Can your good deed to someone become bad to you?

Yes, unfortunately there are times when a good deed can have bad results for the person doing the deed. The old adage, 'No good deed goes unpunished' does occasionally have a ring of truth to it. Sometimes a good deed backfires directly, while on other occasions, something bad may result indirectly while the good deed is being done.

• Direct Backfire

This is an example where the attempt to do a good deed was enough to backfire and cause problems. A woman decided to surprise her husband with a kitten, as he loved animals and had been going on about having a new pet for ages.

She arranged a pick up date once the kitten was ready to leave its mother, and all seemed well. As the kitten was located quite a distance away, she had to tell her husband about it just before the date arrived. To her horror, her husband insisted that he did not want a pet and she had to cancel the pick up, much to the annoyance of the owner, who had specifically held on to this kitten for her.

• Indirect Punishment

Someone took a car-less friend to see her seriously ill brother in a hospital miles away from home. On the way home, a thunderstorm broke out and water started pouring into the car through a previously undetected leak.

To make matters even worse, on coming home the driver found that her daughter had ignored a request to stay at home and had gone out to join a group of friends for fun and games in a nearby wood. While playing on a rope swing, she had lost her grip on the wet rope, fallen and seriously injured her back in the process. Her husband then put the blame for this accident on her absence.