Chronic Relational Distrust as Threat-Primacy Wrong Attractor: The Malevolence-Assumption Architecture, Suspicion-Confirmation Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Trust

Chronic relational distrust — the stable pattern of assuming hostile, deceptive, or self-serving motivations in others as the default interpersonal stance — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CRD in the landscape of calibrated trust. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated trust: the capacity to extend appropriate trust calibrated to evidence — opening to genuine connection while updating trust assessments based on actual behavior, neither naive nor systematically suspicious.

W_CRD is rigorously distinguished from appropriate caution, calibrated skepticism, and paranoid personality disorder (clinical). Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the malevolence-assumption filter (the hostile attribution bias applied as the default interpretive lens — kindness is calculated, generosity is strategic, interest is exploitation-seeking; the filter is structurally self-confirming), the trust-prevention loop (distrust prevents genuine engagement, preventing the experience of trustworthiness that would update the model — the protective stance prevents the data that would make it unnecessary), and the disconfirmation-resistance mechanism (positive relational experiences are explained away or dismissed as temporary — the trust model is structurally immune to positive evidence).

The isolation paradox is central: chronic distrust reliably produces the isolation it is intended to prevent — the protective stance prevents genuine connection, confirming that people cannot be trusted and deepening the distrust. Nine formal propositions characterize the suspicion-primacy basin, malevolence-assumption filter, trust-prevention loop, disconfirmation resistance, isolation paradox, developmental roots, trauma overlay, return paths through schema therapy and EFT, and distinction from appropriate caution.