Hereditary karma

3. You cannot receive the consequence [karma] without committing its corresponding action.

Everything that affects us has roots in our previous actions.

We cannot be affected unless we have some culpability for our previous actions.

This means that whatever we suffer, it is due to ourselves alone. It also means that no one can pay the karma of someone else.

However, in families, the karma is tightly knit. Between family members, there are karmic bonds of infinite variety. For instance, parent and child are often drawn together by psychological affinity. Perhaps they have similar anger or lust; thus, they become a kind of psychological mirror for each other, influencing each other in reciprocal relationships from existence to existence taking turns as parent and child, repeating and mirroring their behaviors and thereby repeating the karmic knot in deepening spirals. In this way, it can "appear" that they are "punishing" each other, or "suffering" because of each other, when in fact they are each just repeating mimicked behaviors they learned from each other, and each suffering the effects of their own actions. The blame they cast on the other is misplaced: each one chose to act, and is responsible for their own actions.

The way out of the knot is by killing our own defects through comprehension in meditation. Subsequently, we learn how to be better parents and better children.