I am assuming you've read the previous articles on energy, elements, and the elemental triplicities. If you haven't, I recommend starting there and coming back.
The central metaphor of scorpio is that of deep empathy for another. Cancer energy sees a crying person and feels sad for them. However, scorpionic understands their sadness in an intellectual capacity, addressing its root causes and motivations. This is cognitive empathy. Through successful psycho-analysis, one forms ideas about how others work under the hood. This is where the metaphor comes in, with the pointy tail of the scorpion. Once you learn how someone works, you learn how to harm them very deeply by exploiting their weaknesses.
The tool of Scorpio's empathy is called discernment, which is at odds with judgement. Judgement is extremely common way to evaluate others, as it renders a verdict: guilty or innocent. We are raised from a young age to view social interactions through this legalistic lens, and might come as a shock to many that an alternative exists. Discernment, however, suspends judgement and does not assign guilt nor innocense. For instance, a man stealing medicine for his ailing wife is clearly guilty of theft. If you're the owner or operator of a state or business, it behooves you to see this act as a clear instance of theft which is punishable. With discernment, however, you ask "why" until you have arrived at an explanation of the motives involved. As you take a walk in this man's shoes, you may find that the wife was going to die without treatment, and there were no accessible legal options to access the medicine. Without assigning guilt nor innocense, you might conclude that ensuring healthcare would prevent people from feeling the need to steal medicine. This is root cause analysis. You might coincidentally arrive at this same conclusion by having sympathy for the man or his ailing wife.
If someone pops life rafts frequently, and you look into their psychology to find that popping life rafts is something they do compulsively as a coping mechanism they picked up in response to trauma, you neither label them guilty nor innocent of their pattern of raft popping. However, when you are both on a cruise liner that is sinking, you don't need to judge them in order to reach the scorpionic insight that they will likely pop your life raft if you let them aboard. Without judging this person, you might nonetheless coldly put your boot to their face and kick them off of your life raft, sentencing them to death. This utilitarian decision to save several lives at the cost of another is enabled by empathy. You might coincidentally arrive at this same conclusion by casting judgement on the person for being a raft-popper.
Within the mind, there are attachments that come as hope/fear pairs. Behind each negative, a positive, and vise-versa. One makes a firm statement to you that they try to be honest. If they seemed genuine, it wouldn't be a bad guess that this person has been hurt by dishonesty and seeks to right this wrong within their own sphere of influence. If someone tells you how masculine they are every ten seconds, it might be a good guess that they are insecure about their masculinity. One scorpionic barb would be to point out an example of the first person being dishonest and in turn calling them dishonest. This forces them to embrace the very worst fear(that they've become the thing they hurt), dealing damage. A second would be to point out one thing the second person does that fails to meet their own standard of masculinity. Delivered with a cool head and a lack of outward malice, such an attack can be delivered in a way that does not read as hostile to bystanders, yet deal psychological damage that might provoke response proportional to the damage done. A successful scorpionic barb is a cruel tool which may cause damage to someone over an extended period of time depending on the fragility of their exploited fear or insecurity. It is ill-advised to ever use one on a friendly or neutral party.
Using cognitive empathy, you can quickly dig into what attachments a person has, then leverage their fears. Instead of causing someone harm with a scorpionic barb by striking their weak point, you instead comfort that weak point. Their hopes may be a source of inspiration, but their fears are the source of their anxieties, which reliably cause people to act irrationally. If you don't address the one point someone is anxious about, they'll ignore the ten other points leading to it. By identifying a negative directly, you can diminish it before addressing it. As with Chris Voss's Big Think interview he uses an example "Look, this is gonna sound really harsh, and there's a really good chance when I'm done saying what I'm gonna say, you're not gonna like me at all." as well as "It sound like..."/"It looks like...".
It can be advantageous to determine what the person's emotional reality looks like and then mirror it back to them. In that same interview, Chris Voss references a conversation with an airport call center employee who was frustrated with her job and seemed to believe he was lucky she was talking to him. When he thanked her for being so generous with her time, the feeling of affirmation overwhelmed her and she pulled some strings to help him. Once one's fears are addressed, they are far more compliant. Over time, repeatedly negotiating by addressing and resolving the other person's fears is sustainable. If you cause any problems in doing so, they should arise as fears, and in resolving them you will ensure you are a partner the other can trust. Aries energy might give you the inclination to negotiate as a zero-sum exercise of cheating the other person through deception. This approach, however, is reciprocal with you providing the service of quieting the other person's fears. They may be willing to accept a slightly one-sided deal as a cost of doing business.
A deep understanding of the other person means knowing them so intimately that you can comfortably sit in silence with them. Perhaps you might be able to finish one another's sentences, and if not, at least understand intuitively where they are coming from when they speak. The romantic side of a scorpionic bond involves learning to press all of their buttons to render them satisfied. In platonic contexts, this may look like understanding the basic dos and donts of the person as well as learning their passions and anxieties. Affirmation and validation may come in many forms, but it ultimately boils down to "I see you"/"I see what you see". Taking the time to honestly affirm and validate someone's experiences and perceptions creates a bond that only the best deceivers could hope to rival with dishonesty.