Chronic Conflict Avoidance as Assertiveness-Deficit Wrong Attractor: The Peace-at-Any-Price Architecture, Suppressed-Needs Basin, and the Return to Grounded Assertion

Chronic conflict avoidance — the stable pattern of failing to assert legitimate needs, preferences, and limits because conflict itself is experienced as intolerable — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CA in the landscape of grounded assertion. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as grounded assertion: expressing genuine needs, preferences, limits, and disagreements proportionate to their importance, without suppression or escalation.

W_CA is rigorously distinguished from the fawn response (trauma-based appeasement), passive aggression (indirect hostility), healthy tact, and legitimate cultural deference. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: conflict catastrophization (anticipated conflict is experienced as disproportionately catastrophic — rejection, abandonment, relationship destruction), the accumulation trap (suppressed needs accumulate and the chronic avoider eventually explodes, which confirms their fear of conflict, deepening avoidance), and the approval-maintenance function (agreeing feels like being liked, but the relationship is built on a false self).

The resentment accumulation is the central relational cost: unexpressed needs generate growing contempt toward the person whose requests were chronically accommodated at one's own expense. Nine formal propositions characterize conflict catastrophization, the accumulation trap, approval maintenance, resentment accumulation, the false peace theorem, the explosion paradox, gender and cultural variation, and return paths through assertiveness training, DBT interpersonal effectiveness, and Nonviolent Communication.