Forced-Position Framing Theory: A Unified Architectural Model Explaining Coercive Communication and Psychological Entrapment

Forced-Position Framing (FPF) Theory Forced-Position Framing (FPF) Theory is introduced as a unified architectural model for understanding coercive communication, epistemic manipulation, and agency restriction across interpersonal, institutional, and ideological contexts. Building on Supra-Agency Theory (SAT), FPF adopts SAT’s Agent Class 1 (AC-1) as the frame-authoring agent responsible for constructing the interpretive environment in which the target is positioned. Although psychology has long studied mechanisms such as double binds, projective identification, hostile attribution, coercive control, framing effects, gaslighting, and moral entrapment, these constructs have remained conceptually fragmented. FPF demonstrates that these behaviors share a common structural logic: an AC-1 agent authors a frame, assigns a target a position within that frame, restricts the target’s available responses, and evaluates the target based on the imposed position. Drawing on communication pragmatics, cognitive framing theory, relational psychology, and epistemic-injustice scholarship, this article develops a four-layer architectural model of FPF—frame construction, position assignment, constraint encoding, and evaluative closure—and illustrates how this architecture generates coercive communicative behavior and its recursive, self-sealing dynamics. Applications across clinical practice, organizational systems, political rhetoric, and digital environments demonstrate the model’s explanatory power. FPF reframes coercive communication not as a symptom of individual pathology but as behavior produced by an authored interpretive architecture that restricts agency and predetermines outcomes. By unifying seven major psychological mechanisms under a single structural framework, FPF offers a new theoretical foundation for the study of shared structural logic across coercive communication and provides researchers, clinicians, and theorists with a powerful tool for identifying and dismantling epistemic containment systems.