Episode 285: Are Soul Ties Real? Overcoming a Purity Culture Teaching

“Soul ties” refers to the belief that when you have sex with someone, you are now joined in the spiritual realm, and that “tie” impedes your ability to ever experience freedom if you marry someone else. Often people claim you have to go through a specific prayer to break the tie, or an exorcism. But is this idea biblical? And does it help or hurt? Today Joanna Sawatsky shares our results of believing in soul ties, and we discuss different ways to talk about heartache and trauma. 

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT:

• Our puberty course The Whole Story
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THINGS MENTIONED

• Our book She Deserves Better 
• My series on Soul Ties
• John Eldredge’s Podcast series on Soul Ties
• Lisa Bevere Reel with misinformation
• The domestic violence website with steps from breaking trauma bonds

Transcript

Sheila: Welcome to The Bare Marriage Podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And when we talk about evidence-based, do you know what we don’t talk about, Rebecca?

Rebecca: Non evidence-based? I have no clue what I was supposed to say there.

Sheila: We do not talk about soul ties.

Rebecca: Oh, well, yes, okay.

Sheila: Yes, which is the topic of today’s podcast.

Rebecca: So we are talking about soul ties?

Sheila: Yes. Oh, right.

Rebecca: Great start.

Sheila: Great start. And we are joined today by Joanna Sawatsky.

Joanna: Hi, everybody.

Sheila: Who is our coauthor on The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better. She ran the stats for The Marriage You Want, The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. She has everything statistics wise. She is the main author on our paper which was published in The Sociology of Religion Journal in November—last November—and she is in the midst of about to submit several other papers.

Joanna: Yes, doing the final edits, making sure that everything is good, dotting i’s, crossing t’s, and since we’re almost submitting, we thought we might as well talk to you guys about some of our findings for one of the two papers we are about to submit.

Sheila: Right, and one of them is about soul ties. Now when we wrote Great Sex Rescue, we talked about four big teachings which we measured in our original survey of 20,000 women that had negative effects, but there were actually a couple of other ones that also had negative effects. They just didn’t make it into Great Sex Rescue because we couldn’t do whole chapters on them, and it didn’t—it seemed more relevant for single people than married people when we were writing a book about marriage so we left it out. But soul ties was one of the big ones, and it shows up a lot in our work on sexual pain. So before we explain how that happens let’s explain what soul ties are. So who wants to do that?

Rebecca: Soul ties beliefs as we are talking about them from here are this idea that having sex with someone has a spiritually bonding effect so that if you’ve been with someone intimately there is now something has happened in the divine realm that ties you together. We often hear this as the idea of the two will become one flesh. It doesn’t matter if you were abused or if it was your choice of if you were 14 and realized it was a mistake the next day. Doesn’t matter what happened, you are now bound together and it was often used as this way to convince kids to not have sex. So for example, a really common—what’s the word? An example from the stage.

Sheila: An object lesson.

Rebecca: A very common object lesson was to take a piece of blue construction paper and a piece of pink construction paper, add glue, smoosh them together, wait for the glue to dry, and then tear them apart, and you say, “See, there’s pieces of the blue stuck on the pink and pieces of the pink stuck on the blue. Once you’ve had sex, you will always and forever be combined in this way. You will carry that person with you.” So this is kind of—this is how soul ties are talked about. They’re often discussed in this way that if you need to get rid of them, it’s often an issue of a deep amount of prayer. Some people even have told people they have to undergo exorcisms or similar types of prayer to get rid of the demonic soul tie that they have because of their boyfriend from high school that they had sex with.

Joanna: Well, actually a lot of them will say—not a full exorcism of demonic influence. It can even be your mom’s high school boyfriend. So you have to confess not just your sexual sins, but it has to go back generations.

Sheila: Right.

Rebecca: And this might sound extreme to some people, but this is actually—we’re taking this example from a book that is one of the most common soul care books that is—

Joanna: That sells better than Great Sex Rescue. Like Great Sex Rescue sells well. This book sells considerably better on Amazon.

Rebecca: Which even though it’s completely bonkers. But it’s huge in very large denominations, and it’s often the kind of stuff that you might not hear from the pulpit but you might hear in a pastoral counseling session with someone behind closed doors.

Sheila: And I get a lot of notes saying well aren’t soul ties real? Because we’re taught them. I was taught them as a teenager. You guys were taught them as a teenager that this is something that happens. I want to give you all an example of what we were taught and what we are talking about. This is an example from Lisa Bevere who’s a popular, Christian speaker. We actually played this clip back in December, but we’re going to play it again for an example of how the soul ties theology is often taught.

Lisa Bevere: See I don’t believe sex is just physical, and actually they’ve proved genetically that when you have sex with someone, you’re actually sleeping with them and everybody they have slept with for seven years. So it is a linking physically, but it’s also a linking of the souls, and God doesn’t want you linked in your soul with 1,800 people.

