Affective Scarcity and the Insolvency Framework: A Post‑Structural Analysis of Relational Ambiguity and Neuroeconomics (Part 2)

Author: Rekha Boodoo-Lumbus

Affiliation: RAKHEE LB LIMITED, United Kingdom

© 2026 Rekha Boodoo-Lumbus / RAKHEE LB LIMITED. All Rights Reserved (including images and graphics)

Abstract

This paper extends the Insolvency Framework by shifting from the recipient’s allostatic burden to the emotionally underdeveloped party’s internal system. It argues that individuals with high cognitive capacity but restricted affective range use ambiguity, distance, and intermittent engagement as compensatory strategies for emotional underdevelopment. Drawing on neuroscience, behavioural science, and attachment theory, the paper reframes breadcrumbing, triangulation, and emotional withholding as neuroeconomically optimised adaptations to affective limitation, metabolically efficient responses that minimise limbic costs while sustaining low-demand relational proximity. It situates these patterns within broader neuroeconomic dynamics (including ambiguity aversion and intermittent dopaminergic reinforcement) and identifies internal autonomy as the restoration of homeostatic integrity for individuals conditioned into chronic sympathetic arousal.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the interdisciplinary scholars whose work in neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioural science has shaped the conceptual foundations of this paper. Gratitude is also extended to the broader intellectual community whose ongoing dialogue around trauma, attachment, and digital relationality continues to inform and deepen this line of inquiry.

Introduction

In an era where intimacy is increasingly mediated through digital modalities, inter subjective structures are being reorganised around asymmetry, opacity, and emotional abstraction. Part 1 of this enquiry examined the recipient’s neurobiological burden under emotional baiting, demonstrating how intermittent reinforcement and interstitial indeterminacy generate sustained allostatic load, epistemic instability, and a chronic ‘Fighting Mode’ in individuals conditioned to absorb emotional strain as routine. That analysis foregrounded the physiological and psychological consequences of associative flux, establishing the groundwork for understanding how digital interactions can shape long term neurobiological states.

The present analysis reverses the lens. It interrogates the internal economy of the emotionally limited agent: the individual whose cognitive sophistication masks a developmentally arrested affective system. Whereas Part 1 focused on the recipient’s neurobiological depletion, Part 2 examines the structural deficits, the asymmetry between cognitive capital and affective capacity, that drive relational ambiguity. The Insolvency Framework proposed here integrates neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioural economics to explain how intermittent attention, emotional withholding, and codified contrition function as compensatory mechanisms for emotional deficits. By mapping these behaviours onto neurobiological, developmental, and metabolic processes, the analysis reveals emotional insolvency not as a personality quirk but as a patterned, energy efficient strategy rooted in affective limitation. The analysis proceeds by delineating the neurobiological architecture of emotional insolvency, exploring affective armouring and digital catalysis, tracing the recipient's developmental reboot toward internal autonomy, and culminating in a neuroeconomic model of sustained relational extraction.

The Architecture of Emotional Insolvency

The emotionally underdeveloped perpetrator’s defining feature is a Cognitive–Affective Dissonance rooted in neurobiological imbalance. Individuals with high cognitive capital often display pronounced prefrontal involvement in executive control and abstraction, as part of a dynamically organised cortical network (Just and Varma, 2007). This cognitive overdevelopment creates an impression of psychological sophistication, yet emotional literacy requires functional integration with limbic structures, particularly the amygdala, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, which mediate threat detection, emotional resonance, and interoceptive awareness (Decety and Jackson, 2004, Schore, 2003). When these systems fail to integrate, the individual becomes structurally incapable of emotional reciprocity. They can conceptualise emotions, but they cannot feel them in real time. This dissociation forms the neurobiological foundation of emotional insolvency.

Psychiatric literature describes this pattern as alexithymic compensation (Berenbaum, 1996), in which intellectual mastery substitutes for emotional fluency. The prefrontal cortex becomes a regulatory overgrowth, suppressing rather than integrating limbic activation (Damasio, 1994). This produces an individual who can manage complexity but cannot tolerate emotional immediacy. Their emotional system remains developmentally arrested, often shaped by early relational environments that rewarded cognitive performance while discouraging vulnerability. As a result, emotional cues are experienced as intrusive, dysregulating, or threatening. Their emotional stuntedness is not a passive deficit, it is an active structural limitation that shapes relational behaviour.

