Completion Compulsion as Sunk-Cost Wrong Attractor: The Incompleteness-Intolerance Architecture, Abandonment-Shame Basin, and the Return to Purposive Engagement

Completion compulsion — the chronic inability to abandon tasks, projects, or commitments even when completion no longer serves any genuine purpose, driven by aversion to incompleteness itself rather than genuine valuation of the outcome — is here reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CC in the landscape of purposive engagement. The healthy ground state S0 is purposive engagement: the capacity to pursue tasks and projects in service of genuine goals, adjusting investment as circumstances change, including the capacity to abandon what is no longer serving its purpose without distress about incompleteness itself.

Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: incompleteness intolerance (unfinished tasks generate chronic low-grade distress specific to incompleteness rather than to loss of purpose, so abandoned goals generate identical pressure to completed but purposeless ones); sunk-cost conflation (prior investment creates felt obligation to complete independent of whether outcome remains valuable); and abandonment-shame architecture (incompletion is experienced as moral failure — quitting, unreliability, weakness — reinforced by a shame structure that makes adaptive reprioritisation feel like character failure).

Nine formal propositions characterise the attractor structure, developmental roots in environments where incompletion was treated as failure, and return paths through purposive re-engagement practice, IFS work on the completion-compelled part, and graduated incompletion tolerance.