Emotional Blackmail as Coercive-Compliance Wrong Attractor: The FOG Architecture, Fear-Obligation-Guilt Basin, and the Return to Boundaried Relationship

Emotional blackmail — the use of Fear, Obligation, and Guilt (FOG) to override another's autonomous decision-making — is here formally reconceptualized through the displacement framework, with primary focus on the recipient's chronic compliance attractor W_EB. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as boundaried relationship: the capacity to maintain one's own needs, limits, and decisions under relational pressure, responding to emotional appeals with empathy while retaining autonomous agency.

W_EB (recipient) is the chronic compliance attractor: the stable pattern of yielding to emotional pressure regardless of one's own legitimate needs — maintained by the FOG mechanism. Fear activates threat response (abandonment, punishment), making rational evaluation difficult; Obligation activates duty-based compliance even when demands are unreasonable; Guilt activates self-punishment for non-compliance.

The three work synergistically — their basin-deepening effect exceeds the sum of individual components. W_EB (perpetrator) is also characterized: the coercive compliance attractor driven by fear of losing control or connection, not pure malice. The victim-perpetuator dynamic is analyzed: chronic compliance reinforces the blackmailer's behavior, maintaining both parties in their respective attractors.

Nine formal propositions characterize the three FOG mechanisms, their synergistic combination, the perpetrator's attractor, the reinforcement loop, the identity dimension (compliance as moral identity), cultural amplifiers, and return paths through FOG recognition and boundary-setting.