The Nature of NSSI: Displaced Anger Under Attachment Constraint in AAM and SArC

NSSI is often framed as emotion regulation, self-punishment, or interpersonal influence, yet these accounts under-specify how mobilization becomes urgent affect, why NSSI wins moment-to-moment behavioral competition, and how attachment constraint shapes whether anger-linked action readiness is routed outward or inward. The Arousal Appraisal Model (AAM) treats emotion as one regime within a broader control problem: calibrating physiological mobilization to state-dependent deployable capacity for coherent expression and integrative processing. The Survival Architecture of Coping (SArC) frames severe self-harm risk as system states that emerge when activation (urgency/action-readiness) rises as deployable coping capacity declines across biological, cognitive, relational, and meaning domains. Integrating AAM and SArC, this paper conceptualizes NSSI as a learned, high-control state-transition policy that becomes increasingly selectable when mobilization/activation rises under high constraint appraisal and low deployable capacity. Developmentally, a common pathway is proposed in which anger-linked mobilization is routed inward when outward expression is appraised as unsafe, forbidden, futile, or relationally catastrophic; punitive self-appraisals may then function as a permission/coherence scaffold that authorizes injury while preserving attachment and immediate safety. The model yields falsifiable predictions for intensive longitudinal research and clinical implications emphasizing capacity restoration, constraint repair, legitimization of anger as signal (not aggression), and expansion of safe throughput pathways.