What Are Soul Ties? The Godly and the Ungodly (Biblically)

A woman once sat at my table and said something I have heard, in different words, a hundred times since: “I left him years ago. So why does it feel like part of me never came back?” What she was describing has an old name in Christian teaching. A soul tie.

Let me explain plainly what a soul tie is, the difference between the kind Scripture praises and the kind it warns against, and how the broken ones are healed — because this is one of the most common threads I see running through the chamber of love in a family’s chain.

What a soul tie is

A soul tie is a deep bond between two souls — a knitting-together that goes beyond feeling into something spiritual. The phrase comes straight out of Scripture’s language. When David and Jonathan became friends, “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David” (1 Samuel 18:1). That is a soul tie, and it was good — a covenant friendship blessed by God.

So a soul tie is not, in itself, evil. The question Scripture forces is: what kind?

The godly soul tie

God designed us to be bound to one another. The deepest godly tie is marriage — “they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). There are also the holy bonds of true friendship, of parent and child, of the body of Christ. These ties give life. They are meant to be there. You do not break them; you tend them.

The ungodly soul tie

But Scripture is just as clear that a soul can be bound where it should not be. “What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:16). Paul’s point is heavy: physical and emotional union forms a real bond, even where there is no covenant — and an ungodly bond keeps pulling at you long after the relationship is over.

The signs are familiar to anyone who has lived them:

• You cannot fully move on from someone, years later, no matter how much you want to.
• A person who hurt you still has a grip on your thoughts, your moods, your choices.
• You keep repeating the same destructive kind of relationship — the same wound in a different face.

That last one is where the soul tie meets the bloodline. The same heartbreak walking three generations of women, the same kind of man chosen again and again — that is an ungodly pattern handed down, and I write about it as part of the generational curse.

How an ungodly soul tie is broken

It is broken the way every inherited bondage is broken — not by willpower, but by stepping into the redemption of Christ and renouncing the bond before God:

1. Name it. Name the specific person or pattern the tie is to. You cannot break what you will not name.
2. Confess and renounce. Confess any sin in the bond, and renounce the tie in the name of Jesus Christ, asking Him to return to you what was taken and to take back what you gave.
3. Cut off what feeds it. The keepsakes, the late-night messages, the rehearsing of the memory. The armor of God is worn in these small refusals.
4. Ask for protection over the wound. Many keep a Seal of Saint Michael close as a reminder of the keeping they are asking God for — not a charm, a reminder.

I wrote a prayer to break generational curses that can be prayed over an ungodly soul tie as well.

“What you carry was never yours. The chain ends here.”

And when a soul tie will not break no matter how sincerely you pray — when the same kind of love keeps walking into your life and wrecking it — it is usually because the tie is older than the relationship you think it started with. It is rooted in a pattern in your bloodline. That is what the Three-Gate Reading is for: to find where the knot was first tied, so it can finally be cut.

The part of you that did not come back can come home. That is the whole point of the work.