Deal with your past - before it deals with you.

So many of our problems come from a desire to ignore, obsess over, or fail to deal with what’s happened to us. Only by recognising that reality can we hope to deal with it.

Craig Oliver

Mar 02, 2025

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Your mind can be a torture chamber.

Instead of learning to cope with things that disturb us, we often magnify and amplify them, intensifying our pain.

Michael Singer, the author of, “The Untethered Soul”, has two great analogies for how we do this. In the first the imagines someone having a thorn in their side. It’s partly an allusion to Saint Paul – who described his personal pain and torment in this way.

Some see his thorn as literal. I prefer it to see it as metaphorical – but whatever, Singer imagines a person failing to deal with the thorn at source. Instead, they build their whole life around protecting the suppurating wound. He imagines them taking it further, building a contraption to stop them sleeping on the wrong side, or anyone accidentally brushing against it. Pretty soon their whole life is designed around protecting the wound.

This sounds absurd, until you consider the avoidant personalities we all know – people who will go to sometimes extreme lengths to avoid psychological pain or confronting something staring them in the face. Whole lives are constructed around not letting anything or anyone near the pain.

Michael used his second analogy on my podcast – this time about the type of person who just can’t get over having been hurt, endlessly ruminating about bad experiences:

Michael: You go to a restaurant, and there's a food that you ate that made you sick. Do you ask for a doggie bag, so you can take it home? And every morning taste a little bit of it to remind yourself how sick it made you? You would never do that. And so why do you do it with bad experiences?

Good question.

Another – perhaps more common - approach to dealing with pain is to engage in actions that distract or numb us from it. Often that is seeking out things like drink, drugs, gambling or sex; sometimes it is less obvious, with behaviours like over-working, shopping, or attempting to control everyone and everything - pretty much anything that helps us feel better, if only for a little while.

The drive to these behaviours is summed up by the Nine Inch Nails song, Hurt, later immortalised by Johnny Cash - who sang it just before he died (image below). Heroin addiction stands in for all kinds of behaviours designed to make “it” go away:

“The needle tears a hole,

The old, familiar sting,

Try to kill it all away,

But I remember everything.”

The futility of the action is summed up in that last line – the relief is temporary, you still remember. On some level, we know the consequences of overdoing any of these things will make us feel worse: a hangover, self-loathing, exhaustion, debt, a poisoned relationship, sometimes physical and emotional injury. But there is something in our makeup that sends us back again, struggling to break the cycle.

The despondency of someone in that cycle may never have been better summed up than in the song’s closing lines:

“And you can have it all, my empire of dirt,

I will let you down, I will make you hurt.

If I could start again, a million miles away,

I would keep myself, I would find a way.”

The good news is the cycle can be broken. It is not easy – and it starts with the stark acceptance of whatever pattern of behaviour we are clinging to. We need to want to let go – but firstly we need to identify what we need to let go of.

The Hindus have the concept of the “Sanskara”. They believe our actions and experiences leave a lasting impression on us. The negative ones create a blockage, a kind of emotional tumour that can cause lasting pain or damage. When that tumour is touched, we recoil or react. How often do you look at another person and wonder why on earth they are being so touchy, or behaving badly? It’s likely one of their Sanskaras has been hit.

Ekhart Tolle (seen below) comes at it from a slightly different angle to the Hindus, describing what he calls the “Pain Body” in his books A New Earth and The Power of Now. This is an accumulation of all the negative energy a person carries with them – it exists as an energy field within our minds, and we can come to identify with it, almost addicted to pain and negativity.

This is not so far-fetched when we consider how many people seem never to be happy unless they are unhappy – or radiate negative energy.

Tolle warns us that the Pain Body feeds on anger, resentment, fear, and sadness:

“Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form, it may be awakening the Pain Body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a sombre mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in a relationship, and so on.”

With some people it’s obvious. This morning my friend Joe and I were out running. We approached a woman who was bellowing into her phone. We made sure she had plenty of space to pass unhindered, but she looked at us sourly and shouted into her phone, “There’s a couple of c***s taking up the whole of the road!” We both burst out laughing at the sheer unreasonableness of it all. But it seemed clear this was a person for whom almost everything was personal affront – Tolle’s Pain Body in action.

On a lower level, so many of my fellow Brits carry around a sense that everything is crap. I visited a friend the other day who had a copy of the bestselling, “Is It Me, or is Everything Shit?” kept by their toilet. In all sorts of ways, this seemed the best place for it – an entire book taking pleasure in seeing the world through a brown tinted lens.

