PhronesisWe introduce and analyze compulsive sympathy-performing (CSP) as a wrong-attractor state W that a social agent reaches when the imperative to display sympathetic responses overrides the capacity to have them. Drawing on dynamical-systems framing, we characterize the ground state S^0 as calibrated authentic care—a mode of affective engagement in which expressed concern tracks, rather than substitutes for, actual resonance with another's experience.
We introduce the Emotion-Exhibition Architecture (EEA) as the cognitive-affective machinery through which socially anxious agents learn to produce emotion-display tokens in lieu of emotion-states themselves, and the Genuine-Resonance Foreclosure Basin (GRFB) as the attractor landscape region that makes exit from W structurally difficult. Nine propositions characterize the mechanics of CSP: its social-anxiety origins, the substitution of display for contact, the paradoxical recognizability of performed care to recipients, the performer's self-deception about her own genuineness, the relationship-maintenance function that traps both parties at surface depth, the distinguishing signature of sincere versus performed expression, and the three-stage return path through restraint, not-knowing, and graduated re-contact.
We show that S^0 is not an idealized maximum of empathic accuracy but a stable basin characterized by imperfect but unscripted responsiveness. Implications for therapeutic practice, close relationships, and professional care contexts are discussed.