PhronesisCompulsive project abandonment — the chronic pattern of beginning projects, relationships, or endeavors with high energy and then abandoning them before completion, repeatedly, across domains — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CPA in the landscape of full-cycle engagement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as full-cycle engagement: the capacity to begin, sustain through difficulty, complete, and receive the results of one's efforts — without compulsive exit before the cycle closes.
W_CPA is rigorously distinguished from ADHD task-completion difficulty, adaptive strategic pivoting based on new information, and appropriate abandonment of genuinely failed projects. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: completion-as-threat (completing a project subjects it and the creator to evaluation; incomplete projects exist in the subjunctive as what they might be, protected from judgment; completion collapses possibility into actuality and invites comparison with standards — for the compulsive abandoner this exposure is more threatening than non-completion), beginning-high exploitation (the beginning of a project carries maximum dopaminergic reward through novelty and possibility; the compulsive abandoner has learned to harvest this beginning-high repeatedly without paying the metabolic cost of sustained effort and completion — an addiction to initiation), and incompletion identity (over time repeated abandonment produces an identity organized around incompletion — the person who has many projects, many beginnings; this identity paradoxically becomes comfortable, providing the narrative of a rich life while foreclosing the vulnerability of any completed, evaluated output).
The Possibility Paradox is central: compulsive project abandonment reliably collapses the possibility it is organized to protect — the perpetual beginner, by never completing, never achieves; unfinished projects accumulate as evidence of incapacity rather than potential. Nine formal propositions characterize the full-cycle engagement ground state, the completion-avoidance wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the possibility paradox, developmental roots in perfectionism and early criticism, and return paths through completion-focused contracting, IFS work, and exposure to evaluation.