PhronesisChronic self-explaining—the compulsive, repetitive offering of justifications for one's actions, feelings, and existence to others who have not requested them—is analyzed here as a stable wrong attractor in the space of self-disclosure behavior. We denote the wrong attractor state W (justification-compulsion) and the target ground state S^0 (calibrated self-disclosure: disclosure that is appropriately timed, audience-sensitive, and proportionate to relational trust).
Using a dynamical-systems framing, we characterize W as a defense-broadcasting architecture: the agent continuously emits preemptive defensive signals toward a modeled critical audience, foreclosing the conditions under which genuine trust and presence can develop. We introduce the trusted-presence foreclosure basin as the region of relational space from which W dynamics actively prevent escape, and argue that the compulsion is self-reinforcing through three coupled feedback loops: anticipatory anxiety amplification, confirmation-of-unreceivability, and identity-as-explanation consolidation.
Nine propositions (P1–P9) structure the theory from phenomenology through mechanism through remediation. We characterize S^0 as disclosure governed by relational calibration rather than anxiety discharge, and describe the perturbations and lineages through which return from W to S^0 becomes tractable. The paper situates this analysis in the broader Phronesis Issues program of mapping attractor geometry in self-relation and interpersonal behavior.