This system is reinforced by reward circuitry dysregulation, which explains why breadcrumbing becomes a preferred relational strategy. Breadcrumbing delivers intermittent dopaminergic reinforcement without triggering the amygdala’s vulnerability related threat response (Fisher et al., 2010). This mirrors neurobiological mechanisms in variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, where unpredictable rewards sustain engagement more robustly than continuous ones, akin to patterns observed in digital addiction and behavioural persistence. Intimacy requires sustained activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and insula, regions associated with emotional risk, empathy, and self–other mapping (Decety and Jackson, 2004). Avoidant individuals experience this activation as metabolically costly and emotionally aversive. Intermittent validation, by contrast, activates the nucleus accumbens in short, low demand bursts (Fisher et al., 2010). This allows them to maintain relational proximity without engaging in emotional labour. The behaviour is not random, it is a neuroeconomically efficient strategy for individuals operating from affective limitation. Relational ambiguity exploits neuroeconomic ambiguity aversion, where uncertain interpersonal outcomes are metabolically less costly than explicit emotional exposure. This engages prefrontal regions, particularly lateral prefrontal areas, to modulate threat processing and suppress limbic signals (Tanaka et al., 2015; Hsu et al., 2005; Huettel et al., 2006).

The Scavenger Hypothesis emerges naturally from this neurobiology. Individuals with low affective capacity gravitate towards partners who provide external emotional regulation (Bowlby, 1969, Ainsworth, 1978, Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). Individuals with high Affective Resonance, often “Primal Over Functioners” in Family Systems Theory, conditioned to self soothe and over function, offer high relational yield with minimal emotional investment (Hochschild, 1983). The emotionally limited system is incapable of generating emotional stability internally, so it outsources it. Commitment requires emotional liquidity; scavenging requires only access to another person’s regulatory system. This dynamic mirrors parasitic energy exchange in biological systems, where organisms with limited metabolic capacity rely on hosts for sustenance. The behaviour is a form of energy efficient parasitism, consistent with the brain’s metabolic imperative to conserve resources (McEwen, 1998). They are not seeking intimacy; they are seeking regulation.

Affective Armouring as a Compensatory Defence

“Affective Armouring,” or the “Macho Wall,” encompasses status posturing, financial gatekeeping, and emotional aloofness. It functions as a psychiatric defence structure designed to protect an underdeveloped affective system. Although it presents as confidence or self sufficiency, its foundations lie in avoidant attachment, limbic hyperreactivity, and dorsal vagal shutdown (Porges, 2011, 2021). This configuration is not merely behavioural; it is neurobiological. It reflects an organism attempting to maintain coherence in the face of emotional stimuli it cannot metabolise. Affective Armouring is therefore best understood as a compensatory mechanism, a façade of dominance concealing profound affective fragility.

Avoidant individuals exhibit heightened amygdala activation in response to emotional closeness, coding intimacy as a threat to autonomy and self coherence (Insel and Young, 2001). Neuroimaging corroborates this pattern, revealing hypoactivation in lateral prefrontal regions during emotional processing among avoidantly attached individuals, alongside hyperreactivity in limbic areas to intimacy cues (e.g., Ran & Zhang, 2018 meta-analytic findings on reduced prefrontal recruitment). This hyperreactivity produces a paradox: connection is desired cognitively yet experienced as physiologically overwhelming. When emotional demands exceed regulatory capacity, the nervous system shifts into dorsal vagal states characterised by withdrawal, emotional flatness, and digital disappearance (Porges, 2011). This collapse is often misread as indifference, although it is more accurately a neurophysiological shutdown mediated by the parasympathetic immobilisation system (Porges, 2021). The defensive façade emerges not from strength but from a chronic inability to tolerate emotional activation without dysregulation.

To preserve psychological coherence, the emotionally limited party relies on intellectualisation, a defence supported by prefrontal overactivation (Just and Varma, 2007). By suppressing limbic signals, they retreat into domains where cognitive superiority can be maintained without emotional exposure. This produces relational asymmetry: they remain in abstraction and control, while the recipient is left to navigate the emotional terrain alone. Psychiatry identifies this pattern as pseudo maturity, the appearance of competence masking profound affective underdevelopment (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). The defensive façade is thus not a personality trait but a structural adaptation that avoids emotional accountability while preserving the illusion of stability.