Sheila: Okay, now interestingly we tried to analyze this and figure it out what in the world she was talking about, and we came up with like she’s combining three different things into one and missing the point entirely. So she’s saying that you’re bonded in this way, and then she’s saying that your DNA actually changes for like—and she uses the seven years things and everyone this person has ever had sex with. And I think that comes from the idea that your skin cells rejuvenate—like every cell in your body rejuvenates every seven years. Is that true?

Joanna: Well, that depends on what tissue type so like your stomach lining is going to rejuvenate very quickly because hydrochloric acid turns out is really hard on cells. But your bones are more slow. Like it varies by tissue type. I don’t have the number memorized for at what point it’s all of the cells in your body, and some of them don’t really regenerate. There’s evidence both ways I believe about the brain, but I’m not a neuroscientist. Don’t take me (crosstalk).

Sheila: But many sexual assault survivors have taken this as a very comforting thing because you realize that seven years after the sexual assault, my body has never been touched by this person. It’s a common thing.

Rebecca: It’s a common adage? Adage? Adage?

Sheila: I don’t know. Adage.

Rebecca: Yes, it’s a comforting and common adage among abuse survivors that the body cells rejuvenate. So I think she was taking it from that.

Sheila: And we’re not trying to bad mouth that. I think that is a comforting thought.

Rebecca: Let yourself have comfort in that.

Sheila: Beth Allison Barr used that in her book The Making of Biblical Womanhood, like yay. But it’s not correct to use it in this way. And then the idea that you have sex with everyone anyone has ever slept with. That was really common in the ‘80s when we were trying—

Rebecca: Oh, it was huge.

Sheila: —when we were trying to convince teenagers to stop having sex.

Rebecca: And the AIDS epidemic too.

Sheila: And the AIDS epidemic, and then the idea that your DNA is changed—that you’re genetically changed comes from this misinformation social media site that went really viral a couple years ago basing it on an article which was talking about how women can have male DNA floating around in their brains and where did this male DNA come from? And basically it usually is attributed to either carrying a male fetus at some point.

Joanna: Yeah, I was going to say.

Rebecca: I got them boy genes in my brain because of Alex.

Sheila: Yeah, having a twin, other things like this. It really isn’t caused by having sex. It really isn’t, and the authors of the articles that were misused to make this claim have come forward and said this is crap. So I think she’s taking all of these different things and combining them into a fear tactic which isn’t really true. So what we’re seeing is that this idea that you’re tied to someone is really used a lot in evangelicalism. Let me give you just a couple of quotes that we used for our book She Deserves Better.

Joanna: Something similar can happen with our hearts. When we emotionally attach ourselves over and over to different people, we can lose our emotional stickiness.

Rebecca: So that’s a big one. That’s the threat. Again this is a big one. If you do this, something about you is now gone. You can never have that again.

Joanna: Right, how do you get sticky again? And if you’ve ever had a sticker that lost its stickiness, it doesn’t get sticky again. And this is also from Every Young Woman’s Battle. When you get attached to someone, you will always keep a part of that person with you, tucking those memories into your trunk of emotional baggage, and eventually dragging them into your marriage where you may be tempted to compare your husband to one or all of your previous boyfriends.

Rebecca: And it’s hard because the problem is all of these things they have a grain of truth. We always talk about that. Why are they believed? Because we all know people who do compare their current husband to past people. We know people who because they’ve had strings of bad relationships have kind of—have attachment issues now. We know people who have gone through these things. The difference is these were used to scare girls away from sex and to make sex a scary thing rather than equipping our daughters and sons too—but these are all books that are to girls that we’re talking about—rather than equipping them with the knowledge they need to make good choices, for example. Like how can you—say that you have had past relationships before. So how do you let those be in the past? We don’t talk about that. What we talk about is if you’ve done this, you're going to compare, and it’s going to be horrible because it’s just going to be bad. (inaudible).

Sheila: Right, and this is really tricky because again element of truth. Sex is bonding. There are hormones, oxytocin that make you bond, right? You do often feel very bonded, and especially women. Studies have shown this, but what’s being claimed is something beyond that because—many times it’s claimed there is this spiritual bonding that can’t really be broken and that goes with you your whole life.

Joanna: And the other thing I find really challenging about soul ties is a lot of people do say you can break a soul tie. But then they will give you their recipe for how to break a soul tie, and the problem is that if this is some spiritual reality that needs to be fixed, then there should be a way to do it. Like there is a very clear—for example, the Bible says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Period. End of sentence. End of story. Pretty simple. There’s a clear action step. When it comes to soul ties, different people say very different things. As I was saying before, do you need to deal with the fact that your great-grandmother—like for example, I know that my great-grandmother was conceived outside of wedlock. Do I need to do a demonic—deal with demonic influence in my life because my great-great-grandmother, the farm girl, got it on before she got married? I don’t think so. I think that’s patently ridiculous, but there are teachings out there that would say that I need to do that. What kind of prayer needs to happen to break a soul tie? What kind of penance do we need to do? Does it involve the demonic? Does it not involve the demonic? Do you have to do it repeatedly? Is it a one-time thing? What happens if you think that you broke a soul tie, but you’re know still worrying about it? I mean I’m sorry but this is totally anxiety inducing. If you are worrying about soul ties and now you're still worrying about it, and I know I prayed the prayer three times but it’s not working, what are you supposed to do then? There’s no sense of consensus among Christians on this which to me indicates that it’s just made up, and that it’s a really effective scare tactic to use for vulnerable kids.

