Your post reminded me of what happened in chapter one, where Kurumi was able to center herself and stop herself from doing something stupid by seeing Kokoro in the crowd during the school assembly. Now that she's likely seeking an out from Kokoro as well, it would seem that seeing Kokoro in the crowd of girls in the classroom would cause her to be more likely to lash out this time.
I had forgotten this until you mentioned it, but it is in the first three black and white pages of
chapter 1, where she does find Kokoro's presence reassuring while the others are represented as a sea of faceless and creepy masses who she has to please with her speech.
Thinking about this more, the story is really following the childhood friend versus newcomer story convention. The childhood friend represents acceptance of the status quo and the way MC was doing things before the story, while the newcomer represents change and growth. Kurumi has generally used Kokoro's validation as evidence that what she had been doing was a good idea and things would be fine if she kept doing it. She tended to think of Kokoro when she wanted to reject Naoi's way of doing things.
Where we're getting now that the 'Kokoro path' is starting to look increasingly like her relationship to her mother, which is seemingly the original source of Kurumi's trauma. Kokoro, while nowhere near as bad, does in fact have some traits of the mother and we could see her ending up like that as an adult if she is rewarded for using 'weaponized fragility' over a long period of time.
So Naoi can kind of save both of them from these respective psychological tendencies (not ending up like the mother is to Kokoro's benefit even if it means not getting what she wants now), while also allowing Naoi to show that she
isn't like either Kokoro or mother regardless of how traumatized Kurumi is interpreting Naoi's behavior.
