Compulsive Confession as Over-Disclosure Wrong Attractor: The Guilt-Purge Architecture, Intimacy Simulation Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Self-Disclosure

Compulsive confession — the chronic over-disclosure of personal information, guilt, or vulnerability in ways that violate appropriate context and relationship depth — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CC in the landscape of calibrated self-disclosure. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated self-disclosure: the capacity to share personal information and genuine feeling proportionately to relationship depth, context, and mutual readiness, building real intimacy through graduated vulnerability.

Three structural variants sustain W_CC: guilt-purge confession, in which the person relieves guilt by confessing wrongdoing regardless of whether the listener is the appropriate recipient or whether confession serves repair; intimacy simulation, in which over-sharing functions as a shortcut to perceived closeness, bypassing the gradual reciprocal disclosure that builds genuine intimacy; and scrupulosity-driven confession, the OCD-adjacent pattern of religious or moral confession compulsion.

Nine formal propositions characterize the guilt-purge architecture, the intimacy simulation mechanism, the scrupulosity variant, disclosure mismatch as accumulated displacement, the distinction from genuine vulnerability and appropriate disclosure, and return paths through disclosure calibration, intimacy scaffolding, and shame work.