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An emotion has a lifecycle: a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It’s like a fruit that develops from a blossom, to a hard and sour knot, and then to a soft and juicy treasure.  

I’ve found that it’s not until we’re most of the way through an emotion that the truest and most valuable wisdom about what the emotion means, and any insight about what we should do, come to us.  But the common instinct is to try to get rid of the emotion before it runs even half of its course. 

We often do this by accepting premature solutions and conclusions that our mind eagerly offers up, to help us “solve” or “figure out” the emotion before it’s actually understood — before the real juice is flowing.

We pick the fruit before it’s ripe. It may have some nutrition and a sour flavor, but not nearly as much value as if we’d waited for the right time — for it to come off the branch with barely a tug.  And sometimes picking and eating unripe emotion fruit can even make us sick, by leading us astray with thoughts, actions, and reflexes that increase our suffering.  The solutions that our mind conjures up during the early part of the emotional wave are like the dry, bitter flesh of a green cherry.

Connecting this fruit metaphor to the arrow metaphor from part 1: when life hits us with a “first arrow” (usually an upsetting event), we feel the emotional pain come on. Then, subconsciously, we do whatever we can to turn away from it so we don’t have to experience the full wave. I sometimes call this emotional reactivity. Emotional reactivity is just another term for the second arrow that we shoot ourselves with to not feel the first. We could call it emotional reap-activity, because we reap the fruit too soon, before the vital wisdom has a chance to develop. The primary, first-arrow emotions we feel will deliver what we need, but only to the extent that we cultivate them to maturity, with our presence, attention, and acceptance.

Internal (intrapsychic) second arrows

We can think of two main quivers of second arrows: internal and external. The internal ways that we pick unripe emotion fruit are cognitive and somatic.

Cognitively, we worry, catastrophize, ruminate, brood, obsess, overanalyze, intellectualize, rationalize, oversimplify, minimize, personalize, self-criticize, and myriad other mental patterns that all serve to rescue us from just sitting with the raw, uncomfortable feeling underneath the thoughts and the uncertainty of what it all means and what, if anything, we should do about it.

Somatically, we clench, freeze, stiffen, breathe shallowly, tighten jaws and limbs, harden our gaze, become restless, fidget, numb ourselves, dissociate, check out, go limp or slump, or anything else that’s physiologically involuntary or semi-voluntary and serves to put distance between us and the full impact of a feeling. We “perform” these bodily tics and reactions automatically because we learned them through trial-and-error conditioning during infancy and childhood, and then polished them every day into proficient unconscious competence as adolescents and adults.

Our mental and somatic internal second arrows are not immediately visible to others. Other people might sense and see tells of our anxious thoughts or depressed body language, but most of the battle is being waged privately inside of us.

I’ll give three examples of cognitive second arrows — worry, rumination, and self-criticism — and explain how, while they often feel like emotions, or “being emotional”, they’re actually subtle relief-seeking reactions that disrupt the emotion lifecycle. They all prolong our pain and erode our freedom over the long run.

Worry

I look at worry as picking unripe emotion fruit. The emotion is anxiety about something that arose. We might not even be sure what the anxiety is about — and so what we do right away, in order not to feel it, is worry. We might also get obsessive or compulsive, doing this or that behaviorally to try to assuage the anxiety, like flipping switches and turning dials on a machine we don’t really understand, with a screen that only shows a comfort meter, but has no gauge that displays the costs of our hemorrhaging energy and crippling narrowness of focus.

Worry is a thought-based version of behavioral compulsions. It’s a mental process that kicks in as an attempt to avoid what’s happening on a more emotional level. We think and think about every negative outcome that could happen, in order to preempt and ward off all potential problems and have at the ready a perfect solution for every last possible calamity. That’s the intention of worry, anyways.

Worry can be very seductive, because unsolved problems make us feel anxious. So worry, counterintuitively, is actually an attempt to think about our anxiety rather than feel it — to quell anxiety not by metabolizing it energetically, but by problem-solving away undesirable circumstances. That’s fine in situations where worry works well, but that’s not when the question “how long should hard emotions last?” comes up. That question arises when we’re starting to realize that worry has failed — the emotions are still there despite our generating a hundred different mental simulations of the future, and we’re back at square one: do we actually sit with this fear, or do we keep doing what isn’t working, which is simulating bad outcomes and possible ways to avoid them?

And of course, it’s our endearing nature to make sure that we’re not feeling anything uncomfortable a moment longer than is necessary, so we ask someone (like a therapist, for example) how long the fear should last, to make sure we’re not on the wrong track by feeling it. What do I mean by feeling the fear instead of thinking about it? I mean consciously feeling it in the body — moving attention away from the thoughts and onto the somatic sensations and where those are taking place. I’ll say a lot more about that in a later chapter.

Rumination

Worry is to anxiety as rumination is to depression. Worry is turning toward an anxious future, whereas rumination turns over a painful past or present, without resolution. People often conflate “negativity” (like rumination) with emotions, but negative thoughts aren’t really emotions — they’re more of a cognitive attempt to avoid them.

“How could that be?” you might ask. “Rumination and negativity make us feel terrible.” That’s true, but if you look at them closely, before they make us feel terrible, they do interrupt some other, more vulnerable emotion. In other words, they substitute one challenging feeling with an even more challenging feeling.

