Just to add a voice that sometimes self harm can be less extreme, but same principle:
when my parents separated and I was a teenager, and I could not cope with it emotionally, I would literally bang my head against a wall. Not very hard, just barely enough to feel the physical pain, and thus dull the emotional a bit. It helped, it really did.
Now as an adult occasionally when I am too stressed, I will bite my finger, not my finger nail - my finger - but again just barely enough to feel pain, or I will sometimes pull my hair - again just barely enough to feel it.
Usually I will do these things subconsciously without thinking, often when i am too distracted (for example looking at the computer screen), and when no one is around, and they are a sign to myself that the stress has gotten to me too much. If I am good about it, I will catch the message and will start acting to reduce the stress. The thing is that this translation of emotional pain or stress into physical pain actually does work: it helps.
And it is much more common than people acknowledge.We have popular sayings such as "banging my head against the wall", "pulling my hair out", for a reason: those are ways humans cope. To some extent it is natural to do so, as long as one does not go to an extreme. Society has taboos about it, but society has a lot of taboos that actually repress human behavior to a point that brings it out in a much worse form behind closed doors, I think. I bet self-harm is much more common, but people don't admit it. And small amounts of self-harm such as pulling one's hair just enough to hurt but not enough to pull one's hair out, how does that harm society? And if the person doing it says it helps, is that necessarily a problem?
Of course, anything like this the more extreme the behavior, the worse of a problem it is. Wouldn't want to hurt oneself too much, leave scars and all that. But there is a gradient of this kind of behavior: there are people who don't do it at all, people who do serious damage to themselves, and all kinds of behaviors in between. And all I am saying is that I don't believe all the in between behaviors are a problem necessarily: they are a coping mechanism with a life that at times is too hard to cope with, and if it helps more than it hurts, perhaps it can be a valid way of coping for some or even for many of us?
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