Chronic Self-Blaming as Causal-Attribution Wrong Attractor: The Control-Through-Blame Architecture, Self-Attribution Basin, and the Responsibility Paradox

Chronic self-blaming — the chronic pattern of systematically attributing negative events, relational difficulties, and adverse outcomes to oneself — not as appropriate responsibility-taking but as a compulsive causal assignment that maintains a coherent world where one's own inadequacy explains all bad outcomes — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CSB in the landscape of calibrated attribution.

The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated attribution: the capacity to assess responsibility for negative outcomes accurately — taking genuine responsibility when it is genuinely one's, acknowledging external contributions and genuine chance, and tolerating the uncertainty of truly ambiguous causation — without systematic bias toward self-attribution. W_CSB is rigorously distinguished from appropriate responsibility-taking, healthy accountability, genuine remorse for actual wrongs, and adaptive self-examination in real failure contexts.

Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: control-through-blame architecture (paradoxically, chronic self-blaming provides a felt sense of control — if I caused it, I can prevent it next time; D(ξ) is generated by negative outcomes whose cause is ambiguous or external), confirmation architecture (the chronic self-blamer interprets all ambiguous evidence as confirming self-causation; genuinely mixed situations are resolved toward self-blame; the detector is systematic and non-random), and secondary blame for blaming (the chronic self-blamer often recognizes their pattern and blames themselves for that too, deepening the basin through meta-level self-attribution).

The Responsibility Paradox is central: chronic self-blaming reliably produces the irresponsibility it is organized to prevent — by attributing all negative outcomes to oneself, the chronic self-blamer loses the capacity to accurately identify genuine responsibility, making actual responsible action impossible. Nine formal propositions characterize the calibrated attribution ground state, the self-attribution wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the responsibility paradox, developmental roots in environments where self-blame was required, and return paths through cognitive restructuring, IFS work, self-compassion, ACT defusion, and somatic approaches.