This defensive system extends into Performative Revisionism, where past partners or relationships are idealised (Storr, 2021). The behaviour serves several neurobiological functions. It restores dopaminergic reward through narrative dominance (Fisher et al., 2010), reinforces Affective Armouring by positioning the emotionally limited party as evaluator rather than evaluated, and destabilises the recipient through cortisol spikes, sympathetic activation, and comparison anxiety (McEwen, 1998). The recipient becomes trapped in self surveillance, attempting to “measure up” to an idealised predecessor who may never have existed. Triangulation thus becomes a neurobiological power play, maintaining emotional depletion while preserving the emotionally limited party’s position as arbiter of value (Abramson, 2014). The defensive façade operates as a dynamic system of relational control sustained through ambiguity, withdrawal, and curated narratives of superiority.

The integrity of Affective Armouring is further maintained through what may be termed the Status Subsidy Paradox. Among high capacity individuals, external markers of success, financial gatekeeping, professional dominance, and the curation of an expansive domestic “legacy” operate as forms of externalised liquidity that obscure a profound internal affective deficit. This outward wealth functions as a relational subsidy, allowing the emotionally limited party to circumvent the metabolic demands of emotional labour. Their perceived “market value” is high, enabling them to command attention and regulation without offering reciprocity, thereby conflating acquisition with attachment. Within this framework, the accumulation of relational “assets,” whether partners, dependents, or admirers, does not signify emotional depth but a strategic dispersal of affective debt across a broader and more manageable system.

The Digital Catalyst: Mediated Asymmetry and Cognitive-Affective Dissociation

The system of emotional insolvency is significantly amplified by the structural affordances of digital communication, which act as a catalyst for prefrontal dominance and limbic suppression. In digital environments, the absence of non verbal cues, such as prosody, facial micro expressions, and shared physical space, attenuates activation of the “social brain” network, particularly the mirror neuron system and the insula (Cacioppo and Cacioppo, 2012). This “online disinhibition effect” enables the emotionally limited party to operate almost exclusively within the prefrontal cortex, treating relational exchanges as strategic, asynchronous tasks rather than real time emotional encounters (Suler, 2004). Digital features such as read receipts and delayed response capacity create temporal asymmetry that the emotionally insolvent individual exploits as a low cost regulatory tool. By manipulating response latency, they maintain the defensive façade of aloofness while bypassing the metabolic demands of immediate emotional resonance (Turkle, 2015). For the recipient, however, these digital crumbs trigger a profound limbic–cortical mismatch: the prefrontal cortex attempts to decode the silence logically, while the amygdala interprets digital withdrawal as a threat to the attachment bond, accelerating allostatic load and Fighting Mode (McEwen, 1998, Van der Kolk, 2014).

Digital platforms further intensify emotional insolvency by enabling Optimised Asymmetrical Visibility. When the emotionally limited party has superior access to relational data, engagement metrics, presence indicators, or behavioural patterns, the interaction shifts from dialogue to a form of predatory surveillance. This informational advantage allows them to calibrate intermittent reinforcement with near mathematical precision, delivering digital crumbs at moments of peak recipient vulnerability to maximise dopaminergic impact. This is not merely relational ambiguity; it is a neuroeconomically optimised strategy in which information asymmetry is weaponised to preserve the defensive façade while ensuring the recipient remains in a state of Fighting Mode and epistemic captivity.

The Developmental Reboot: From Fighting Mode to Emotional Maturity

The recipient’s transformation is best understood as a neurodevelopmental shift rather than a psychological epiphany. Individuals raised in invalidating or unpredictable environments internalise hypervigilance, self blame, and relational over functioning as survival strategies (Hochschild, 1983, Berenbaum, 1996). These adaptations are not cognitive choices but physiological imprints, encoded through repeated exposure to inconsistency, emotional neglect, or conditional affection. Over time, the nervous system becomes anchored in sympathetic dominance, with cortisol driven alertness functioning as a baseline state (McEwen, 1998). This chronic activation creates a body that is always braced, always scanning, always compensating. The Reboot begins with an awakening of the insular cortex, allowing the individual to interpret somatic signals that were previously suppressed by the sympathetic drive of Fighting Mode (Van der Kolk, 2014).

