PhronesisCompulsive monologuing — the habitual monopolization of conversational airtime — presents as a wrong attractor in the landscape of human connection. Unlike simple self-absorption, it functions as a sophisticated avoidance mechanism: the chronic speaker discovers, often unconsciously, that filling every silence with their own voice eliminates the vulnerability intrinsic to genuine listening.
This paper develops a formal displacement framework in which the ground state S^0 is calibrated conversational reciprocity — the comfortable alternation of talking and listening turns, accompanied by genuine curiosity about others' inner experience — and the wrong attractor W is the compulsive monologuing basin, characterized by an airtime-expansion feedback loop and progressive dialogue foreclosure.
We formalize nine propositions governing the mechanics of the basin: the vulnerability-avoidance driver, the pseudo-connection substitution, the withdrawal dynamics of interlocutors, the deepening of listening intolerance over time, and the conditions sufficient for return. The architecture reveals a structural irony: monologuing is deployed in the service of connection but produces increasing isolation, driving the speaker deeper into the very behavior that forecloses the closeness they seek.
Return requires not mere awareness but deliberate listening practice, talk/listen ratio tracking, and the cultivation of genuine curiosity about the other's experience as the antidote to the control-need that sustains the basin.