Let’s say you’re struggling with some very valid and significant disappointment or grief about something real in your life. Maybe you lost a relationship, or an opportunity that was extremely important to you, and now there’s a deep, painful void where that love or hope recently was. What’s one way to not feel that sadness? Well, you could, for example, become nihilistic and cynical and tell yourself that everything kind of sucks. You’ve just now made a compelling case that there’s no point in feeling sad or disappointed, having now mentally prepared yourself for everything sucking, while at the same time minimzing the loss you suffered. There’s no reason to feel sad or in grief if you tell yourself over and over again that nothing is good, since that way nothing good can be lost. There’s no reason to ever feel disappointed if you build a worldview that hope is pointless.

That’s often the subconscious purpose of conjuring negativity — to numb ourselves to grief, sadness, and other emotions — and rumination is the novocaine-tipped second arrow that helps us not feel the first one.

Self-criticism

Another intrapsychic emotional substitution (second arrow) we might make is replacing the fear of failure with shame, through self-criticism. We can subconsciously and repeatedly tell ourselves we’re no good at anything, or destined to fall short of our true desires and dreams, in order to avoid the embarrassment or the disillusionment of not reaching goals that we’d otherwise pour our heart and soul into. Deep down, we’re afraid of failure — or maybe even afraid of the pressures and greater responsibility of success — so we swap those feelings out for something more familiar: shame, and a lackluster view of our own capacity. A story that we’re just not that powerful or competent. Or that we’re fundamentally defective in some ineffable and irremediable way.

The first arrow in this case could simply be a normal level of apprehension or anxiety about striving to become larger and to fulfill our potential. It’s human and normal to feel discomfort from the uncertainty of how much our sowing will produce fruit. The second arrow we inflict on ourselves — in an attempt to escape that apprehension first arrow — is self-criticism, shame, and the pain of holding ourselves back from who we truly want to become.

Somatic second arrows

All thinking patterns, like the ones I just described (worry, rumination, and self-criticism), are accompanied by somatic experiences — a pattern of sensation and energy in the body.

With worry, the body revs up, otherwise known as our nervous system going into sympathetic mode or hyperarousal. Typically the chest and heart area tighten, the breath gets faster and shallower, and we’re just a little more “clenched”, as if bracing for a physical impact. Our nervous system is idling higher than normal, as more gas is pumped into it, preparing for a literal fight or flight from imagined threats.

Rumination, especially the depressive or hopeless variety, tends to create the opposite somatic experience of hypoarousal: shutting down, slowing, sinking, caving, dissociating, numbing. The eyes blur, the brain fogs, limbs get heavy, and energy evaporates.  But that kind of stillness isn’t calm.  Calm is settled and present, not shut down. Hypoarousal is more like the playing-dead survival response of a pinned-down prey animal.  Rather than too much fuel, there’s too much brake. Our body is like a car with no destination, since our whats-the-point-ism thoughts have told us that every destination is worse than here.

Self-criticism can either rev us up or shut us down, depending on whether there seems to be a way out, and on which way our autonomic nervous system tends to fall: toward fight, flight, freeze, or faint. The shame that self-criticism produces is sometimes called a fear of not being good enough, so we might rev up and worry about how that perceived inadequacy will affect us socially or materially.  But it can just as easily evoke the shutdown response, as we collapse, shrink, and fold in on ourselves, our body trying to make us disappear and hide on some level.

There are different ways that our nervous systems become dysregulated. Stuck on or stuck off, or some combination or alternation of both.  And often one leads to the other. The body tenses up to fight or flee, and when there seems to be no way out, it gives up and shuts down, like a prey animal that struggles before it goes limp.  In any case, when the second arrows are flying, we’re causing emotional blockages which prevent the emotions from flowing and passing through us, which prolongs and increases our emotional pain.

I think that we can add somatic second arrows, the way we can add the cognitive ones. Just like negative thoughts are trained reflexes, bodily reactions to tighten up or to shut down can be as well.

Practice: coming back into range

In a later chapter I’ll go more in depth into skills for turning toward primary, first-arrow emotions. But for now I’ll share a simple practice that I use for dislodging somatic second arrows. Ask yourself, “Is some part of my body subtly clenched right now?” See if you can soften, or unclench. Let your guard down. Notice that you’re safe right now in this moment, and so you can relax.

If depression hooks you more easily than anxiety, you can ask yourself, “Is any part of my body shut down? Am I detached, distant, not here in any way?” In that case, consciously take a strong inhale breath, filling up your lungs, and fully exhale, and do that several times. Focus on something around you in your immediate setting. Movement, like a walk or stretching or resistance training, often restarts our nervous system.

Regulating our nervous system doesn’t mean the emotional pain is over. After all, whatever shot the first arrows still left a wound that needs our attention. What it does is put us back in a range that’s better for working with the first arrows.

The body-mind feedback loop

Cognitive and somatic second arrows go hand in hand, because our bodies respond to our thoughts, and vice versa. When we’re on tilt physically, our minds look for an explanation. When our minds have a story, our bodies get convinced of the story. It’s a feedback loop, and that loop can get interrupted on either side of it, and it’s sometimes powerful to intervene from both — challenging our distorted thoughts while also attending to regulating our bodies.

Reacting to our feelings with second-arrow thoughts and somatic reflexes is like picking one sour, unripe fruit after another, which makes ripe fruit scarce. We cannot force an emotion fruit to ripen any faster, but we can learn to simply observe and tend to it while we keep our hands off of it long enough for it to finish its lifecycle, so that we can harvest more nutrients in the long run. This looks like being with the processes of our mind and body, rather than reflexively and automatically interfering with them.

Continued in part 3…