Competence-preserving dependency is the framework’s answer to the protector-dependency scenario. The aim is not maximal independence — humans have always depended on tools, institutions, and each other — but dependency that leaves the participant more able to carry their own geometry over time, rather than less. The governing distinction is protection is healthy when it increases future capacity, and pathological when it permanently substitutes for capacity, which turns every act of assistance into a question about what it does to the person on the other side of it.
The memorable form is a test of the protector rather than the protection: a good protector catches you when necessary; a bad protector makes catching you permanently necessary. It draws directly on support versus substitution and on renewability — atrophy is capacity being consumed rather than replenished — and its most dangerous case is invisible, because a dependency that has quietly replaced a capacity still feels like competence right up until the system is removed.
Its constructive form is capability return: when a system saves time or lifts a burden, the freed capacity should flow back to the participant as more understanding, reach, and ability to initiate — not simply into deeper reliance on the system’s thinking. The measure of a high-capacity ecology, on this view, is not whether it can make the participant unnecessary but whether it makes more of the participant possible.