There are certain people you meet in life who seem to radiate bad luck.
You get involved with them in some way, and suddenly your life starts going completely off track.
It can seem like you’ve been cursed in some way, ever since coming into the orbit of this individual.
But how much can another person really impact your destiny?
Can a person bring bad luck to you?
1) Let’s start at the beginning
What is “luck?”
The word has roots in Dutch meaning happiness or good fortune.
It basically means exactly what it sounds like: something pleasant or fortuitous occurring by chance.
The concept of good or bad luck is essentially nothing: it simply means something we judge as good or not good happening.
Identifying bad luck is important, because this will lead us to point two.
Bad luck is something that might not have happened but did happen.
As a result, this bad luck brought negative experiences or consequences down on you which otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.
Very bad luck is when these adverse situations keep happening to you, seemingly without interruption or at least much more than situations of what you would consider fortunate outcomes or good luck.
2) How can you be sure about what bad luck is?
Bad luck in retrospect could turn out to be good.
For example, if you miss two subways on your way to work but consequently avoid arriving at the scene of an ongoing shooting in the metro that occurred earlier, your bad luck was actually “good luck.”
On a longer time frame, failing to end up with the man of your dreams and heartbreak three times in a row strikes you as terrible luck. You’re cursed!
But a year later you meet a man who makes all the past guys look like nothing in comparison and you’re so glad that numerous bad luck things went wrong with them.
That “bad luck” you had in the past has now proven to, ultimately, be “good luck.”
In any case:
Within the context that we judge any occurrence, let’s say that we have the right to call something bad luck.
I meet a new woman through a mutual friend who talks to me often and we begin socializing.
Soon after, I have a crucial job interview and right at the moment I drive out to it my car which has been perfectly fine has a major breakdown on the freeway…
I get my arm blown off two days before my tour ends on a military deployment…
Then I arrive home several weeks later to find my fiance is cheating on me and my home has been foreclosed on without notifying me…
This series of events certainly seems like bad luck!
But what evidence do we have that bad luck isn’t just unfortunate events? Perhaps multiple unfortunate events?
The main way to measure this here is that a series of incidents or events occurs that defy the odds and identifiably correspond with a person entering or reentering your life.
To take another scenario…
You not only don’t get the job you thought you would, but you also are diagnosed with a serious illness, have your partner leave you and experience many issues with your car within one month of making a new friend at work.
Before him everything was normal.
But are you sure that this new work friend is bringing some kind of bad luck onto you?
In order to figure this out, we have to move on to point three:
3) Proving the origin of bad luck
Beliefs about why you get good or bad luck abound in most cultures and religions.
Starting from the skeptical and scientific point of view, we must admit that isolating bad luck as being caused by someone’s presence in our lives is a very tricky proof to make.
“There can be many reasons that it would seem someone is unlucky, and no real way to prove the presence of bad luck.”
In order to make this as logical as possible, we have to conclude that bad luck is when we notice the presence of someone in our lives and that it directly lines up with a noticeable increase in negative and disappointing events in our life.
Next up, now that we’ve determined what bad luck is, let’s determine how you could identify its origin.
Which brings me to point four:
You must have a control factor for any real experiment.
4) What happens when this person is not in your life
In the above scenarios, you have observed a noticeable correlation between awful luck and somebody being in your life.
In order to check if this is actually happening, you will need to remove this person from your life or at least stay away from them and see if your luck improves.
So, do it.
If at all possible, stay away from this person and see what happens. Do the unfortunate incidents begin to decrease?
Do you feel like life starts going more your way as you spend time away from this person?
If so, we need to move on to observation #5.
5) Who’s around us makes a huge difference
This is where we need to further differentiate luck from circumstance.
The truth is that who’s around us makes a huge difference.
It makes a difference in:
- The ideas and topics we’re most exposed to
- The prevailing mood we’re surrounded by
- Our style, music taste and art and culture we are introduced to
- The type of people we meet through mutual friends and acquaintances
- The beliefs and core values we absorb and which are normalized around us
- The dangers and risks that we encounter when spending time with people
- The opportunities and fun times we have by being around certain people
- The way we speak, think and act
When you have so much influenced by who you spend time with, it’s important to ponder a very key consideration:
What if bad luck and bad consequences stemming from this person are the same thing?
6) What if this person is bring negative situations your way?
If bad luck and bad consequences are one and the same, you’ll easily be able to tell.
Go back over your interactions and relationship with the person you worry is bringing you “bad luck.”
What are their beliefs?
What do you do when you’re with them?
How do you feel when you’re with them?
What situations or consequences have been contributed to by their actions or their influence on you?
It’s quite possible that somebody is not bad luck to you, they are just bad for you and actively making your life worse or sabotaging it through their influence on you.
In other words, this might not be bad luck, it might be a bad person.
Or at least a bad person for you.
If you find that this person has introduced you to other people who caused you harm, brought on negative economic or psychological consequences on you or harmed your job or personal life through his or her behavior or words, then you can be sure:
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You’re not getting bad luck from this person, this person is just bad for you and leading you (even if indirectly) into bad situations.
However, if this person is somebody you like a lot who’s never noticeably led you into something negative, we have to move on to step 7.
7) If you’ve successfully separated out bad consequences and bad luck…
You’re now dealing with somebody in your life who seems to accompany bad luck, but this person has nothing about them or their role in your life that leads to adverse consequences.
