driving the system. When a group is made up of unhealthy people who lack self-awareness, you get wounded behaviors and a replacement family system.
Wounded people don’t go to a group consciously thinking, “Hey, I think I’ll join this group and project my unresolved attachment wounds onto the other members.” They might even believe they are joining because the mission or shared purpose is something they believe in. Once they’re in, however, they feel purpose and belonging. Maybe even safety and emotional warmth. That becomes more psychologically important than the mission itself.
When that happens, you’ll see a very distinct shift. The group becomes the family. The leader becomes like a father figure; the nurturer of the group becomes the mother figure. Respected members are the older siblings, and newer recruits are like the little brothers and sisters. The more unresolved the person’s wound, the stronger that attachment pressure becomes.
I’m not saying that these people start running around calling each other mommy and daddy, although I’m sure there is some form of that in an online community somewhere. It’s an underlayer of the group dynamic that people don’t even realize is happening. Once attachment fusion happens, the group stops orienting around truth and starts orienting around preserving the attachment system.
Bringing It Back to Counterintelligence
Everything I’ve said above explains why unresolved attachment wounds are operational liabilities. A person who is terrified of losing their attachment to someone can be steered into almost anything. When the group is the family, members will tolerate any manner of disruption, manipulation, unethical conduct, or even abuse, because losing the group feels like losing their family.
How many abusive churches are out there? How many toxic political movements, dysfunctional activist groups, and cults, all imploding in cycles of betrayal and emotional chaos? How many times have you seen a leader get caught doing something that should be an automatic disqualification from their position, potentially for life? You can see it objectively, and can’t figure out why they get to keep their position, their status, and their clout.
Well, that’s because your wound isn’t attached to that particular structure. Yours may be somewhere else: are you an adult who puts up with abusive family dynamics even now, because confronting them is too costly? Are you part of a political movement that makes you feel seen and welcome? Are you hanging on to a label, ideology, or even a social identity that gives you a ticket to a community that lets you feel “seen”? Are you defending your boss, leader, or family member because they are right, or because losing them would feel emotionally destabilizing?
Those are counterintelligence questions.
At its core, counterintelligence forces a collision with reality. If your wounds determine what you can and cannot emotionally afford to see, clear orientation will remain out of your grasp.
Next week, the third and final part of this series covers what to do with what you just found.
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GCP 101: The foundational doctrine. Orientation, vetting, structural trust, infiltration archetypes, and counter-narrative control.
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Fundamentally, there is no secure organization, is there? The organization itself needs to dispose of that fiction to really understand vulnerability and create its own resiliency.
Can't wait for next week's article. This was another eye-opener as well, maybe saw myself in a couple of the examples. Honest self-reflection is tough but needed.