Performative Healing

 

Quiet Acceptance, Performative Healing, and Social Dynamics

An integrative psychology–sociology analysis

Abstract

This paper distinguishes quiet acceptance—an inward, non-performative integration of experience—from the performative display of acceptance, which mobilizes social settings to validate personal healing. Drawing from clinical psychology (trauma theory, memory reconstruction), cognitive models of autistic attention (monotropism, perseveration), and sociological theories of impression management and narcissistic culture, the brief describes how performative healing can function as an attention-seeking strategy that disrupts collective contexts, reproduces trauma dynamics, and can be experienced as manipulative. Clinical and social recommendations are offered for practitioners, group facilitators, and community members. Key claims are supported with primary texts and peer-reviewed literature.     

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1. Introduction: Two Modes of Acceptance

Quiet acceptance refers to an intrapersonal resolution of an experience that does not require ongoing external validation. It is characterised by internal integration, modest behavioural change where necessary, and the absence of repeated public performance. By contrast, performative acceptance is the repeated use of public moments to signal one’s progress in healing, often by reintroducing private material into unrelated social contexts in ways that demand recognition. This distinction is analytically useful because the two modes implicate different social functions, therapeutic needs, and ethical responsibilities.

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2. Theoretical Foundations

2.1 Cognitive Attention, Perseveration, and Monotropic Processing

Autistic cognition is commonly described as involving restricted, highly focused attention systems—often called monotropism. Under monotropism, attention is not diffusely distributed but concentrated on a limited set of interests; this can produce perseverative re-circling of themes and first-framed interpretations of events. When an individual with such attentional style anchors on an initial formulation of an event, subsequent reframings can feel discordant or threatening. Empirical and theoretical treatments of monotropism make this attentional economy explicit as a mechanism by which first-framed meanings gain disproportionate behavioural salience.  

2.2 Memory as Reconstruction; Source-Monitoring Errors

Cognitive psychology demonstrates that memory is reconstructive rather than photoreceptive. Source-monitoring errors—confusing imagined or inferred content with witnessed speech—are a well-documented phenomenon that can lead an individual sincerely to believe in an altered recounting of earlier conversations. Repeated internal rehearsal of an initial framing can further consolidate reconstructed memories, making them phenomenologically real to the rememberer while remaining discordant with others’ recollections.  

2.3 Trauma, Reenactment, and the Dialectic of Silence and Disclosure

Trauma theory highlights a central dialectic: the urge to deny or silence traumatic material and the complementary urge to proclaim it aloud. Survivors commonly oscillate between secrecy and compulsion to tell; repeated telling may be fragmentary, contradictory, or emotionally charged, and can function as a reenactment rather than an integration. Clinical literature emphasises that reenactment often persists until the survivor can find a safe, containing context for processing.   

2.4 Impression Management, Narcissism, and Attention Economies

Sociological accounts of self-presentation (Goffman) and critiques of modern culture (Lasch) frame performative acceptance as a form of impression management within an attention economy. Where social validation is scarce or prized, the public staging of healing can become a strategy for status, sympathy, or relational leverage. This is not inherently pathological—many cultures ritualise disclosure—but when disclosure is instrumentalised to attract attention or control social interaction outside designated therapeutic contexts, it can be experienced by others as manipulative, disruptive, or narcissistic.   

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3. Mechanisms Linking Private Trauma to Public Performance

1. Encoding and Anchoring. An initial statement or event—especially when emotionally salient—becomes the anchor for subsequent internal narrative. Monotropic focus and perseveration bias this anchoring process.  

2. Rehearsal and Reconstruction. Repeated mental rehearsal of the anchored frame consolidates a reconstructed memory or interpretation; source-monitoring errors may follow, producing sincere but divergent accounts of what “was said.”  

3. Script Selection and Reenactment. Current interactions are selected and reworked to replicate prior traumatic scripts (repetition compulsion), drawing in interlocutors as involuntary participants in an unresolved past.  

4. Social Instrumentalisation. When the reenactment is deployed across multiple, often unrelated social spaces, it functions instrumentally—to secure attention, empathy, or control—thereby shifting the act from potential healing to social leverage (impression management / attention capture).   

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4. Social and Ethical Consequences

• For groups and meetings: Repeated introduction of an individual’s unresolved material into contexts designed for other aims (work, community decision-making, social rituals) can derail collective processes, shift the emotional tone, and impose emotional labour on others who are not prepared or qualified to contain that material. Facilitators face ethical choices about space-holding and boundary enforcement.  

• For intimate relationships: The looping of past trauma into present conflict can be experienced as coercive or manipulative when partners are recruited into roles that replicate earlier abuse or neglect. This dynamic can erode reciprocity and mutual trust. Clinical assessment should attend to both intent and impact.   

• For individuals claiming healing: Public performance of healing can yield immediate social rewards (attention, sympathy), but it may also inhibit genuine integration by externalising the work of healing and substituting appearance for resolution. The tendency to demand validation across contexts can become maladaptive if it displaces private processing and appropriate therapeutic engagement.  

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5. Clinical and Community Recommendations

1. Contextual containment. Encourage disclosure of trauma in appropriate, contained spaces (therapy, peer support groups) rather than general forums. This protects both the storyteller and the community.  

2. Externalising agreements and recaps. In dyads where memory divergence and perseveration are present, use brief written recaps or agreed-upon notes after significant conversations to reduce source-monitoring errors and prevent repetitive public re-framing. This procedural approach respects cognitive styles while protecting group processes.   

3. Boundary setting and ethical facilitation. Community leaders and facilitators should set norms about space use (e.g., time-limited personal sharing during meetings) and intervene when repeated private processing hijacks public agendas. Training in trauma-informed facilitation is recommended.  

4. Psychoeducation and neurodiversity-affirming supports. Provide psychoeducation about monotropism, perseveration, and reconstructive memory to partners and group members; this promotes understanding without excusing harmful behaviours. Interventions should be neurodiversity-affirming and trauma-informed.  

5. Assess for exploitation versus need. When performative sharing coexists with economic demands or relational manipulation, assess for coercive patterns (economic abuse / coercive control) and respond with safeguarding practices as necessary.  

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6. Limitations and Ethical Note

This synthesis is interpretive and integrative; it is not a diagnostic manual. The presence of perseveration, public disclosure, or attention-seeking does not by itself indicate malice, personality disorder, or deliberate manipulation. Ethical practice requires careful assessment of intent, capacity, trauma history, and contextual factors. Interventions should prioritise safety, dignity, and autonomy.

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7. Select Short Quotations (≤25 words each)

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”  

“Trauma can be repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels.”  

“At any one moment, the amount of attention available to a conscious individual is limited.” (Monotropism formulation).  

“The individual will have to act so that he expresses himself, and the others will be impressed by him.” (Goffman, on self-presentation).  

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself.” (Lasch, on cultural narcissism).  

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Index of Works (by Title and Author — no links)

• Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl.

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life — Erving Goffman.

• The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations — Christopher Lasch.

• Trauma and Recovery — Judith Lewis Herman.

• The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma: Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism — Bessel A. van der Kolk.

• Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism — Dinah Murray; Mike Lesser; Wendy Lawson.

• Monotropism: An Interest-Based Account of Autism — Dinah Murray (and related collected works).

• Memory and Suggestibility / Source-Monitoring — foundational empirical work (e.g., Elizabeth F. Loftus; Marcia K. Johnson & colleagues).

• Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life — Evan Stark.

• Coercive Control / Domestic Abuse resources — (practical overviews from advocacy and legal scholarship; e.g., Women’s Aid summaries).