Imagine you’re walking along and you get hit by an arrow. Ouch! Your mind then fills with panicked thoughts, like “this pain is overwhelming” or “I’ll never survive”.

This is the buddhist parable of the Two Arrows. The first arrow is the event that occurred, i.e. the physical arrow lodged in your arm. The second arrow is your reaction to the event; in this case, the panicked thoughts and feelings.

We can’t often control the first arrow. But we can control the second arrow, by choosing how we respond to the situation. This is the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a state or sensation, suffering is our reaction to that sensation.

A simple example would be having a fatigue crash. We can’t control a crash that’s already happened, but we can chose whether to get wound up about it, or to stay calm and ride it out. Getting angry increases stress and drains our energy, but it doesn’t have any affect on the crash itself.

When we examine our reactions, there are often many layers of emotions that trigger each other in turn. We might feel anxious about the crash, then angry at ourselves for feeling anxious. We might then feel sad that we’re angry at ourselves for being anxious.

These extra layers of emotion also have a physical reaction in our body, such as increasing adrenaline, impacting our energy levels and also invalidating our emotions, especially if we’re treating ourselves badly.

If we can instead treat ourselves with compassion and acceptance, we can remove these extra layers of emotional response and significantly lower the load on our body. That won’t make the original emotion or sensation go away - the crash still happened - but we’re no longer making the problem worse than it is.

We’re not trying to remove our feelings, which are often legitimate and valid. It’s normal to feel upset at having a crash, or about many other things, and we should give ourselves permission to feel these important emotions. Instead, we’re just trying to recognise when we’re adding unnecessary layers of reactions that are harming us and impacting our mind, body and recovery.

It’s often thought processes that trigger these extra layers, so we can use techniques like the STOP process on these. Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is much worse than the actual thing happening, so by recognising these patterns for what they are we can regain control.

ME/CFS brings many arrows that we can’t control. Sometimes we can feel a bit like a pin cushion, peppered by constant symptoms and indignities: that’s quite enough arrows, we get the message! By asking ourselves how we feel about how we feel, we can gain more insight and understanding into the way our mind and body works, avoid unnecessary suffering and energy drainage and bring more compassion into our lives.