Post-Joy Guilt as Inhabited-Positive-Experience Wrong Attractor: The Joy-as-Threat Architecture, Deserving-Threshold Basin, and the Return to Inhabited Positive Experience

Post-joy guilt — the chronic pattern of experiencing guilt, anxiety, or self-punishment following positive emotional experiences, producing systematic evacuation of joy and positive affect through threat-response activation — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_PJG in the landscape of inhabited positive experience. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as inhabited positive experience: the capacity to be genuinely present within positive emotional states — allowing joy, pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness to be fully experienced, without chronic interruption by guilt or threat activation that evacuates the experience before it can be inhabited.

W_PJG is rigorously distinguished from appropriate survivor's guilt in genuinely comparative suffering contexts, healthy concern about genuine responsibilities, realistic assessment of transient positive states, and appropriate humility. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: joy-as-threat architecture (positive experience activates a threat response — joy signals danger, visibility, vulnerability to loss, or deserving-threshold violation; D(ξ) is generated by positive emotional experience above threshold), deserving threshold dynamics (the post-joy guilt sufferer carries an internal deservingness monitor that compares current positive experience against a threshold; positive experience above threshold generates guilt signal proportional to the excess), and pre-emptive negation (rather than waiting for joy to arrive and then feeling guilty, the sufferer learns to pre-emptively negate positive experiences before they can reach full inhabitation — converting anticipated joy into anxiety).

The Joy Paradox is central: post-joy guilt reliably produces the emotional poverty it is organized to manage — by systematically evacuating positive experience, the sufferer maintains the depleted affective baseline that makes the deserving threshold feel appropriate and joy feel dangerous. Nine formal propositions characterize the inhabited positive experience ground state, the joy-evacuation wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the joy paradox, developmental roots in environments where positive experience was punished or interrupted, and return paths through IFS exile work, self-compassion, positive experience amplification practices, and ACT willingness toward positive affect.