Compulsive Boundary-Dissolution as Self-Loss Wrong Attractor: The Merger-as-Closeness Architecture, Self-Sensing Atrophy Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Differentiation

Compulsive boundary-dissolution is formalized as a wrong attractor W_CBD within the displacement framework: the inability to maintain appropriate self-other distinction in close proximity — merging with others' emotional states, adopting others' opinions as one's own, losing track of one's own needs and preferences when attending to another's. The healthy ground state S0 is calibrated differentiation: the capacity to be genuinely present with and responsive to others while retaining a stable sense of one's own inner state, needs, and perspective.

Three mechanisms sustain the dissolution basin: merger-as-closeness equation (genuine connection is understood as requiring maximum overlap; maintenance of a separate perspective is experienced as distance or rejection; this produces the collapse of differentiation in the name of intimacy, which paradoxically prevents genuine intimacy between two distinct persons); self-sensing atrophy (ongoing suppression of self-awareness in favor of other-attunement gradually impairs the capacity to sense one's own inner states; the self becomes progressively invisible to itself; this progressive impairment makes recovery harder because the ground state to return to becomes increasingly inaccessible); and differentiation-as-threat encoding (any moment of noticing and expressing a distinct perspective or need is experienced as risky — it might cause hurt, conflict, or withdrawal; this threat-encoding keeps differentiation suppressed even when the person has enough self-awareness to notice they have a distinct inner state).

The Merger Paradox states: compulsive boundary-dissolution reliably prevents the genuine closeness it is organized to achieve; genuine intimacy requires two distinct persons meeting; merger produces fusion rather than closeness; the other person cannot genuinely encounter the dissolving person because there is progressively less of them to encounter. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor, with developmental roots in enmeshed family systems and anxious attachment.

Return paths include self-sensing practice, opinion-differentiation experiments, and IFS work on the merger part and differentiation exile.