Compulsive Venting as Affect-Processing Wrong Attractor: The Co-regulation-Seeking Architecture, Validation-Loop Basin, and the Return to Genuine Affect Circulation

Compulsive venting — the chronic pattern of repeatedly expressing emotional distress to others without genuine processing, organized around co-regulation-seeking and validation-loop maintenance rather than affect integration — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CV in the landscape of genuine affect circulation. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as genuine affect circulation: the capacity to experience, process, and integrate emotional material — using relational co-regulation as a genuine support for internal processing rather than as a substitute for it — such that emotional experiences move through completion rather than cycling in repetitive expression without resolution.

W_CV is rigorously distinguished from appropriate expression of distress, healthy use of social support, legitimate processing conversations, and adaptive seeking of perspective. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: co-regulation substitution (the compulsive venter uses relational contact and validation as a direct substitute for internal processing; D(ξ) is generated by emotional activation that cannot be discharged through venting), the validation loop (each venting episode provides temporary relief through co-regulation, reinforcing the pattern while leaving the underlying emotional material unprocessed and available to generate the next episode), and processing avoidance (genuine emotional processing requires sitting with difficult affect, finding its meaning, and allowing it to move toward resolution — all of which the venting loop bypasses).

The Processing Paradox is central: compulsive venting reliably produces the emotional dysregulation it is organized to manage — by substituting external discharge for internal processing, the compulsive venter maintains the unprocessed emotional backlog that makes the next venting episode inevitable. Nine formal propositions characterize the genuine affect circulation ground state, the validation-loop wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the processing paradox, developmental roots in environments where internal regulation was not supported, and return paths through somatic processing, IFS, expressive writing, and graduated internal tolerance.