Listen for what people repeatedly avoid saying.

What someone consistently steers around is usually more informative than what they say. A topic that never comes up, a name that is never mentioned, a question that always gets a redirection: the gap has a shape, and the shape tells you where the difficulty lies.

Pay attention to the absences in your regular conversations, gently and without treating it as an investigation. If someone reliably avoids something, that is not an invitation to press. It is information about where they are tender, and knowing it lets you be careful in the right places rather than the wrong ones.