Escalates

Some state, like debt, conflict, or confidence, keeps compounding because each turn makes the next turn bigger.

A small dig from your sister at dinner. You answer with a sharper one. Next family text thread, she is colder, so you loop in your brother, so she feels ganged up on and escalates again. Nobody planned a feud. Yet every month the temperature runs a little higher than the last.

Escalation is the cue that some state, here resentment, compounds because each turn creates the fuel for the next turn: more of the state gives more pressure or ability to create the same state. Spot it by comparing turns: is round three genuinely bigger than round one, and did round one's output become round two's input? Then name the compounding quantity in one word (resentment, debt, confidence, backlog). Finally, check the rival before declaring a loop: some things grow because of an outside trend or plain accumulation with no return path, like a workload rising because the company keeps signing clients. When the cue is real, you stop treating each incident as separate and start looking for the link that carries this round into the next. Skip the label when the growth would continue even if everyone froze their behavior.