How To Punish My Cheating Spouse

They didn't make a mistake.

A mistake is grabbing the wrong bag at baggage claim. A mistake is an accident you didn't choose.

What happened to you was a choice. They knew. And calling it a mistake is just a softer word for something that isn't soft at all.

So the anger makes sense. The urge to make them feel a fraction of what you're feeling makes sense.

Which brings us to the actual question.

How do you punish a spouse who cheated?

There are four doors. Body, mind, heart, and soul. Physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. And three that people walk through most often: their money, their reputation, and their kids.

Here's the part that gets left out.

They all work.

You really can make their life miserable. You can keep them guilty for thirty years. You can call the boss. You can tell the church. You can make the children choose.

The problem isn't that punishment fails.

The problem is what it costs the person doing it.

Destroy them financially and you may be destroying money you need. Destroy their reputation and you hand your own name to the same gossip. Keep them anxious and guilty and you have to stay in that room with them to do it. And parental alienation isn't protection for your kids. It's your pain, routed through them.

You have every right to punish them.

The question is what it turns you into, and whether that's the person you want to be five years from now.

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Transcript

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The Cheating Punishment Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How can you punish your spouse for cheating? Hmm. I'm Dr. Joe Beam with Marriage Helper. I've been working with marriages for over 30 years now. One of the times I was speaking at Piperdine University up in Malibu, California, which is, by the way, a beautiful campus. A lady on the East Coast had seen a flyer that I was speaking in Malibu, and she didn't know my cell phone number, didn't know how to find me, but did some detective work to figure out where in the Malibu area I was staying, and actually called me there. She said, I know you don't really know me, but I have a question for you. Okay, what's that? You may have heard of my husband, and she told me the husband's name, and I said, Yes, I've heard of him. She said, Well, he just got caught in an extramarital affair. And all of my friends are telling me to emasculate him. I said, You mean physically? Like you're going to castrate the guy? No, no, no. Emasculate mean a figurative way, to take him to the bank and take all of his money away from him, to ruin his reputation, to do all those kinds of things. And I said, So are you going to do that or not? Well, before I tell you what she said and what she did, let's think about

Why An Affair Is Not A Mistake

SPEAKER_00 1:10

this for a minute. You see, if your spouse has cheated on you, whether it was a one-night stand or a full-fledged emotional and sexual affair with another person, if your spouse cheated on you, and they try to justify it by saying, Well, I made a mistake, it was not a mistake. A mistake is something that you do accidentally, that you didn't willingly mean to happen. And so if your spouse said, Well, I made a mistake by sleeping with that person, you know what they're saying is, well, I woke up one morning and looked and realized the person next to me wasn't you. Wow, I obviously made an error by going to the wrong house, a mistake, but I thought I was at the right house, and I thought that that was you, and I had sex with that person thinking it was you. That would be a mistake. But that's ludicrous. That doesn't occur. They knew what they were doing. So please be aware of that. They knew what they were doing. Now, they may not have been in control of their emotions at the time, may not even have been in control of their mind at the time, but unless they were unknowingly drugged by somebody else, it's their responsibility. Even if they took the drugs, they still are responsible. And the only thing would excuse them is if they were raped, or if somebody unknowingly drugged them and they went up a net. And an affair is a terrible thing. Mistakes don't sound so terrible, do they? But what your spouse did, he or she knew what they were doing. And it hurts because you feel rejected, you feel offended. You maybe even have done some comparison in your own mind of you and this other person, and that makes you even angrier. And so I'm not trying to tell you that it's not a big deal. It is a big deal.

Punishment Versus Rehabilitation

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Now, you can either do one of two things about this big deal. One's called punishment. You say, okay, that's what I'm here for. How can I punish them? Well, understand that punishment means infliction of an unpleasant consequence. In a couple of minutes, I'll talk about various ways to do that. But you need to decide: do you really want to do punishment or do you want to do rehabilitation? Rehabilitation means restoring the person to where he or she used to be and restoring the marriage to where it used to be. And you might be at this point be saying, forget that, Dr. Beam. I came to this one because of the question. How can I punish my spouse for cheating? All right, well, let's talk about various ways to do that.

