Relationship Exit Anxiety as Entrapment Wrong Attractor: The Leaving-Dread Architecture, Loyalty-Imprisonment Basin, and the Return to Chosen Presence

Relationship exit anxiety — the chronic inability to leave relationships that are harmful, unfulfilling, or finished, driven by anxiety about leaving rather than genuine desire to stay — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_REA in the landscape of chosen presence. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as chosen presence: being in a relationship because one genuinely chooses to be there — the capacity to leave when leaving is right, giving staying its meaning.

W_REA is rigorously distinguished from appropriate commitment through difficulty, genuine love that motivates staying, and rational concern about practical exit costs. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: leaving-as-catastrophe (the imagination of exit is populated with catastrophic scenarios — the partner's devastation, one's own aloneness, social consequences, guilt; these imagined costs are systematically overestimated via impact bias while the costs of remaining are underestimated as familiar; D(ξ) is generated by the act of leaving rather than by the relationship itself), loyalty-imprisonment (staying becomes organized not around desire but around obligation — loyalty, guilt, pity, responsibility; the imprisoned individual believes they are choosing to stay when they are actually choosing not to leave), and partial-exit oscillation (rather than fully leaving, the trapped individual oscillates — threatening, almost leaving, returning; each partial exit increases guilt and makes the next full exit harder; the oscillation signals to the partner that exit is never real, deepening both parties' entrapment).

The Loyalty Paradox is central: relationship exit anxiety reliably produces the harm it is organized to prevent — staying out of fear rather than choice produces a relationship of obligation and resentment, harming both parties more than a clear honest exit would have. Nine formal propositions characterize the chosen presence ground state, the entrapment wrong attractor, the three mechanisms, the loyalty paradox, developmental roots, and return paths through EFT, right-to-leave work, and catastrophic imagination correction.