Within the Insolvency Framework, envy is conceptualised as a Scarcity Driven Activation, in which the recipient perceives relational resources as finite and under threat. By contrast, prosocial empathy, particularly towards a perceived rival or another individual within the emotionally limited party’s relational system, signals the emergence of emotional abundance. Extending care in this context demonstrates an absence of attachment scarcity and disrupts the expectation of triangulation or competition. Neurobiologically, this stance bypasses the emotionally limited party’s amygdala mediated threat detection and instead engages the temporoparietal junction, associated with advanced perspective taking and moral reasoning. The refusal to participate in the Envy Pattern de levels the relational field, shifting the dynamic from transactional tussle to asymmetrical observation, in which the emotionally anchored individual retains both the moral and metabolic advantage.

The Reboot accelerates when the body begins rejecting the metabolic cost of perpetual vigilance (Han, 2015). This is not a moment of insight but a physiological refusal, a somatic boundary drawn by a system that can no longer sustain the energetic drain of emotional overextension. Midlife often introduces this recalibration: hormonal shifts, accumulated stress, and neurobiological maturation converge to create a threshold beyond which the nervous system refuses to subsidise the emotional deficits of others (Van der Kolk, 2014). This shift is supported by increased prefrontal–limbic integration, improved interoceptive accuracy, and strengthened vagal tone, all markers of emotional maturation (Goleman, 1995, Giedd, 2008, Porges, 2021). The individual begins to feel the difference between anxiety and intuition, between obligation and desire, between survival and internal steadiness. What once felt like loyalty now feels like depletion. What once felt like connection now feels like cost.

The transition into Intrinsic Solidity marks the emergence of internal autonomy. As the individual withdraws from externalised validation loops, the parasympathetic system stabilises, the default mode network becomes coherent, and the sense of self consolidates (Coan and Sbarra, 2015). This consolidation is not merely psychological; it is neurobiological. The nervous system shifts from outward orientation — scanning, appeasing, decoding — to inward anchoring. The reclamation of the Vita Contemplativa, a contemplative and internally rooted mode of living, closes the energetic “kitchen” on which the scavenger once fed (Han, 2015). The individual no longer leaks energy through hypervigilance, emotional labour, or self abandonment. They cannot be consumed because their nervous system no longer provides the metabolic surplus on which emotionally insolvent individuals depend (Van der Kolk, 2014). Internal autonomy is therefore not a posture but a physiological state: a system that regulates itself from within, no longer shaped by scarcity, fear, or relational extraction.

This internal consolidation does more than stabilise the nervous system; it exposes the external system that previously operated unnoticed. Once the individual is no longer entangled in hypervigilance, appeasement, or relational decoding, the structural economy of emotional insolvency becomes visible in full resolution. What felt personal is revealed as systemic. What appeared as interpersonal conflict is reframed as a macro economic pattern of extraction. This shift in vantage point creates the analytical conditions for examining the broader machinery that sustains the emotionally limited party.

The Neuro Economics of Affective Insolvency

The structural coherence of the emotionally limited party is frequently sustained by the parasitic nature of Reciprocal Debt. In this dynamic, the subject deploys substantial Cognitive Capital, manifested as institutional authority or technical expertise, to establish a network of ‘indebted’ subordinates. This constitutes a form of Relational Extraction (Hochschild, 1983), in which the provision of professional support functions as a strategic investment in future social validation and “Status Subsidies” (Storr, 2021). The subject subsequently collects on this debt by positioning themselves as a focal point for Performative Vulnerability. As this network is anchored in professional or ethical obligation, it provides the necessary dopaminergic feedback for the subject’s curated narratives of “internal conflict” (Skinner, 1953) without requiring authentic emotional reciprocity.

This dynamic produces an affectively void social system. Although the subject exists within a high density social network, the system remains fundamentally transactional (Han, 2015). Relationships are predicated on functional utility rather than affective resonance, thereby subsidising the subject’s ongoing evasion of their internal insolvency. The result is a structurally reinforced cycle in which the emotionally limited party’s deficit is masked by a network that appears relationally rich but is, in practice, affectively barren.

