PhronesisCompulsive pre-emptive helpfulness—the systematic provision of assistance before the recipient has expressed any need, driven not by evident difficulty but by the helper's anticipation of potential need—is analyzed here as a wrong attractor W_CPEH in the phase space of relational care. The attractor is organized not around generosity but around the helper's inability to tolerate the possibility that another person might need something and not yet have it.
We define the ground state S^0 as calibrated responsive care: the capacity to attend to another without acting ahead of them, to offer help when help is genuinely sought, and to sustain full presence to another's autonomy even when that autonomy includes the right to struggle. The displacement D() 0 measures deviation from S^0 at each relational moment, and the integrated displacement = D()\,d serves as a scalar index of chronic pre-emptive overreach.
We formalize a help-giving function H(t) and an expressed-need function N(t) and show that the compulsive pattern is characterized by the systematic condition H(t) > N(t) with H(t) driven by the helper's internal anxiety state rather than any signal from the recipient. Three mechanisms sustain the attractor: distress-intolerance, in which watching another person struggle—even briefly, even productively—is experienced as unbearable and drives pre-emptive help as a form of affect regulation; help-as-worth, in which the provision of help is the primary mode by which the helper establishes relational value, so that potential unmet need becomes a threat to be neutralized before it fully forms; and anticipated-failure, the implicit belief that the other will fail or suffer unnecessarily if unaided, which produces a self-fulfilling prophecy by preventing the development of the other's own capacity through repeated pre-emptive intervention.
The central formal result is the Help Paradox: pre-emptive help, by structure, deprives the recipient of the experience of asking, receiving, and developing capacity; it is therefore a form of relational control that produces dependency while subjectively presenting as generosity. Nine formal propositions organize the theoretical structure. Developmental roots lie in environments where the child was responsible for preventing or managing others' distress, where failure by others reflected on the helper, and where hypervigilant attunement to others' states was trained as a survival adaptation.
Return paths include waiting-for-asking practice, the cultivation of tolerance for others' struggle, and the disciplined separation of empathy from intervention.