taluluto:

i got 3 asks about this so consider all of them answered with this!! 

it’s more of a brief mention rather than an overarching plot point, but there’s a scene during the chimera ant arc, while gon and killua and co. are sitting in knov’s “fourth dimensional mansion” immediately following the main invasion of the palace. off the top of my head i know it’s episode 110 in the 2011 anime— not sure about the manga chapter. the group is talking about the fact that they’ve noticed that the chimera ant king has been injured somehow, but because of circumstances at the time, the only logical conclusion was that he’d injured himself

morel asks the group at large why they think meruem might have injured himself, because he can’t think of a reason— the exact question he asks is “when would you ever purposefully hurt yourself?” i believe

gon then flashes back to the scene earlier where he saw kite’s possessed body and provoked it so it would attack him— after which he immediately responds “when i couldn’t forgive myself.” the rest of the group, especially killua, gets uncomfortably quiet for a moment before continuing

talking about real life, and demographically/statistically speaking, it’s more common for boys— especially younger adolescent boys— to self harm by bruising themselves/punching or banging their heads against walls/purposefully getting into fights/etc. as a coping mechanism [for negative feelings, pent-up stress or guilt, or as self-punishment]; (source on those statistics) and often, because when society thinks of “self harm” they think of cutting, this behavior often isn’t recognized as self harm, by others or even by the person doing it

considering gon’s behavior throughout the entire series as well as this scene in particular, i think it’s quite reasonable to interpret gon as using/having used pain as self-punishment and a guilt/stress coping mechanism, whether or not he realizes he’s doing it