PhronesisCompulsive friendship caretaking — the chronic pattern of organizing one's friendships around attending to others' needs while systematically suppressing and denying one's own — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_FCA in the landscape of mutual care. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as mutual care: friendship in which both parties can both give and receive — attending to the other's needs and allowing the other to attend to one's own, without chronic asymmetry.
W_FCA is rigorously distinguished from compulsive rescuing (crisis-rescue dynamics), appropriate care in friendship, and genuine asymmetry in specific friendship contexts. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: need-detection as identity (the compulsive friendship caretaker has developed acute sensitivity to others' needs; this sensitivity is organized as identity — they are 'the one who takes care of people'; D(ξ) is generated by attending to their own needs rather than others'), need-suppression and invisibility (the caretaker's own needs are systematically suppressed — either not noticed, minimized, or resolved without allowing others to help; when the caretaker has a crisis they manage it privately, refuse offered support, or redirect attention back to the friend), and role-lock (both caretaker and friend become locked in complementary roles; the friend brings problems to this person; the caretaker solves them; the role is reinforced by both parties and defines the relationship; attempts to shift it are resisted by the system).
The Care Paradox is central: compulsive friendship caretaking reliably produces the care deficit it is organized to resolve — by foreclosing the possibility of receiving care, the caretaker ensures their own fundamental need for care remains unmet while exhausting themselves providing it to others. Nine formal propositions characterize the mutual care ground state, the asymmetric-devotion wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the care paradox, developmental roots in emotional parentification, and return paths through IFS, practicing need-disclosure, and building mutual relationships.