The PIES Map Of Human Hurt

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Now, we use an acronym in our business that kind of covers everything about a human being. We call it pies: physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. Or if you want to say it this way, body, mind, heart, and soul. And if you think about punishing them, you can look at each of those. Okay, well, I'm going to punish you physically. We would strongly recommend that you don't do that, because if you start doing damage to the other person's body, you're going to wind up in all likelihood getting arrested, and you might be the one going to jail, and you're the one that's going to wind up with punishment. So don't do that. I have actually, over the years, worked with people who, in a fit of rage, because what the spouse did let themselves get out of control themselves physically and damage their spouse physically, some, even to the point of murder. And in that situation, it's like, I can't believe I did that. So do you really want to punish the other person physically? I strongly advise you not to do that. Well, what about intellectually? I want to get them so focused on what I'm going to be doing next that they're going to be unable to do their job thinking, what's my wife or what's my husband going to do now? And what's his or her lawyer going to do? And what's going to happen with my children? And what's going to happen here and what's going to happen there, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so intellectually, I'm going to make life so miserable for them that they really can't function. Well, you could do that if you wish. Let me talk about in just a minute, how that might backfire on you. Or you can say I'm going to punish them emotionally. First of all, I'm going to make them feel guilty, keeping them feeling guilty for the rest of their lives. I actually met a couple. Boy, this was back in the 1970s. I guess I'm pretty old, huh? And back in the 1970s, he had had an affair and she stayed with him, and one day she told me, she said, Do you know why I stayed with him? And I expected to hear some wonderful great story of love and compassion and forgiveness. She said, So for the rest of his life, every day, I can remind him what a son of a he is. And she did. She punished him every day in whatever way she could by not cooking his dinner when he was expecting it. Which he has a right to do, obviously. Or saying nasty things about him in public to other people, or whatever it might be. You say, and he took it? Well, for a while he did. He was a minister, by the way, when she told me that he was a minister of a church, and after that he quit being in the ministry and took a job as an over-the-road truck driver. You say, why? To not be there anymore. And so you can hurt them physically, you can punish them physically, you can do it intellectually by getting them all tangled up in this thing where they can't think and operate in life. You can do it emotionally where they feel so guilty, or they're stressed, or they're full of anxiety because they don't know what you're going to do next and how it's going to affect them next. Or you can do it even spiritually. That's the P I E S. You say, what does that mean? It means you can mess up their peace inside where they feel that they're doing the right thing now. Now, obviously, if they cheated on you, they violated their integrity to do that. But maybe now they're trying to put it back together. And you can punish them by making sure they can't do that. So if they're a church person, you go talk to their pastor. Oh, you spread the word throughout that church. Let me tell you what my spouse did. And you want to make sure, and if you see them looking as if they're praying, you make fun of them. How could you pray? God doesn't want to hear from anybody like you. And so you can come at them body, mind, heart, or soul.

Why Payback Poisons Your Peace

SPEAKER_00 7:20

And the three most common ways that people do that. One is financially, another is reputationally, and the third way is parental alienation. Now there are more, but those are the three most common that we see. Now let's go through all of this stuff again to say, okay, if I do any of this, how does it affect me, meaning you, if you decide to punish him or her? So let's say that you try to do something physically to them. Now, again, we devise strongly against that. That's wrong, it's against the law. And you're going to wind up paying for it. So let's just move to the next one. What if you're doing things to make sure they're messed up intellectually? Because now all I can think about is what's going to happen next, what's this lawyer going to do, what's going to occur there? Well, you realize how much mind effort that you'll have to put into that as well? So you won't just be messing with their mind intellectually, you're going to be making yours where it doesn't have peace and calm. And what about emotionally? Trying to make them feel guilty, trying to do this or that. Look, when you take vengeance on another person, it doesn't just affect them, it affects you. Because, oh, there are all kinds of different mottos out there, like vengeance is drinking poison, hoping it'll kill the other person. What that means is that anything you do that's negative to another human being will negatively affect you. Do you really want to become that person? I was talking to a friend not long ago. They were not married yet, but during their engagement, she cut it off and left him. And she had borrowed some money from him in between, and this guy was an attorney, and he knew how to go after her, and he said, I'm gonna make her life a living hell. And I said, You have the right to do that if you wish. But is that really who you want to be? But she borrowed money from me and now she's left me. She does she deserve to be punished? Sure. But I'm not talking about what it'll do to her. I'm talking about what it will do to you. Do you really want to be that person? And if you try to destroy your spouse financially and you need some of that money, what do you think it's gonna do to you? Like the lady that told me I'm gonna get him fired because this boss will fire him for the fact that he cheated on me like that. And I said, Yeah, you told me you were a homemaker, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's gonna happen to you getting money from him if you get him fired? You see, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face, as my mother would have said back in the day. If you go after him emotionally or come after him physically or reputationally, all of those things affect you. Financially, you may need some of that money. Reputationally, well, I'm gonna destroy his or her reputation by spreading the word everywhere. And then people will gossip about your situation, which means at the same time they're gossiping about you. And some of them, particularly those that are unkind or anybody who doesn't like you, are gonna start making speculation about how you cause it to all happen to begin with. Don't you understand? Anytime you do something to hurt the other person, it's gonna come back at you, and you say, Well, what if I do it with parental alienation?

Parental Alienation And Kids

SPEAKER_00 10:34

That's just wrong. Parental alienation says I'm gonna do things where I can convince my kids that my spouse is no good, they shouldn't be around him or her, that he or she is evil. What do you think that does to your kids? One of the biggest fears a child has is losing a parent. And now you're not just cutting off the other person, you're trying to destroy them in the eyes of their children who need a mom or need a dad in their lives, somebody who cares about them. And parental alienation is not about the welfare of the children unless your spouse really is a drug addict or an axe murderer or something like that. But if you do it because of the fact that you're mad and you want to punish the other person, you're not doing it for the kids. You're not. You're doing it for you. And I understand. Well, they hurt me. I get it. I want to hurt them back. I understand. But all of this comes back to you. And if you have children, it's going to affect them negatively as well. Well, Dr. Beam, I started this video looking for ways to hurt my spouse, how to punish them. And I've given you some ideas physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, financially, reputationally, all those kinds of things. You can do that. But what's the consequence? What's the consequence for you? You know, for your own sake, your own peace, your own future peace and happiness.

A Better Path And A Clear Ask

SPEAKER_00 12:10

What if we can help you learn how to do this differently for your children now and for their future? We'd love to help you learn how not to punish, but to rehabilitate. To have the marriage that you always wanted, that maybe even at one time you thought you had. But it went bad because of your spouse's affair. So it's your right if you want to punish them, do so. But if you really want the best for you, for your children, and even for that spouse that hurt you, please give us a call.