The Thorn You’ve Been Protecting for 20 Years

Do you ever notice how much energy you spend avoiding one specific pain?

Not physical pain. The other kind. The kind that sits in your chest when you think about a particular memory, a particular failure, a particular fear. And you’ve arranged your entire life to make sure nothing ever touches it again.

Michael Singer calls this “the thorn.”

In The Untethered Soul, he uses a simple analogy. Imagine you have a thorn sticking out of your arm. It’s painful. You have two choices: pull the thorn out and deal with the temporary pain, or spend the rest of your life making sure nothing ever touches that spot again.

Most of us choose option two. We don’t even realize we’re doing it.

When My Dad Died, He Left Me With a Thorn

I was young when my dad lost his job as a bank clerk. I watched him disappear as a person. A few months later, he died of a heart attack. I’m sure he worried about money but didn’t tell anyone.

That became my thorn: if I don’t have money, or a reliable way of making it, I’m in danger.

So I studied medicine. Well paid. Job for life. Safe.

But the thorn stayed. Each time I got promoted, I needed more money. Each rank higher, I saw new threats. The chasing never stopped.

What I really needed to do was stop and take the thorn out. Acknowledge that life and death can be unfair, cruel. Money did not protect me. If anything, chasing it made me ill.

Alcohol and dark humour were my ways of distracting from the pain. My main period of burnout forced me to start questioning all of this, but it took years before I saw that I was chasing the wrong thing. That I had been chasing at all.

Reading books like Your Money or Your Life and The Seven Stages of Money Maturity helped me see that money was a vehicle, a way of getting somewhere. Much as I sit from my window now watching the cars drive past, I have come to realize money is not me. And so I am not the thorn.

The thorn of my dad’s death was not me.

Therapy helped me lift that thorn out. Acknowledge these things happen. My dad did his best. We couldn’t go further than that.

Extreme burnout made me stop working for several months and confront this. But it was still too painful. It took years to become more accepting.

I don’t know if I’ve fully pulled this one out. The pain still comes sometimes. But I have a better chance now. Rather than obsessing, I’ll note it, do 4-7-8 breathing, just be still, be calm.

The Rugby Player Who Lost Himself

When I worked as a GP, I saw a 40-year-old man, Steve (not his real name), and his wife who said “you have to fix him.”

Steve played rugby for a local amateur team. He suffered a shoulder injury during a match and stopped training and playing for a few weeks.

As we unpicked it, his life was in that rugby team. His friends, his physicality, his training. When he couldn’t do that anymore, he turned to drink.

The pain of disconnection and physical pain was too much. So he just sat drinking after work each day. Didn’t see his friends. Lost his routine.

Of course, drinking every day means you start to put on weight, feel low and depressed, and become miserable and angry around your wife.

Steve’s thorn: if I’m not physically strong and active, I’m not a man.

So when injury threatened that identity, his entire life arrangement collapsed. He couldn’t pull the thorn out. He could only numb the pain.

Why Men Struggle to Pull the Thorn Out

Because we believe the thorn is us. And we use it to drive us.

Criticized at school for not keeping up becomes “I’ll show them, I’m going to make it.”

A big mistake at work and fear of losing your job becomes being aggressive or withdrawn and disinterested.

The thorn plays into the man box (I’ve written about this here). We identify with those traits subconsciously to “fit in.”

Feelings, emotions other than anger, allowing things to pass? Not acceptable in this model. So we “tough it out.” “Soldier on.” All masculine, physical, strength and doing.

When we could simply say: “This isn’t working. I’ll do something else.”

The Testosterone Trap

Here’s what makes it worse: chronic stress reduces testosterone.

Your body can make cholesterol into either cortisol or testosterone. Under chronic stress, we balance towards cortisol. Survival mechanisms. Better to be running away from the lion than eaten by it while having sex.

But if we have low testosterone, we feel more anxious, on edge, don’t sleep well (we don’t feel safe), and make poor decisions like drinking alcohol that makes us more anxious and sleep worse.

It’s a vicious circle. The thorn creates stress. Stress lowers testosterone. Low testosterone makes us less able to handle the pain. So we protect the thorn even more desperately.

One patient on testosterone replacement told me: “I can think again and do my job.”

Another: “My business is working much better now that I am. And my relationship with my wife has improved too.”

They stopped protecting the thorn. They had the energy to pull it out.

Change One Thing This Week

Ask yourself: What’s my thorn?

What pain have I been protecting for years? What have I arranged my life around to avoid touching?

Write it down. Just naming it is the first step.

Then ask: What’s protecting this thorn costing me?

Energy? Relationships? Health? Authenticity? Peace?

You don’t have to pull it out today. But you need to see it’s there. And you need to see that the thorn is not you.

Singer writes: “If you are willing to be disturbed, anything can be used for your growth.”

The pain of pulling out the thorn is temporary. The pain of protecting it lasts a lifetime.

If You’re Ready to Go Deeper

I’m currently recruiting 4 men for case study places in my new 1:1 programme, The Grounded Mind. If you’re a professional man who’s spent years protecting a thorn and you’re finally ready to pull it out, let’s talk.

Get in touch and tell me what your thorn is.

Until next time

References

Singer, M.A., The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, 2007, New Harbinger Publications

Dominguez, J., Robin, V., Your Money or Your Life, 1992, Penguin Books

Kinder, G., The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, 1999, Dell Publishing

Traish, A.M., Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, “Testosterone and Cardiovascular Disease”, 2011