PhronesisThis paper develops a displacement-framework analysis of compulsive dramatizing, formalizing it as a wrong attractor (W_D) in the phase space of experiential significance. We distinguish significance from mere intensity: significance is the felt sense that an experience participates in a meaningful structure larger than itself, while intensity is its raw phenomenological charge.
Compulsive dramatizing emerges when early or chronic environments fail to confer reliable significance on ordinary experience, producing a significance-hunger loop in which the amplification of events into drama provides only temporary satiation while simultaneously rendering undramatized reality intolerably flat. We identify the amplification architecture as the core basin-deepening mechanism: the narrative inflation, audience-seeking, and catastrophizing sub-processes that transform routine events into occasions of urgency, rendering proportionate experience increasingly inaccessible.
The proportionate-reality foreclosure basin is the resulting attractor geometry: a configuration in which the calibrated witness of ordinary life is no longer felt as possible, and in which the ordinary must first be dramatized before it can be processed at all. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor, its installation dynamics, its reinforcement by social-media significance markets, and its relationship to narrative identity theory and existential significance research.
We map return paths through calibrated present witness—the recovery of the capacity to find the undramatized real both sufficient and worthy of attention—and argue that S^0, the ground state of the displacement framework, requires not the elimination of drama but the restoration of proportionality between event and response.