The second arrow

Something painful happens. Then, almost at once, the commentary starts: "I should have seen this coming." "Why am I like this?" "It will always be this way." The first thing hurt. The commentary makes it hurt more.

An early Buddhist text, the Sallasutta, has an image for this. The Buddha compares two people in pain, one who has trained their mind and one who hasn't. Both feel the pain, he says. The untrained person also fights it, and so gets hurt twice:

In the sutta, the first arrow is pain in the body, and the second is the mind's reaction to it: distress at the pain, resistance to it, and a hunt for some escape from it. The image is now used more widely, and this lesson uses it that way. The first arrow is whatever hurts, and that includes grief and disappointment. The second is what you do to that hurt.

The second arrow lands so fast that it feels like part of the first, which is why it's hard to see. The difference matters, though. You rarely get a say in the first arrow. You often get one in the second.

Second arrows come in a few familiar shapes:

• Blame: "Why am I like this?" "I've only myself to blame."
• Forecasts: "This always happens." "It'll never get better."
• Fighting the feeling: "I shouldn't feel this." "I need this to stop, now."
• Feeding the feeling: "I ought to feel worse than this." Going over it again and again to keep it fresh.
• Feelings about feelings: anxiety about being anxious, shame about being sad. These are the same arrows, aimed at a feeling.

Fighting a feeling and feeding it look like opposites. Both are ways of working on the pain, and both leave you with more of it.

The line doesn't run between feelings and thoughts. "I really wanted that job" is a thought, and it belongs to the first arrow, because it only says what was lost. A second arrow goes further. It passes a verdict on you, predicts the future, or argues with the feeling.

If second arrows did nothing but hurt, you'd have dropped them long ago. Each one comes with a promise:

• Blame promises discipline. Be hard enough on yourself, and it won't happen again.
• Forecasts promise protection. Expect the worst, and it can't catch you off guard.
• Fighting the feeling promises control. Refuse it firmly enough, and it will go.
• Feeding the feeling promises loyalty, or answers. To stop hurting would mean it never mattered, and one more time through might finally make sense of it.

Mostly, the promises aren't kept. The worst doesn't hurt less for having been rehearsed. A feeling you argue with doesn't leave, so now you have the feeling and the argument. The tenth replay rarely tells you more than the first, and how much something mattered isn't measured by how long you make it hurt. Blame is a poor coach, too. In experiments, people who met a mistake with some kindness worked harder to put it right, not less.

None of this means the blame is always false. Sometimes it really was your fault. "I got that wrong, and here's what I can do about it" is responsibility, and worth keeping, because it points at something you can do. "I'm useless" points at nothing. The two aren't always easy to tell apart. "I should have prepared more" could be either, and the test is where it ends: in a plan, or in a verdict.

This is the easiest way to misuse the idea: to look at pain that has gone on for a while and decide you must be doing it to yourself. That would be a second arrow of its own. How long something hurts doesn't tell you which arrow it is.

You can't stop second arrows arriving. They're fast, and they're habits. What you can do is catch them sooner and stop adding to them.

Expect to catch them late, and often. And watch for the trap built into the practice: noticing a second arrow, then scolding yourself for it ("I can't even do this right"). That's a third arrow. Set it down too. Catching one late still counts.

In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Marianne Dashwood falls for the charming John Willoughby. Then, abruptly and without a proper explanation, he leaves for London. Of her first night without him, Austen writes:

She weeps for most of that night, and gets up with a headache, unable to talk and unwilling to eat. She forbids "all attempt at consolation" from her mother and sisters. In the evenings she plays every song she used to play to Willoughby and gazes at the music he copied out for her, "till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be gained". Austen adds: "this nourishment of grief was every day applied."