Anxious Attachment as Hyperactivated-Bond Wrong Attractor: The Protest Behavior Cascade, Reassurance-Depletion Loop, and the Return to Earned Security

Anxious attachment — the chronic pattern of hyperactivating the attachment system in response to perceived relational threat — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_AA in the landscape of earned security. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as earned security: a stable internalized sense of worth and relational safety that can persist through temporary separation, ambiguity, or conflict without triggering catastrophic abandonment responses.

W_AA is rigorously distinguished from realistic concern, appropriate relational need, and healthy attachment behavior. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: the protest behavior cascade (hypervigilance to abandonment cues generates protest behaviors — excessive contact, jealousy, clinging — that increase the probability of the feared rejection, confirming the threat), the reassurance-depletion loop (reassurance temporarily reduces anxiety but never addresses the underlying worth deficit, requiring escalating doses while partners become progressively exhausted), and the preoccupied self-narrative (self-worth fused entirely with partner availability — alone equals abandoned equals worthless).

The chase paradox is central: anxious pursuit consistently triggers avoidant withdrawal in partners, confirming abandonment fear and deepening the wrong attractor — making the anxious-avoidant couple a co-stabilized attractor pair. Nine formal propositions characterize the hyperactivated attachment system, protest cascade, reassurance-depletion loop, chase paradox, developmental roots, neurobiological substrate, preoccupied self-narrative, return paths, and distinction from healthy relational need.