Emotional Self-Neglect as Needs-Suppression Wrong Attractor: The Self-Dismissal Architecture, Chronic-Invisibility Basin, and the Return to Self-Witnessing

Emotional self-neglect — the chronic pattern of dismissing, minimizing, or failing to attend to one's own emotional needs and internal states as an active stance of self-dismissal — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_ESN in the landscape of self-witnessing. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as self-witnessing: the capacity to attend to one's own emotional states with the same care, validity, and curiosity one would offer another person.

W_ESN is rigorously distinguished from alexithymia (difficulty identifying emotions), emotional numbness (affect shutdown), conflict avoidance (deferring to others), and codependency (other-focus with attachment). The core is the systematic treatment of one's own emotional experience as less valid, less important, and less deserving of attention than others'. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the self-invalidation reflex (emotional states are automatically assessed as 'too much,' 'irrational,' or 'selfish' before they can be processed — the internalized dismissing response applied preemptively to oneself), the other-orientation default (attention flows automatically outward while self-awareness is systematically reduced — the individual becomes an expert in others' emotional states and a stranger to their own), and the emptiness-avoidance cycle (turning toward the emotional interior feels overwhelming after years of neglect — avoidance of the very thing that would end the neglect maintains it).

Nine formal propositions characterize the self-dismissal basin, self-invalidation reflex, other-orientation default, emptiness-avoidance cycle, cost accumulation, developmental roots, relationships with adjacent patterns, return paths through self-compassion and somatic approaches, and distinction from appropriate other-focus.