If someone hurts us repeatedly, is that because of our past karma?

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
suppose we are in a relationship with someone and they are doing something bad which is hurting them and hurting us but we don’t have the influence to stop them from doing that so then how will that end? see see a lot depends on specifics but I will give some broad principles there is the love that guards and there is the love that guides that means that love is the same but say if a small child if a small maybe 2-3 year old child goes and maybe while playing a ball breaks the neighbor’s window or something like that the parents will say that ok don’t worry about it we will pay for it if a child does something wrong the parents stand next to the child and guard the child from the results but if a teenager or adult child does something like that then at that time it is the love that has to guide if the parents keep guarding the child from the consequences of their actions then what happens the child keeps doing the wrong thing so now of course the child is there but there can be other situations also where guarding others from the consequences of their actions in the name of love is actually a disservice to them so I was in Connecticut I had gone to a seminar on spirituality and mental health it was spirituality and mental health and addictions the whole group of addicts had come there so there was one man who was a little older 65-70 and there was a girl with him who was 5 years old so then after the class I was talking they were both Americans he told me that she is his granddaughter he said that his daughter had become a drug addict and she was taking more and more drugs and he said she would borrow money from me and never return it and then I retired and my life savings one day she broke into my house and stole it all and then not only that while she went to get a big haul of drugs she left her daughter in her home alone and there was some kind of electrical wiring which went off and there was a fire over there so I had to run and save her at that time so when both of these happened in quick succession till then I was trying to help her, support her but after both of these happened I went and did a court case against her I filed a complaint against her and she didn’t go to jail but she had to go to a de-addiction centre penitentiary centre and then I filed for custody of my granddaughter and at that time my daughter was so angry with me she said what kind of father are you you are taking my own daughter away from me you are sending me to jail now she is in the de-addiction centre and now as she is getting treatment now she is becoming a little sober now she is understanding that what I did for her was good so at least she is understanding right now but even after she comes out she is not going to get her daughter back my granddaughter is going to be with me, I have got the custody that is an extreme example but in general if somebody is an addict if the addicts are to be counselled often their family members also have to be counselled and there is a concept called co-dependency co-dependency means the addicts significant other in their life they unwittingly start facilitating the addicts addiction so the addict may get drunk or go high and after every episode their significant other picks up all the pieces if they keep doing that when that person is not hit by the consequences of their actions then they keep doing it more and more so sometimes letting people suffer the consequences of their actions is love it is painful, there is no easy way we don’t want them to hurt but we don’t want us to also get hurt so these are decisions that have to be taken very carefully and as I said a lot will depend on the specifics but the principle is that if that particular suffering which we are getting is because of that person’s misuse of free will then at the very least we should stop giving them power over us if this person somebody is an addict and squandering all the money and then you say its my own karma well its not karma, its irresponsibility it requires courage to take a stand now of course everybody commits mistakes and we can’t just come thundering down on people for one or two mistakes but something is being done repeatedly again and again, worse and worse degrees then at the very least we have to create some distance now specifically how we do that, that will vary now sometimes it might be something different like somebody is you know is autistic or has some other mental health mental development issues because of which they are aggressive because of which they act in ways that hurt others they are not exactly consciously doing it, then its a different dynamic but we will have to see the specifics broadly speaking we have to look at things from the perspective of what is the best for that person but what is also the best for us because if we are drowning ourselves in trying to help them then they will drown and we will also drown so its not selfishness to think of our basic survival needs that’s intelligence beyond that if we start thinking only of ourselves then that’s a problem in airplanes it is said that whenever there is an emergency first put the mask on yourself then put it on your children why? because if we try to put it on the children first we might not be able to reach them and fix it and they might not be able to put it on so there are times when if our very life is itself becoming unbearable not in the sense that something happens and for the next sometime we feel very bad about it but its repeatedly happening again and again then some appropriate action is required