PhronesisCompulsive problem-creation — the chronic pattern of creating problems, maintaining situations at subclinical problem-level, or inserting oneself into others' difficulties as indispensable solver, organized around the belief that one's value lies in fixing things — is here reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CPC in the displacement framework. The healthy ground state S0 is contribution-as-presence: the capacity to contribute to relationships and situations through genuine presence and engagement, not requiring problems as the precondition of valued existence.
Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: value-through-fixing (the problem-creator's identity is organized around competence-demonstration; problem-free situations generate displacement cost D(xi) — the intolerable anxiety of perceived valuelessness; problems are not merely opportunities to help but preconditions for existence-as-valued); problem-maintenance behavior (small problems that could be fully resolved are held in partial resolution, never quite fixed; the problem-solver maintains their role by maintaining problems at a chronic low level requiring ongoing management); and crisis-precipitation pattern (when problems naturally resolve, new ones are created through catastrophic interpretation, by introducing complications into smooth processes, or through actual behaviors that generate the crises they appear to solve; the problem-creator is often genuinely unaware of their precipitating role).
The central Competence Paradox states: compulsive problem-creation reliably produces the incompetence it is organized to prevent; the pattern is eventually recognized by others as itself a form of dysfunction, destroying the competence-reputation it was organized to establish. Nine formal propositions characterize the attractor structure, developmental roots in family systems where the child's role was problem-solver, and return paths through presence-without-purpose practice, IFS work, and distinguishing competence from value.