PhronesisEvery long-term relationship requires that both parties change. Growth, development, expanded capacity, new interests, altered perspectives, deepened maturity — these are not threats to a relationship but the substance of its life over time. The healthy relational system navigates change from a secure enough base: it can hold the other person's development without experiencing it as the relationship's dissolution, and can tolerate the discomfort of recalibration without collapsing into exit.
This paper formalizes the chronic failure of that navigational capacity as a wrong attractor W_ CAUG (chronic abandonment under growth) within the displacement framework. The person in W_ CAUG systematically exits relationships when the other person changes, grows, develops new capacities, or otherwise becomes different — even when the change is positive, explicitly desired, or actively encouraged by the person who then exits.
We designate the healthy ground state S^0 as calibrated relational evolution: the capacity to remain relationally present through the changes both parties undergo, grounded in a secure enough relational identity to tolerate the other person becoming more fully themselves. Three interlocking mechanisms sustain the wrong attractor. First, the static-partner requirement: the implicit encoding of the relationship as defined by a specific configuration of both parties, such that any change in the other person is experienced as the relationship itself ending rather than as the relationship evolving.
Second, destabilization-as-loss encoding: the other person's growth produces a shift in the relational dynamic — in power balance, role definition, or need structure — that is experienced as the loss of the relationship rather than as its development. Third, growth-envy triggering: the other person's development activates comparison and inadequacy, making continued proximity threatening regardless of the relational content.
Nine formal propositions articulate the attractor's structure and basin-maintenance dynamics. The paper introduces and proves the Growth-Exit Paradox: chronic exit under the partner's growth systematically prevents the accumulation of long-term relational depth — the very form of connection the pattern is organized around protecting — because depth requires surviving change together.
Developmental roots include dismissive-avoidant attachment formation, early relational environments in which the other person's change was consistently experienced as threat or loss, and narcissistic injury structures primed by comparison. Return paths involve earned security development, secure-base construction in therapy, and Internal Family Systems work on the part that encodes change as abandonment.