Chronic Complaint-Cycling as Grievance-Rehearsal Wrong Attractor: The Recurring-Dissatisfaction Architecture, Forward-Action Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Problem-Resolution Orientation

Chronic complaint-cycling (W_CCC) is formalized as a wrong attractor distinct from single-episode complaining or legitimate grief: it is the compulsive re-circulation of the same grievance across time without movement toward resolution or acceptance. Where earlier work addressed the venting loop as a general architecture, the present paper isolates the specifically cycling character of the phenomenon—the iterative return to a complaint already heard, processed, and nominally closed—and analyzes the two structural mechanisms that generate it: the Recurring-Dissatisfaction Architecture (RDA) and the Forward-Action Foreclosure Basin (FAFB).

The RDA is the cognitive-affective system that restores grievance salience after apparent processing, regenerating the felt need to revisit. The FAFB is the attractor boundary that repels action-toward-change, converting the problem into a permanent fixture. Nine formal propositions characterize: the primacy of unresolved-injustice anxiety (P1); the complaint as provisional bonding mechanism (P2); listener fatigue and the progressive contraction of the relational support base (P3); victim-in-waiting identity lock-in (P4); problem perpetuation through non-action (P5); the criterion distinguishing legitimate grievance-sharing from compulsive cycling (P6); the action-toward-change response as the necessary condition for return (P7); gradual recalibration via complaint-to-proposal conversion (P8); and the stability of the ground state S^0—calibrated problem-resolution orientation—in the person who acts on what troubles them (P9).

Two corollaries derive from the interaction of RDA and FAFB; two remarks delimit the scope of the analysis. The return path from W_CCC to S^0 is non-trivial because the cycling pattern is identity-constitutive and socially reinforced, but it is achievable through structured complaint-to-proposal conversion, listener-redirect protocols, and the systematic accumulation of self-efficacy evidence.: chronic complaint-cycling, wrong attractor, Recurring-Dissatisfaction Architecture, Forward-Action Foreclosure Basin, grievance rehearsal, calibrated problem-resolution, victim identity, complaint-to-proposal conversion