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The Vicious Flower analogy comes from Cognitive Psychology. Originally developed by Salkovskis, Warwick, and Deale to explain health anxiety, that is hypochondriasis, this tool can be applied to all sorts of situations that cause us to suffer. It facilitates mindful exploration of reactions and coping behaviours that can turn out to cause more harm than good. It’s highly compatible with what mindfulness teaches us about suffering and reactivity. 
There are three episodes in the Vicious Flower series. Today, I’m going to explain the Vicious Flower analogy. Next week, I’ll give you a couple of examples of how to apply the analogy, because I found that examples helped me. And, in the third episode, I’ll show you how to pick the unhelpful petals on the Vicious Flower and grow new ones that represent helpful coping strategies.
We all use coping behaviours to deal with situations that distress or disturb us, but not all coping behaviours are effective. Some have harmful consequences, for example, when I eat comfort food in response to anxiety, I gain weight, my blood sugar exceeds healthy levels, and my joints swell up causing me to move like a rusty robot. 
Other coping behaviours cause harm by looping back on the problem. For example, when I incessantly ruminate about how I should handle a situation - you know how that goes, right, “I should said this,” or “Next time, I’m going to do that” - that kind of rumination amplifies my feelings of distress, blowing the problem out of proportion. 
We’ve talked before about the two kinds of suffering: primary and secondary. Primary suffering is directly caused by the situation at hand. Secondary suffering is caused by our reactions to the event and to the primary suffering. I’m using the term “suffering” because it encompasses a whole range of negative events from minor inconveniences right on up to major pain, and everything in between. Let me give you an example of primary and secondary suffering.
A few weeks ago, my post-secondary polytechnic institute made what felt like a very quick decision to move all classes online so we could empty out the institute to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. This event caused primary suffering. We instructors had about two working days to convert our hands-on experiential lessons into an online format. There was a tremendous amount of work involved and it likely wasn’t our best work, because it was rushed. Many of us feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied when we can’t put out our best work.
But, one of my colleagues experienced a significant amount of secondary suffering on top of that. New to the institute, she had little confidence in her ability to adapt, and she became quite anxious. She feared that she would fail and, as a consequence, would not be hired back again. The fear was detrimental, because it caused her to procrastinate in her work, and she had trouble focusing when she did work. All of these negative reactions and consequences are secondary forms of suffering. 
Just to wrap up this story, I’ll tell you that my colleague expressed her fear in our weekly online staff meetings, and we rallied around to help her learn how to cope effectively. She’s doing well now.
Secondary suffering is triggered when we judge our experience to be negative and we begin to experience a craving to reduce the negativity. In other words, we experience primary suffering and are driven to get rid of it. Next, we begin enacting coping behaviours in an effort to resolve our problem or run away from it. Those coping behaviours might end up being effective, but all of us experience situations in which our coping behaviours create secondary suffering.
The Vicious Flower analogy describes all of this in picture form,