PhronesisWe formalize compulsive boundary-announcing (CBA) as a wrong attractor W_ CBA within the displacement framework for psychological ground-state dynamics. In W_ CBA, the person proactively declares limits, refusals, and non-negotiables in contexts where no request has been made and no encroachment has occurred or is imminent. The announcement precedes the encounter; the armor is displayed before any aggressor has arrived.
We identify two principal sustaining mechanisms: (1) the Pre-Emptive Refusal Architecture (PRA), a cognitive-behavioral system that generates anticipatory defensive declarations as threat-prevention, modeling all potential contact as potentially violating; and (2) the Trusting-Openness Foreclosure Basin (TOFB), the attractor-within-the-attractor in which the capacity for natural, responsive, unguarded engagement is progressively closed off by the armor-display habit itself.
We state and prove nine propositions (P_1–P_9) characterizing the geometry of W_ CBA: invasion-anxiety as the primacy driver (P_1); pre-emptive refusal as threat-prevention attempt (P_2); others' experience of the unprompted announcement as aggression or rejection (P_3); boundary-warrior identity lock-in (P_4); connection foreclosed before it can be attempted (P_5); distinguishing genuine healthy limit-setting from compulsive pre-armoring (P_6); the return path requiring the open-first encounter (P_7); gradual recalibration via responsive-only limit-setting practice (P_8); and the stability of S^0 in limits that emerge from contact rather than preceding it (P_9).
We characterize the healthy ground state S^0_ CRLS (calibrated responsive limit-setting), in which limits arise in response to actual encounter and are communicated without pre-emptive declaration. Developmental roots in early violation environments are analyzed. Return paths are identified: the open-first encounter practice, identity-unlocking from the boundary-warrior role, and the phenomenological re-learning of contact as safe-by-default.