PhronesisWe formalize chronic approval-seeking (CAS) as a wrong attractor W_ CAS within the displacement framework for psychological ground-state dynamics. In W_ CAS, the person's sense of their own adequacy is constitutively conditional on external signals: praise, acceptance, and validation function not as social bonuses but as the primary substrate of self-worth, without which the felt sense of one's own legitimacy cannot be maintained.
This is structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0 of calibrated self-referenced esteem, in which self-worth is grounded in internal reference—values coherence, direct self-knowledge, and accumulated competence awareness—and social feedback enriches but does not constitute it. We identify a three-layer validation architecture that sustains W_ CAS: the seeking loop (validation relief deepening need more seeking), the intrinsic-adequacy foreclosure basin (the progressive unavailability of self-generated worth as a regulatory source), and the conditional-worth lock (the structural equation worth = f(external\;signal) hardcoded by developmental experience).
Nine formal propositions (P_1–P_9) characterize the geometry of W_ CAS and its basin of attraction, including the Foreclosure Deepening Theorem and the Seeking-Authenticity Incompatibility Lemma. We analyze three behavioral surface patterns—people-pleasing, contingent self-worth oscillation, and external locus of evaluation—as downstream expressions of the same structural attractor.
Return dynamics are specified: intrinsic-reference cultivation, the adequacy-floor practice, Self-to-exile contact in the Internal Family Systems model, and the phenomenological recovery of pre-evaluative presence.