Compulsive Social-Monitoring as Belonging-Anxiety Wrong Attractor: The Acceptance-Surveillance Architecture, Secure-Membership Foreclosure Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Relational Trust

Compulsive social-monitoring — the habitual, high-frequency surveillance of social signals (message receipts, reaction counts, follower metrics, group-chat timestamps, profile views) — presents as a regulatory strategy for belonging-anxiety but operates as its perpetuator. This paper introduces a dynamical-systems framework in which the agent's relational state space contains two attractors: a ground state S^0 of calibrated relational trust, and a wrong attractor W of compulsive acceptance-surveillance.

We characterize the foreclosure basin surrounding W, showing that the monitoring act itself generates the affective evidence that sustains the basin's depth. Nine propositions formalize the structure: the acceptance-surveillance architecture (P1–P2), the feedback loops that entrench W (P3–P5), the secure-membership foreclosure mechanism (P6–P7), and the perturbation geometry of the return path to S^0 (P8–P9).

We argue that recovery is not a matter of willpower or reassurance accumulation, but of structural perturbation — introducing cost asymmetries and delay tolerances that shift the Lyapunov surface so that S^0 becomes the lower-energy basin. Clinical and design implications follow: therapeutic targets are the monitoring reflex latency, the interpretive prior, and the social-environment feedback structure, not the anxiety itself.