Narrative Entrapment as Life-Story Wrong Attractor: The Fixed-Script Architecture, Identity-Calcification Basin, and the Return to Authorial Agency

Narrative entrapment — the chronic condition of being imprisoned in a life story that no longer serves, unable to revise the organizing narrative of who one is, what happened, and what is possible — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_NE in the landscape of authorial agency. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as authorial agency: the capacity to hold one's life story as one's own construction — authored rather than merely lived — and to revise, reframe, and expand it as experience accumulates and understanding deepens.

W_NE is rigorously distinguished from appropriate narrative consistency (stable identity), healthy meaning-making from difficult experience, and legitimate trauma narrative. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: script-as-reality confusion (the narrative entrapped person has forgotten that their life story is a story — a selective interpretation of experience rather than experience itself; the story feels like fact, making revision feel like self-betrayal rather than authorship), identity investment (the organizing narrative has become so central to identity that revising it would require revising who one is; stories of victimhood, failure, or uniqueness may be the primary structures through which one knows oneself; the basin is deepened by identity investment), and story-confirming perception (the entrapped person perceives experience through the lens of the fixed script — noticing confirming evidence and discounting challenging evidence; the script becomes self-sealing).

The Truth Paradox is central: narrative entrapment reliably prevents the authentic self-understanding it is organized to express — the fixed story that feels like truth becomes a prison, progressively foreclosing the actual self which is always more complex than any story of it. Nine formal propositions characterize the authorial agency ground state, the fixed-script wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the truth paradox, developmental roots, and return paths through narrative therapy, ACT defusion, and posttraumatic growth.