Compulsive Conversational Digression as Thread-Loss Wrong Attractor: The Associative-Hijack Architecture, Main-Point-Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Narrative Focus

Compulsive conversational digression (W_CCD) is formalized within the displacement framework as a thread-loss wrong attractor: a stable but dysfunctional communicative basin in which the speaker's associative field systematically overrides the narrative goal state, producing a pattern in which conversations are perpetually enriched in the moment but never arrive. S^0 (Calibrated Narrative Focus) is the healthy ground state: the capacity to pursue a main thread, follow associations selectively and with awareness of displacement cost, and return deliberately when detoured.

Three sustaining mechanisms maintain W_CCD: (1) associative-relevance-as-obligation, in which every associated idea arrives with a felt urgency that marks omission as a failure of completeness; (2) digression-as-connection, in which tangential elaboration is experienced as deepening intimacy rather than fragmenting attention, so that digressions feel more generous than maintained focus; and (3) thread-recovery-anxiety-avoidance, in which returning to the main point after a digression requires the speaker to acknowledge the detour, which generates shame or awkwardness sufficient to make further digression preferable.

We formalize the conversation as a directed path in topic-space, each digression as a displacement from the narrative goal state, and accumulated displacement as the total distance between initiated topics and completed topics. The Digression Paradox names the central structural irony: each digression is experienced, in the moment, as enriching the story with relevant context and relational warmth, but the cumulative effect is that no story gets told—the attempt to add depth produces only absence of arrival.

Developmental roots are traced to environments in which discursive wandering was modeled as intellectual richness, to ADHD-adjacent executive-function profiles, and to early relational environments in which associations were rewarded and narrative closure was either absent or punished. Return paths include thread-anchoring practice, explicit return-commitment, and listener-feedback attunement.

Ten formal propositions and two remarks structure the analysis.: compulsive digression, wrong attractor, displacement framework, thread-loss, associative hijack, narrative focus, conversation analysis, main-point-foreclosure, return paths, ADHD-adjacent