PhronesisChronic approval-cycling designates a self-reinforcing behavioral and affective pattern in which an individual's moment-to-moment mood and stable sense of self-worth become contingent on the receipt of external positive feedback, while the internal capacity to generate, sustain, and trust one's own evaluative assessments—internal esteem generation—is progressively foreclosed. Within the Displacement Framework, this pattern is formalized as a wrong attractor W_AC: a dynamically stable configuration that the system reaches and maintains not because it produces well-being, but because the accumulation of displacement cost = D()\,dt has deepened the basin sufficiently that return to ground state S^0 requires deliberate corrective effort rather than spontaneous relaxation.
The paper provides a formal architecture of the cycle's four phases—seek, reception, crash, re-entry—shows how each phase contributes to basin deepening, and derives nine propositions characterizing the structural properties of the attractor. We distinguish approval-cycling from ordinary social sensitivity: the diagnostic criterion is not the presence of responsiveness to feedback but the atrophy of internal esteem generation such that external feedback becomes the primary—eventually the only—operative source of self-regard.
We close by characterizing the return condition: what must be rebuilt internally before stable exit from W_AC is achievable, and why premature withdrawal from approval-seeking without internal esteem restoration produces relapse rather than recovery.