Chronic Body Catastrophizing as Somatic-Threat Wrong Attractor: The Symptom-Amplification Architecture, Interoceptive-Distortion Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Embodied Trust

Chronic body catastrophizing is a pervasive and undertheorized attractor state in which ordinary somatic signals are systematically interpreted as evidence of severe threat, damage, or disease. We propose a formal framework treating calibrated embodied trust—the capacity to receive and accurately interpret interoceptive signals—as the ground state S^0 of somatic self-relation. Catastrophizing is modeled as a wrong attractor W: a self-reinforcing basin that distorts interoceptive processing, amplifies threat salience, and impedes return to baseline.

Using displacement field formalism, we define D() as the deviation from calibrated embodied trust at any moment, and = D()\,d as the accumulated somatic displacement. We derive nine formal propositions characterizing the attractor geometry, the symptom-amplification feedback loop, and the basin depth of interoceptive distortion. The architecture is analyzed mechanistically: hypervigilance feeds signal amplification, which confirms threat, which deepens hypervigilance.

Exit dynamics are examined through the lens of recalibration—restoring the body's capacity to generate and receive accurate, non-catastrophized signals. The framework interfaces with somatic symptom disorder, health anxiety, pain catastrophizing, and medically unexplained symptoms, offering a unified attractor-theoretic account of why body-focused fear is so difficult to exit and how calibrated trust is recovered.