Compulsive Helpfulness as Self-Neglect-Through-Serving Wrong Attractor: The Others-Must-Come-First Architecture, Own-Needs-Deferral Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Generous Presence

To help is among the most fundamental expressions of human care. In its calibrated form, the person extends genuine generosity from a position of relative fullness, attends to their own needs alongside those of others, and receives support in return without shame or collapse. Compulsive helpfulness is formally reconceptualised here within the Displacement Framework as a wrong attractor W_ CH in the landscape of relational functioning, structurally distinct from the healthy ground state S^0_ CGP — Calibrated Generous Presence — which is the capacity to offer real and sustained help from a base that is replenished, bounded, and allowed to receive.

The compulsive helper systematically prioritises the needs of others over their own, encodes self-care as selfishness, derives worth primarily or exclusively through usefulness, and experiences receiving as a threatening form of vulnerability. This paper formalises the Helper's Paradox: the compulsive-helping stance, designed to be of maximum service to others, produces helper burnout, resentment, and progressive capacity depletion, ultimately degrading both the quality and the sustainability of the helping offered.

Three sustaining mechanisms are identified and formally characterised: (1) own-needs-as-selfish encoding, in which attending to one's own requirements is experienced as moral failure, making self-care feel identical to abandoning others; (2) worth-through-usefulness wiring, in which the helper's sense of value is contingent on being needed, so that rest, refusal, or receiving constitute existential threats; and (3) receiving-as-vulnerability avoidance, in which accepting help activates shame, fear of dependency, or felt loss of the relational role that organises identity.

Nine propositions formalise these mechanisms, the dynamics of the own-needs-deferral basin, the decay of helper capacity as deferred needs accumulate beyond threshold, the positive-feedback loop between usefulness and identity, and the return paths through capacity replenishment, needs literacy, and the practice of receiving. The paper draws on Maslach's caregiver burnout literature, Beattie's codependency framework, Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory, Figley's compassion fatigue research, Bowlby's attachment theory, and the empirical literature on pathological altruism and over-giving.