In other words, you like them, you like what they’re involved in with you, but the more you’re around them bad things happen.
Could they just be genuinely cursed or somehow bringing bad “karma” or energy down on you subconsciously or in a spiritual dimension?
This is where it becomes quite subjective.
There are many cases where somebody can affect you in ways you don’t realize or don’t want to admit to.
They may be extremely positive, which makes you feel inadequate and leads you to make impulsive or poor choices…
They may be very successful and cause a reaction of jealousy in you, leading you to begin modeling your life in pursuit of them in ways that bring you into negative circumstances.
In one way or another, a perfectly nice person who you like a lot can be bad luck to you when they cause you to behave in ways that are against your own self-interest.
Your own issues can be triggered by someone even when it’s not their fault.
As for whether their actual energy or spiritual presence is somehow affecting you or bringing bad things into your life?
That’s clearly going to be more a matter of opinion on your part, and there’s no real way to prove that somebody is bringing bad luck into your life on a supernatural level.
However if you have someone important to you and have noticed bad luck trailing behind them, it may now be time to dig deeper into that as best you are able.
Which brings me to point eight…
8) Digging into potential hidden spiritual or karmic dimensions
If you do believe there is some karmic reason that a person has cursed your life, the primary way to dig into this would be to pray or meditate about it for starters.
A secondary option is to go to a spiritual guide or past life regression therapist to try to dig further into it.
Spiritual guides such as psychics and mediums claim to be able to communicate beyond the veil of mortal life.
Some say they can access things like the Akashic records which contain volumes of spiritual data about past lives and karmic debts.
Others say they can access ancestral karma and other hidden past life memories which may have a bearing on why your life is going the way it is and why somebody in your life appears to be unexpectedly bringing ruin down upon you.
Separating out the legitimate spiritual guides, mediums and therapists from charlatans can be a challenge.
But if you do any of these therapies such as past life hypnosis, the main method for determining whether legitimate progress has been made is to analyze what you experienced.
Was it more or less what you thought your past life would be or was it a little different?
Were you somebody famous or who you know about well, or a person you never would have expected and perhaps low in caste or unknown?
Generally, past lives or other dimensions of ourselves and ancestral karma are not overly glorious or famous.
You may have been a dishwasher in a cruel lord’s manor, or a poor peasant who died in her early adulthood.
But if you find that your past life therapy begins untying knots you’ve always found tied, it can indeed be quite valuable and also yield answers about what may be going on with somebody in your life who is bringing ill fortune your way.
There may be some energetic block or destiny with them that you have to resolve or work on that you may not even have been aware of in any way.
Bouncing back from bad luck
When you experience bad luck, it can feel like the whole world is turning against you.
Whether or not you have traced this bad luck to one or multiple people in your life, this can be a time that you begin to question your life.
Why can’t a few more things go your way?
Anybody who claims to be above such frustrations is lying to you.
We’ve all asked things like this at times, and even celebrities and powerful individuals have hidden pains and frustrations that they want resolved.
But it’s crucial when experienced frequent disappointments to find a way to fully accept what’s out of our control.
This doesn’t mean we have to like it.
I may hate that I had an accident last year that led to a long term injury. You may still be furious that you were cheated on, or that a member of your family isn’t supporting your dreams.
But these aspects are not in our control. An accident last year is in the past. Your family member not supporting you is their choice.
We can only choose how to respond now.
If somebody is bringing bad luck into your life, you essentially are faced with a decision whether to try to cut them out of your life or not.
Granted that’s not always possible, but if and when it is, you certainly have some thinking to do.
Good vibes only?
I’m currently living in quite a trendy New Age, pseudo-hipster type place.
I see a lot of shirts with things like “Good Vibes Only” and people around here pepper their social media with power of positivity and Law of Attraction truisms.
“You attract what you are” and sh*t like that.
There’s something to be said for good vibes! Who doesn’t like them?
But the idea of cutting everyone out of your life who’s negative or gets on your nerves is also quite a shallow mindset.
First: what would happen if everyone who’d ever had a problem with you cut you out of their lives?
Second: how much are you going to grow and progress if you try to cultivate some kind of pain-free social utopia in your personal life?
We need struggle to grow.
Some friends and acquaintances may be a little on the rough side or bring things into our lives which aren’t ideal.
But it’s not always easy to make a firm, binary judgment about whether they’re ultimately bringing us “bad luck.”
How can we see for sure whether somebody in our life is bad luck for us, and over how long of a temporal window?
My friend who’s an angry addict that constantly gets me in trouble and constant bad luck situations the past few years may one day become a spiritual healer who saves my life in a decade.
It can be very hard to know!
Weighing the pros and cons
Whether or not you believe in bad luck, there’s no doubt that being around the wrong kind of people can really drag you down.
There’s a balance to be found here:
You don’t want to lose the growth and opportunities that can be found from engaging with all types of people and learning to deal with difficult individuals.
At the same time, you don’t want to waste your time and drag your energy down by being around toxic people who pull you to their level.
If you find that somebody in your life is impacting you in a more subtle or spiritual way that doesn’t seem to have any clear explanation, I would advise to consider past life therapy or contacting a spiritual guide.
Most of all, never forget that you are in the driver’s seat of your own life.
No matter how much others who cross your path may impact or negatively drag you down, it’s ultimately up to you to move forward, be proactive and decide to the best of your ability who will be part of your life or not.