PhronesisChronic relational anger — the stable pattern of anger as the dominant baseline affect in intimate relationships, characterized by perpetual grievance-orientation, low trigger thresholds, slow return to baseline, and hostile attribution of partner behavior — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CRA in the landscape of regulated assertion. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as regulated assertion: using anger as an accurate signal of genuine boundary violations or injustice, expressing it proportionately, and returning to baseline without accumulation.
W_CRA is rigorously distinguished from intermittent explosive disorder (impulsive rage), healthy anger (appropriate signal), and situational anger (responsive to actual injustice). Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the hostile attribution bias (neutral partner behaviors are systematically interpreted as hostile or disrespectful — the basin operates through perceptual distortion), the grievance accumulation trap (unresolved anger accumulates as a running ledger; each incident adds to the total; the partner is perpetually in deficit; resolution is impossible because the accumulated ledger is never processed), and the anger-as-power function (anger provides short-term control and compliance, reinforcing the pattern).
The intimacy erosion dynamic is central: chronic relational anger progressively destroys the conditions for genuine intimacy — trust, goodwill, and felt safety. Nine formal propositions characterize the grievance-activation basin, hostile attribution bias, ledger logic, power reinforcement, intimacy erosion, developmental roots, gender expression, return paths, and distinctions.