A definitive marker of Emotional Insolvency is the shift from relational reality to a holographic projection. Within this framework, the subject functions as a “hologram”: a construct possessing high cognitive resolution but lacking somatic mass. Interactions with such a subject primarily activate the visual cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Just and Varma, 2007), producing a mode of engagement that is analytical, detached, and oriented towards the preservation of hierarchy and image. The observer perceives the subject but remains neurologically isolated from them (Suler, 2004), unable to access the interoceptive cues that underpin genuine relational presence.

Authentic relationality, by contrast, requires activation of the insular cortex and somatosensory regions, which mediate interoceptive awareness and “felt” presence (Damasio, 1994, Decety and Jackson, 2004). The emotionally limited party operates from a state of affective depletion and therefore lacks the capacity to trigger these somatic pathways in others. Attempts by peers to seek intimacy collide with the Structural Defence Perimeter, a protective layer designed to guard against perceived “Social Baseline” threats (Coan and Sbarra, 2015). The result is a relational field in which proximity is permitted but resonance is structurally prohibited.

A shift in perspective emerges only when the observer has achieved sufficient internal stability to disengage from the Reciprocity Loop. From this vantage point, the individual perceives the broader system of emotional insolvency rather than its personalised manifestations. What the wider network interprets as Institutional Authority is revealed as a compensatory structure masking alexithymia (Berenbaum, 1996). The refusal to participate in the extraction model disrupts the relational economy that previously sustained the emotionally limited party’s deficit (Porges, 2011).

In this state, the observer is no longer a component of the subject’s external regulatory system but a witness to its allostatic exhaustion (McEwen, 1998). The system’s fragility becomes visible only from outside its configuration, and it is this external vantage point that enables the individual to discern the structural, affective, and neurobiological deficits that remain concealed within the network itself.

Conclusion: The Efficiency of Integrity

Integrity emerges as the most energy‑efficient relational strategy. Neurobiologically, coherence between cognition, affect, and behaviour reduces the metabolic cost of self‑regulation. By contrast, deception, façade maintenance, and emotional evasion impose significant cognitive load, activating working memory, inhibitory control, and stress pathways. These behaviours demand continuous monitoring of inconsistencies and suppression of affective cues to maintain psychological continuity. Over time, this generates internal friction: the emotionally limited party becomes trapped within the structure of their own avoidance, expending increasing energy to preserve a façade that yields diminishing emotional returns. Avoidance is therefore not neutral but a metabolically expensive strategy that erodes psychological resilience and deepens affective insolvency.

The limitations of the Insolvent Relational Model become most visible during Contractual Collapse. For the emotionally limited party, individuals function as service‑level assets. When a partner attempts to shift from a transactional arrangement to an emotional or legal requirement, the emotionally limited system experiences a liability spike. In response, it enacts a Punitive Liquidation, using financial starvation or digital erasure to restore equilibrium. This contrast highlights the fundamental safety of the emotionally mature individual: operating with transparent integrity and requiring no external liquidity, they cannot be bankrupted or starved.

By contrast, the emotionally integrated individual, neurologically coherent and metabolically efficient, operates with minimal internal friction. Their nervous system is no longer split between vigilance and suppression, nor burdened by the labour of managing another’s emotional deficits. Instead, their life becomes defined by quietude, depth, and the capacity for genuine care. Emotional maturity is not a posture of independence but a physiological state in which the system regulates itself from within, free from the distortions of relational ambiguity. In removing scavengers from their relational landscape, the emotionally anchored individual creates the conditions for sustained flourishing: stable vagal tone, coherent self‑representation, and relationships grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction.

Ultimately, the transition to internal autonomy is a movement toward Homeostatic Integrity. While the system of insolvency requires continuous and metabolically expensive maintenance of façades, revisionist narratives, and defensive posturing, internal autonomy represents the path of least resistance for the nervous system. By decoupling reward circuitry from externalised validation loops and closing the metabolic kitchen to relational scavengers, the individual reduces internal friction. Integrity is therefore not a moral alignment but the ultimate neurobiological baseline, the state in which the human organism achieves metabolic efficiency, structural stability, and somatic resonance.

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