Ep. 1: How Not to Heal from Trauma

When I think of the term “resilience,” I think of the Buddhist idea that each wound has “two arrows.”

The first arrow is the injury we sustain from our environment—a mistake we make, an insult we endure, a financial loss, etc. These arrows are an inevitability of life, and most people live in fear of them. When they see someone take an arrow and move on with their life, we often refer to this person as resilient.

However, the second arrow of every wound is the story we tell ourselves about it. The blame, the shame, the character attacks we levy against ourselves or the self-sabotage we deploy in our reactivity. We burn up a lot of energy in the form of that second arrow, which makes every risk much scarier, drags out every failure, and etches every mistake into our memory. Now, on the surface, having a long memory of your failures might seem useful in avoiding mistakes in the future, but the reality is that these types of behaviors make taking risks in love, life, and business that much more difficult. Our sense of adventure may get overtaken by a sense of fear.

In this episode of A Crash Course in Healing, I begin to share my process of healing the wounds from a first arrow and disarming all the second arrows that came after.