‘It is said that two arrows fly our way whenever we experience a negative event. Being struck by the first arrow hurts – that arrow is pain. The second arrow is our emotional reaction to the first, and often, it is even more painful than the first arrow. That second arrow is where suffering originates from.’

The parable of the two arrows is a foundational Buddhist teaching that illustrates the difference between unavoidable physical or emotional pain (the first arrow) and the suffering we create through our mental reaction, resistance and rumination (the second, optional arrow). What application does this have to being a barrister?

Barristers are paid to think and strategise, filtering out the intense emotions surrounding a case to focus on the facts. However, at the family Bar, our clients – children, mothers and fathers – frequently carry profound, unimaginable trauma. The danger is that by clearing away their emotional overhang, we inadvertently absorb it. Empathy is essential for effective, trauma-informed advocacy, but it also acts as the conduit for vicarious trauma, meaning that some cases stay with us long after we leave the courtroom.

When the ‘arrows’ that have struck your clients are the very same ones that have struck you, the professional firewall melts away. This is the raw reality of the family Bar. You are not just analysing facts; you are navigating a psychological minefield where a client’s testimony can act as a direct echo of your own lived experience. In those moments, trauma-informed practice stops being a helpful framework and becomes a survival mechanism for the advocate. When the case chimes with your own history, managing it requires a different approach.

Trauma, originating from the Greek word for ‘wound’, defines both the exposure to severe distress and its psychological effects. SAMHSA (2014) characterises it as an event or circumstance experienced as harmful or life-threatening that impairs an individual’s long-term functioning and wellbeing. Ultimately, these trauma responses work directly against our parasympathetic nervous system, requiring deliberate effort to restore equilibrium.

Viewing trauma-informed practice as a ‘journey without a destination’ takes the pressure off finding a perfect, permanent solution and shifts the focus to continuous adaptation. Because human experiences and case dynamics are always evolving, our approach to managing the impact of that work must change too.

Managing vicarious trauma and burnout is absolutely essential when your daily work involves carrying the weight of other people’s crises. When you are exposed to distressing material and acute trauma as a ‘daily diet’, standard, superficial self-care (like taking a hot bath or watching a movie) isn’t enough. You need systemic, psychological and practical strategies to protect your wellbeing. When personal life events quietly pile on top of an already heavy professional workload, the cumulative effect can be staggering. In the context of the family Bar, this can be the tipping point. You are already using your cognitive and emotional energy to manage the ‘arrows’ striking your clients; when an unexpected crisis, relationship breakdown, loss or illness occurs in your own life, your internal reservoir is suddenly depleted.

What makes this particularly dangerous for advocates is that we are trained to compartmentalise. We pride ourselves on the ability to leave our personal lives at the courtroom door. But human psychology doesn’t work in airtight compartments – you can’t control it all, and you don’t need to.

The anatomy of stress – mind, breath and body

In the words of Zen master Taisen Deshimaru, you have to ‘think with your whole body’. As a barrister, your primary tool is your intellect. When you are an overthinker by nature, your brain is already running its high-voltage processor on overdrive. The brain is just one part of the anatomy of stress; the reality is that trauma, anxiety and exhaustion are somatic experiences – they live in our bodies.

I don’t profess to be an expert in these things, so I have outsourced the ‘how to’ to someone whose professional discipline is anchored in the connection between mind, breath and body – one of my personal heroes, my yoga teacher, Tim Senesi. Read his tips below. 

A yogic approach: simple, evidence-based and transformative techniques for busy barristers
The body keeps score. Long before the mind catches up to the weight of what we’ve witnessed, the body is already holding it in the shoulders, the jaw, the belly, the breath. For barristers carrying the stories of others, this isn’t abstract. It’s physical. And that means the remedy has to be physical too.
The good news is that you don’t need an hour on a yoga mat to start shifting things. You need minutes. And you need consistency. Here are a few practices that are simple, evidence-based, and genuinely effective even for the busiest schedules.
Breathe first. Before you walk into a courtroom, before you open a difficult file, take sixty seconds to breathe deliberately. Inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for six. The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, your body’s built-in recovery mode. This isn’t mysticism. It’s physiology. One minute of conscious breathing tells your nervous system it is safe to come down from high alert.
Move between moments. Stress and trauma accumulate in stillness. When we sit for long periods, the body has nowhere to process what the mind is absorbing. A five-minute movement break between cases, simple spinal rotation, a forward fold, hands interlaced behind the back to open the chest, does more than stretch muscles. It gives the nervous system a chance to discharge what it has been holding.
Use the floor. At the end of a heavy day, lie on your back and put your legs up the wall for five minutes. It sounds almost too simple. But this position shifts blood flow, calms the adrenal response, and signals to the body that the workday is genuinely over. Think of it as a closing argument to your nervous system.
The second arrow is optional. In Buddhist teaching, the first arrow is the pain of the event itself, the case, the testimony, the weight of what you’ve heard. The second arrow is what we add to it: the rumination, the self-criticism, the replaying. Yoga and meditation don’t remove the first arrow. But they give us tools to put down the second one. We learn to observe our thoughts without identifying with them. To feel the weight without becoming it.
For those of us who live primarily in our heads, and barristers are perhaps the ultimate example, this is genuinely transformative work. Not because it makes us less sharp or less effective, but because it gives us somewhere to put things down. Even briefly. Even imperfectly.
You don’t have to overhaul your life. Start with the breath. Start with five minutes on the floor. Start with the simple, radical act of checking in with your body once a day and asking it how it’s doing.
The practice doesn’t ask you to be perfect. It just asks you to show up.
If you’d like to explore these practices further, Tim posts free yoga and movement classes every week on his YouTube channel, Yoga with Tim. A good place to start is Tim’s 10 Minute Morning Yoga for Mobility – short, accessible and designed for people with real lives and limited time. You can find it at youtube.com/@yogawithtim.
Reference

SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach, US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Trauma and Justice Strategic Initiative, July 2014