Post-Conflict Rumination as Resolution-Resistance Wrong Attractor: The Unfinished-Argument Architecture, Injustice-Narrative Basin, and the Return to Conflict Completion

Post-conflict rumination — the chronic pattern of being unable to release interpersonal conflicts after they have formally concluded, compulsively replaying arguments, rehearsing better responses, and maintaining emotional activation around resolved disputes — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_PCR in the landscape of conflict completion. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as conflict completion: the capacity to engage genuinely in interpersonal conflict, work toward resolution, and then allow the conflict to close — releasing emotional activation, integrating what was learned, and returning to present relational engagement without chronic replay.

W_PCR is rigorously distinguished from appropriate processing of genuinely unresolved conflicts, healthy reflection on relational patterns, legitimate grievance maintenance in genuinely unjust situations, and adaptive conflict learning. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: unfinished-argument compulsion (the post-conflict ruminator carries a catalogue of things they should have said, better arguments they could have made; D(ξ) is generated by the felt injustice of the conflict's outcome), injustice narrative maintenance (rumination preserves and amplifies the sense of unfairness, selectively amplifying evidence of the other's wrongness with each replay), and relational trust degradation (post-conflict rumination progressively erodes trust; the person cannot return to genuine connection because they are still in the conflict).

The Resolution Paradox is central: post-conflict rumination reliably prevents the resolution it is organized to achieve — by maintaining the conflict in active replay, the ruminator ensures the injustice is never processed and resolution never felt. Nine formal propositions characterize the conflict completion ground state, the resolution-resistance wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the resolution paradox, developmental roots in environments where conflicts were never genuinely resolved, and return paths through Gottman conflict processing work, somatic release, IFS parts work, and radical acceptance of imperfect resolution.