There is a serious side to this, we can get caught up in a downward spiral of negative emotions and patterns of thinking – feeling comfort in the bad. This identification can lead to self-destructive behaviour, emotional reactivity, and a constant cycle of suffering.

Rather chillingly, Tolle warns us to:

“Observe the attachment to your pain. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy.”

This is a kind of emotional sado-masochism, enjoying the sense of hurting and being hurt. Again, we all know people who revel in their pain, seeming to get some kind of perverse thrill from it.

On a more mundane level, Sanksaras or the Pain Body create the enervating sense that life is all slog, or, as I have mentioned before, a grind, not a gift.

Psychologists have their own acronym to describe the symptoms of this condition so many millions feel: TATT – standing for Tired All The Time - is now a fully recognised medical symptom of an illness that may not have any clear, physical cause.

This can ultimately lead to the debilitating depression described so perfectly in Hamlet’s soliloquy beginning:

“I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth…”

(An image of Richard Burton in Hamlet, you can find a link to him reciting it in Notes below.)

The speech leaves me in awe of Shakespeare’s ability to capture the essence of what it is like being dragged down to a level where we cannot be inspired by, or see the point in anything.

There have been points in my life where the world appears no more than:

A foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”
And when I consider mankind and myself, I have asked myself:
“What is this quintessence of dust?”

I was expert at hiding it, but it was real, turning my world monochrome, deadening my capacity to be energised by life.

The concepts of the Sanskara and the Pain Body have helped me see that there is a cause and that it can be treated. I did not need to take them literally. The fact was that I had failed to deal with my past. My way of expressing it was that I had concreted over the poison it had created in me. For years that had allowed me to present myself as a stable human being. So much so that people sort me out in a crisis. Need a level-headed, non-panicking person to deal with a situation? Call Craig. Not only will he deal with it with the minimum of fuss, he will take on the weight of the situation - and act like it is no trouble.

There was a moment when I was in therapy when I was confronted with the reality of this. I had dismissed the idea about how and why I had become this person. In a tone bordering on frustration, my therapist said, “For God’s sake, Craig, you did it for a Prime Minister for six years!” Her point was that I had been in one long, rolling crisis, frequently taking bullets for others - feeling it was my job to fight every battle. What made me the person willing to do that? No – that’s not quite right: What made me the person who actively volunteered for it?

I realised that an often extreme childhood had wounded me very deeply.

It’s not appropriate to go into the full detail of it here. I want to respect the feelings of others while they are still here. But some dark moments created those Sanskaras and provided the energy for my own Pain Body.

I responded to what was going on by trying to be a model child and teenager. I rarely rebelled. I studied hard. When I was eighteen I left home and – although I have always tried to be a dutiful son – my visits were as boundaried as I could make them.

Looking back, I was building a tunnel, trying to escape, believing that when I was out, I would be able to build my own life – learning from my experiences, being my own person…

I was naïve to say the least. I may have been done with my past, but my past was not done with me.

Instead of dealing with the cause of my problem, I buried it. I thought it was done with and I could move on. But the truth was, it remained there, rotting and putrefying, occasionally surfacing, sometimes distorting my life and my relationships.

I made several wrong choices. More to the point, I struggled to feel joy. I thought it was my job to be the sensible one, taking on and solving the problems of others. It gave me a twisted sense of purpose and meaning. I clung to my identity – strong, stable, can-do – not realising it was a front, one of those Potemkin villages, where what appear to be houses, are merely facades. (There’s an image of a fake North Korean village - pretending to be paradise but hiding reality, below.)

Life races by – allowing you to ignore what’s buried beneath these facades. But the pressures mount. Our foundations are tested– and if they aren’t solid, they crack. The poison surfaces and suddenly we are left realising nothing was ever solid, nothing safe.

To come at it from a different angle, and going back to Michael Singer’s first analogy, I was a version of person who built a machine to protect the thorn in his side, to stop him feeling the pain of it. But the machine was faulty and the pain came anyway. I needed to deal with it at source.

I needed to let go.

Sanskara, Pain Body, thorn, buried poison, Potemkin village….

The metaphors have been laid on pretty thick in this piece.

Broadly, they are attempts to describe the same thing. They are ways of trying to locate and identify what’s wrong inside.

In my next piece, I will write about what you can do about it, once you have recognised the issue.

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