Compulsive Reassurance-Seeking as Doubt-Suppression Wrong Attractor: The Approval-Loop Architecture, Validation-Hunger Basin, and the Return to Self-Anchored Adequacy

Compulsive reassurance-seeking — the chronic pattern of repeatedly soliciting confirmation, approval, or validation from others regarding one's worth, decisions, relationships, or adequacy — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CRS in the landscape of self-anchored adequacy. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as self-anchored adequacy: the capacity to hold a stable enough sense of one's worth, decisions, and relational standing from an internal ground — while remaining genuinely open to others' perspectives — without requiring continuous external validation to maintain psychological stability.

W_CRS is rigorously distinguished from appropriate feedback-seeking, legitimate relational check-ins, and healthy support-seeking. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: externalized worth regulation (the compulsive reassurance-seeker lacks sufficient internal anchoring for their sense of worth — worth must be regularly replenished from external sources; D(ξ) is temporarily resolved by received reassurance but the resolution decays), the reassurance half-life decay (each reassurance provides only temporary relief whose calming effect decays rapidly, requiring more frequent and more emphatic reassurance over time, producing escalating relational demands), and the doubt amplification loop (repeated reassurance-seeking paradoxically amplifies the underlying doubt it is organized to suppress — each act of seeking communicates that the doubt cannot be borne without external help, deepening the conviction that reassurance is necessary).

The Adequacy Paradox is central: compulsive reassurance-seeking reliably produces the inadequacy it is organized to resolve — by externalizing worth regulation, the seeker progressively undermines their own self-anchoring capacity, becoming more dependent on reassurance while each reassurance cycle reduces their ability to self-regulate. Nine formal propositions characterize the self-anchored adequacy ground state, the doubt-suppression wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the adequacy paradox, developmental roots in anxious attachment and conditional regard, and return paths through EFT secure attachment building, CBT exposure to doubt without reassurance, schema therapy, and self-compassion.