Why and how did others start?

I started because my hair felt funny after being cut the first time.  I wasn't used to the hair being so spiky on top of my head and I started pulling out the spiky ones.

After Sexual abuse

After emotional/physical abuse

In school the children were asked to pull a hair with a root and examine it under a microscope. 

There is a fabel/story that if an eyelash falls on your cheek, you can make a wish and it will come true.  Many people started pulling lashes to be able to make that wish.

After other traumas in their lives - divorce of parents, moving into a new school/town etc, suddenly having no friends etc.

XXXX pulled all his eyelashes one night. There were many people asking,"Why did you do such a
thing?" Xxxx's response, "I'm looking for bugs." It seems he had seen a PBS program that showed all the little creatures that lived on the body. They showed electron microscope pictures of the mites that live
on our bodies and in our beds. Xxxx wanted to see these so he says that is why he started to pull out his eyelashes. He would pull and examine each lash looking for bugs- it didn't matter that they could
only be seen with an electron microscope.

Some people just started - don't remember the reason or there just wasn't any reason

I started because a shampoo I had used made my head break out in boils, so I pulled out all of the hair around them to pop them.
xxx tells me that her first urge came when she saw a hair on my head that had fallen out and was just laying there. She noticed the root and became fascinated. She then went up in her room and pulled one of her own hairs and that was the beginning. She used to say "I wish I never saw that hair on your head"
When I was in the fourth grade I contracted head lice at the Y.M.C.A.. I first noticed it while in school, and when my teacher saw the lice she made a big deal about it in front of the whole class. After that everyone started to make fun of me and I keep trying to get rid of the
bugs, and it grew from there.
I started to pull, because one day while playing with my hair, I noticed a grey one. I couldn't believe that I would already have a grey hair at age 23. It felt coarse. I pulled another hair from my head to see if that one was grey too. I kept pulling and pulling. This is how it all started.
I distinctly remember being in high school - it was towards the end of a school year and my friends and I had already started sunbathing. We were sitting in homeroom discussing how the sun had given our hair blonde highlights. Someone pulled out a hair to bend the hair's blond tip to its dark root to compare the change in shade. I tried it and became fascinated with the dark root. That was the beginning; my friends simply pulled one or two hairs that one day in homeroom but I continued on and on... searching for the thickest, darkest root.
I was about 11 or 12 years old and i remember seeing an add in a magazine. There was a black space where the ad asked to place a strand of your hair on it and compare it. I believe it was a shampoo ad. I had a beautiful head of hair until I started and could not stop.   The strand of hair had to be connected to the root as that was what the ad was comparing. shampoo was supposed to enhance the growth via the root
I can remember people calling me names because the hair on my legs was getting darker, but I wasn't allowed to shave yet. So, I began pulling the darkest ones out with tweezers and that is
how it began.
I came from a very abusive family. I wasn't aloud to express myself. When I did I was hit. I felt like I never had any control over what was happening to me. Pulling my hair was something that I could control. I alone could control the pain on myself.
I was at the hair salon and the beautician asked if I knew what a split-end was. I said no, so she pulled a hair from my head and showed it to me. After that, I wanted to get rid of all the
imperfect hairs...and have been trying to stop ever since.
I always had the most beautiful, naturally curly, blonde hair. It always seemed to be a big deal to everyone in my family. At about 12 or 13, I was in school one day looking at my hair and discovered a dark, coarse hair so I pulled it out. I kept looking for more and pulled each one.
The rest is history.
When i was growing up my younger sisters had lice a few times, by this time i was a
part time puller. I had the grueling task of going through my sisters hair constantly to look for lice. I didn't want anyone going through my hair to check me, so anytime i would get a itch or tingly feeling on my head i would pull that hair out on the spot, and make sure i saw no head bugs. I also have a super bad habit of twirling hair around my finger then i keep twirling until the hair snaps from around my finger.
At puberty when the first dark pubic hairs showed, I thought it must be some mistake! They were long and black and coarse, not soft and fuzzy like the rest of my pubis, so I pulled them out. As more and more of the coarse hairs grew, I couldn't keep up, so I stopped pulling for the most part.
A couple of years later, I got a new hairdo. This was during the '60s so I had to have the long straight hair with thick bangs. I noticed that I was bothered by the "wild hairs" on the
crown of my head - the ones that didn't match my bangs perfectly. So I started plucking.
I remember that I would always get compliments about my thick straight hair when I was young. My mother would braid my hiar and one of my cousins would make fun of it. Then I remembered how pretty one of my cousins hair was, hers was thin and pretty and I felt I had too much hair so I started pulling out some of my hair. Then I discovered the root and I was amused by it and until this day I pull
I was in 2nd grade and working on a math problem involving borrowing/subtraction problems. I remember the teacher kept
asking me how to solve the problem and then I got nervous and started to pull my eyelashes out. That was the last time I
have seen myself with them.
i got an eyelash in my eye when i was 11 and it hurt so bad that i was determined never to let another eyelash get in my eye again. when my mother discovered i had no eyelashes i started pulling my arm and leg hair instead, since no one cared about that hair and no one would bother me about it.
I always had a problem with picking scabs. It must be a disease like trich because I multilate myself by pulling off my skin. Well, whenever I get pimples I scratch them off and then keep pulling the scabs off. I got this realy bad one in my hairline. I started to pinch upward and before I knew it I had been pulling hairs off the pimple. I was facinated by this, so I pulled
out all the hair around the pimple. For weeks after that, I would search viguousely for split ends and then pull them out. Eventually, I started pulling out normal hair.
As an black female,I was about 17years old and was doing whats called,hot combing my hair some know it as straightening. The hot comb was too hot and I did not realize it and I burnt a patch out about the size of a quarter and it was very short. I got the strangest feeling and a mixture of anger and squeezy feeling from looking at the short hairs. I proceeded to grab the hairs it became sore and I was doing every since. Iam now 38yrs old. I would do it if I was upset, my scalp has always gotten sore since I can remember as a little girl. This became a way to deal with the soreness as well. I have yet to conquer this addiction. The longest I have stopped is 3-4months. I need help in conquering this . I never knew anyone else did this except my husband and I. I turned him on to this bad habit when we were dating as teenagers I promised if  he allowed me to pull the hair from the pimple on his scalp it would feel much better. He has been doing it off and on every since.
I had chicken pox in elementary school and it was so itchy I began to pull out hairs for relief and it kept on from there.
I first started playing with my hair - lightly tugging on it for years after I became a single parent at 23. My hair thinned terrible after giving birth and never really grew back in properly. So I started lightly pulling on it then one day when I was 30 I pulled a hair out and it felt like a big release. That was 10 years ago now
I was 16 or 17. Mascara, clumps of mascara. I would 'smooth' out my lashes, losing one or two. Then one day I looked at the clumps and noticed a funny lash....OUT of line. So I grabbed a tweezer and plucked it. then the next one was out of line....It took about a year before my big brown eyes were bald.
My trich began within 5 months of starting prozac, an SSRI drug (very similar to
Zoloft). I was 22.