Compulsive Story-Correcting as Accuracy-Over-Witnessing Wrong Attractor: The Fact-Priority Architecture, Narrative-Interruption Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Witnessing Presence

Compulsive story-correcting (W_CSC) is formalized within the displacement framework as an accuracy-over-witnessing wrong attractor: a stable but dysfunctional relational basin organized not around social dominance or conversational competition, but around a deep, functionally compulsive prioritization of factual accuracy over the emotional content of shared narrative. The person in W_CSC does not experience themselves as dismissing the storyteller; they experience themselves as honoring the conversation through the gift of precision.

This subjective frame—the corrector as contributor—is the mechanism's most clinically salient feature, and the source of its deepest interpersonal damage. We identify three interlocking mechanisms that sustain the W_CSC basin: (1) accuracy-as-respect (the belief that correcting errors honors both speaker and listener, and that allowing inaccuracies to stand is a form of disrespect); (2) factual-error-as-threat (the phenomenological experience of factual inaccuracy as a mild but real dysregulation that can only be resolved through correction, independent of whether the error matters to the story's meaning); and (3) correction-as-contribution (the compulsive story-corrector's genuine experience of the interruption as adding value, clarifying the record, improving the shared account).

Together, these mechanisms generate what we term the Accuracy Paradox: by correcting the facts, the story-corrector destroys the emotional truth that the storyteller was attempting to communicate. Accuracy, deployed compulsively, serves disconnection. The ground state S^0, Calibrated Witnessing Presence, is distinguished from W_CSC not by the absence of factual awareness but by the capacity to subordinate accuracy to witnessing when the stakes of accuracy are low and the emotional content of the narrative is high.

Developmental roots in precision-as-love-language environments and the dismissal of emotional content as epistemically inferior are analyzed. Return paths include witnessing-first practice, deliberate correction-withholding, and stakes-assessment as a pre-correction protocol. Nine formal propositions structure the analysis.: compulsive story-correcting, wrong attractor, displacement framework, Accuracy Paradox, witnessing, narrative interruption, fact-priority, calibrated presence, emotional truth