The Second Arrow

If you do therapy with me, at some point you will hear about the second arrow. It will sound like this:

“During the time of the Buddha, there was a large hunt held in the forest. During the hunt, one of the hunters is accidentally shot by another hunter. He’s in terrible pain—an arrow coming out of his body, blood everywhere. Things aren’t great.

In this moment of pain, the hunter starts thinking: “Why did I get shot? What have I done wrong to get shot? Of all the hunters on this trip, of course I’m the one who got shot. Getting shot is the worst. I’m never going to recover. I’m probably never going to be able to hunt again.” And on and on.

Really—the hunter has been shot twice.

The first arrow is the actual thing that went wrong. It’s where his pain is truly coming from.

But the second arrow? That’s his reaction to it. The story he tells himself about why it happened to him, that he won’t get better, that he’s cursed or someone had it out for him. And that second arrow causes more suffering than the first.”

So what do we do with the second arrow?

Painful Second Arrows

For many of us, myself included, the second arrow is where much of our pain comes from. We might have a legitimate first arrow: getting fired, breaking up with a partner, or a fight with a loved one. But it’s often the second arrow that shapes our experience.

Thematically, second arrows can have different flavors. Here are the ones I see most often in therapy:

• The “It’s my fault” second arrow. With this arrow, something has happened and we end up blaming ourselves or taking all the responsibility for what happened. Rather than being with the first arrow of pain, disbelief, surprise, or worry, we add a second arrow that blames us for the outcome. This can sound like: “If I hadn’t…” or “Maybe if I didn’t say….” This arrow often grows out of a painful belief about our own brokenness.

• The “Things will never change” second arrow. This arrow is the belief that things will never improve and we will always be stuck in this place. It’s a reaction rooted in the present moment, but it’s also shaped by everything else that has gone wrong before. This arrow reflects a deep sense of permanence and stuckness.

• The “I hate my reaction” second arrow. This arrow is sometimes the hardest to see. It can sound like: “I can’t believe I’m not over this already,” or “I’ve worked on this for so long and it still gets to me,” or “I know that she’s just like this and I can’t believe I fell for it again.” This arrow grows out of a deep desire to stop feeling and to deny our initial reaction.

What’s (not) awesome is that sometimes we end up in a second, third, and fourth arrow pile-up: “it’s all my fault that this happened” because “it always happens this way” and “I hate that this still matters to me.”

Yikes. At this point, my client is often a pin cushion of arrows.

Being With the First Arrow

The meditation teacher Shinzen Young offers a math formula that helps explain the second arrow:

Pain × Resistance = Suffering

What feels so true about this equation is that resistance isn’t an add-on. Notice that the equation isn’t pain + resistance = suffering. Our resistance multiplies our pain. It magnifies it.

With clients, I’m often listening for the second arrow and trying to slow us down enough to catch it. I’m also helping clients stay with the first arrow—the painful reaction we have, the emotion we don’t want to feel, the experience of being unseen.

Some patterns I see repeat in the therapy room include:

Staying in the past is easier than facing the scary future. Sometimes the wound from the first arrow has already healed—but we keep going back to our suffering. Our desire to ruminate, to relive the story, is part of what prolongs our pain.

It’s often easier for clients to hold onto a sense of righteousness: “But Kalpana, I was the wronged party.” And that may be true. But it can be harder to see how returning to the same story again and again might be happening because that story feels more familiar than what comes next. Dwelling on the past can keep us from recognizing the agency we have now to make something different happen moving forward.

Minimizing our pain isn’t a way around it. Nobody likes painful emotions. Literally no one. So when painful feelings come up, we often jump straight to comparisons to try to minimize them.

That can sound like: “Other people are way worse off than I am,” or “I’m actually lucky this happened, because it could have been worse.”

We do this in the hope that if we compare our situation to something worse, our feelings will simmer down. But “simmer down because it could be worse” is rarely very helpful.

Solutions are better than feelings. This is a common human trap. If I can fix the problem, then I won’t have to feel this way again—so let’s jump straight to solutions.

If you’ve ever tried to tell someone about something difficult happening in your life and they immediately gave you five things you could do to fix it that you didn’t ask for? Yeah, that’s solutionizing.

And we often do this to ourselves in the hope that if we jump to solutions fast enough, we won’t have to feel the pain underneath.

Finding a Way to Live With All the Arrows

In writing this post, I did a bunch of research trying to find my forest hunter story—but it turns out it doesn’t actually exist and it’s a made up Kalpana hallucination.

In the Sallatha Sutta, the Buddha explains that an ordinary person struck by pain is like someone shot with two arrows. The first arrow is the physical or emotional pain itself. The second arrow is our mental reaction to that pain: fear, resentment, self-blame, catastrophizing.

I’m not sure the goal is to have a strict No Second Arrow stance. It’s human to want to feel good things and avoid painful ones. But when we resist the pain we’re actually feeling, we often end up inviting in the second arrow.

Instead, we can try to cultivate the ability to notice it.

And ironically, the second arrow often needs a little softness too. Can we notice when another story has crept in? That on top of what happened, we’re now also dealing with “it’s my fault,” or “this will never change,” or “not this again.”

When we catch that we’ve fired a second arrow, we can return to the original hurt with a little less shame and judgment about our pain.

Acceptance can be a hard word to swallow. It often sounds like approval or resignation. But like many ACT therapists, I think of acceptance more as “being willing to be with.”

And when we can be willing to be with both the first arrow and the second, we often find ourselves a little closer to healing—and a little less alone with our pain.