Parents and children can easily develop soul ties.  A mother who has known limited opportunities and frustrated dreams often tries to live her life through her child.  Because she wants the emotional payoff and/or the attention that goes with her child’s success, she smothers them.  That dynamic continues into the child’s adulthood.

Parent/child relationships are complicated but anywhere there is manipulation or domination, you can be sure a soul tie exists.  The best thing someone in the relationship can do is to break the soul tie by repenting of it in prayer, by asking God to sever it, and then consciously turning to Christ for the very things the other person was providing.  

I’ve had more than one person say to me, “If I stop meeting this person’s needs, things will fall apart.  I am the fixer in the family.”  But here’s the thing.  Sometimes things need to fall apart in order for God to put things back together.  One day in prayer, the Holy Spirit spoke to me about a certain relationship. “Stop standing in the way of them coming to me!  They need the pain to turn their face my direction.”

So many adults have a soul tie with a parent even though they are upwards in age.  They visit them a nursing home or in an assisted living facility and try, in every visit, to get their parent to tell them what they long to hear.  Unable to forgive the withholding, the soul tie continues to play out, demanding something from parents won’t, or can’t, give what’s expected.  First, no parent can give away what, first, they have not experienced for themselves!  And secondly, some people have been ruined by sin and are simply unwilling to love.  Both reasons are tragic and adult children need to grieve, forgive, and cast all their hope on Christ.  He invites us to live in Him.  

Finally, this is usually the last thing any of us want to do.  We think what we need most is what parents haven’t yet given.  That is a mirage.  Behind it is the freedom and abundant life Christ offers but the only way to experience it is to let go of our idols.