PhronesisCompulsive uninvited helping is identified and analyzed as a significance-through-service wrong attractor: a self-reinforcing behavioral pattern in which a person intervenes in others' tasks and difficulties before being asked, deriving a sense of meaning and identity from the act of being indispensable while simultaneously foreclosing the other's autonomous engagement and generating relational resentment on both sides.
Distinct from compulsive unsolicited advice-giving, which is primarily verbal and cognitive, compulsive uninvited helping is behavioral and action-oriented: the helper takes over, steps in, does the thing. Within the Displacement Framework, the ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated responsive support—the capacity to be present to another's difficulty without compulsive intervention, remaining available to assist only when genuinely invited.
Compulsive uninvited helping constitutes a sustained displacement D() from S^0, accumulated as = D()\,dt over relational time. We formalize nine propositions characterizing the attractor's capture mechanics, its trigger structure, the significance function served by behavioral intervention, the requested-assistance foreclosure basin, and the conditions for return. We describe the Jump-In Architecture as a five-stage cycle and characterize the Requested-Assistance Foreclosure Basin as the geometrical region in relational state space in which waiting for an actual request becomes experienced as unbearable uselessness.
The paper situates this pattern within codependency theory, parentification research, Fromm's distinction between having and being care, Winnicott on good-enough support, and the autonomy-supportive versus controlling-help literature. The central argument is that compulsive uninvited helping is structurally a significance-regulation strategy disguised as generosity, and that genuine support requires the prior capacity to tolerate another's struggle without rushing to end it.