Sheila: And I do want to acknowledge a lot of people especially those in more charismatic traditions very much believe that this is true, and I think sometimes—

Rebecca: Well, let’s deal with the stats, and then we’ll deal with—then we’ll talk about why we think it’s true. So, start with the stats.

Sheila: Joanna, do you want to give us some stats on what happens when you believe that soul ties exist?

Joanna: Okay so let’s go back. We’re going to (inaudible) first. So one of our collective favorite Bible verses is the idea that good trees bear good fruit, bad trees don’t bear good fruit. Very good. There’s a wonderful Rain for Roots song about how apples don’t grow on pear trees if you’re looking for a good, biblically based children’s song about this verse. It exists thank you to Sandra McCraken and company. But soul ties if they are internalized or even if you are exposed to the soul ties message meaning you’re taught it by your church, by your family, or by Christian media, we see an increase in rates of sexual pain in women in our study. And so that is the study we took—we looked at how the different tropes that we investigated in the survey we did for Great Sex Rescue how they impacted sexual pain in our first paper, but for this one we took it a step further. We looked at pain that was associated with obstructed penetration and pain that was not associated with obstructed penetration, and then we also looked not only at degree of internalization. We also looked at degree of exposure by looking at again the church, family, and media—

Sheila: Okay, I need to translate now for everyone who is listening. 

Joanna: Sorry.

Sheila: So in other words, in this paper, we’re looking at people who have pain during sex and we’re looking at people, but we’re distinguishing them from people who have pain to the extent that you can’t even have intercourse because it’s just too painful. So we’re looking at those two groups, and then we’re looking at people who actually believed a lot of these messages like soul ties message that we’re talking about today but also messages like the obligation sex message that we’ve talked about on this podcast a lot, the all men struggle with lust message. These are all the messages that we measured, and so we’re looking at people who believed them but also people who were simply taught them even if they never actually believed them. So there’s the translation.

Joanna: Yes, and I would like to do another paper down the road where we look at the impact of being exposed but not believing, of being exposed and believing, and all of that, but that was beyond the scope for this paper so we just looked at were you exposed? Yes or no. And then separate analyses. Did you believe? Yes or no. And actually when it comes to internalization we differentiated between strong agreement versus slight or just agreement versus any disagreement. For the nerds out there, we did a little bit different. It led to some really fun results. Okay so what we found with soul ties was that there was an increase in sexual pain that was associated with obstructed penetration so again that means that there is no ability to have intercourse, and also that if women had sexual pain, it was more likely to be characterized by obstructed penetration. So if they had sexual pain and you believed in soul ties, your sexual pain was likely to be worse. 

Rebecca: And that makes sense, right, because the soul ties message says to women sex is profoundly threatening to you and your sense of autonomy. Sex has the ability to change you, and it happens whether or not you want it to. Remember what I think in And the Bride Wore White—that whole thing—even if you don’t say yes, your body makes a promise. That is scary.

Sheila: Yeah, and this is what is often taught. I remember this taught when I was in charismatic circles in the ‘90s that rape is especially something where you get soul ties, and so it just adds this super big layer of trauma—of even more trauma to people who are already traumatized. And I know—please I know that there is a lot of people who are listening who believe this, and I get it. And we’re going to be explaining in a minute how we can talk about this in a different way that isn’t harmful, like how we can talk about the phenomenon of trauma and bonding in a way that isn’t harmful so we’re not trying to deny that there is trauma. We’re not trying to deny that there’s bonding. What we’re saying and please hear us in this is when you believe this stuff before you’re married, it is statistically linked to higher rates of sexual pain.

Rebecca: Even if you never had sex, like they say, it’s only negative because they realized what their soul tie is and of course, they’re going to have worse sex because they have a soul tie. No, these are virgins, a lot of them. Like this is not something where it’s like they’re just getting—I’m sorry. This is going to sound harsh, but I know they’re thinking that’s just the natural consequence of being promiscuous. These are not particularly promiscuous groups. Like our sample skews highly religious, and highly religious—

Joanna: And I actually restricted it to women who were highly pious in high school. You had to attend church at least weekly for me to include you.

Rebecca: And those populations tend to have far less sex than the average population, but the fact that we’re seeing higher rates of sexual pain amongst groups that believe this shows this is a bad tree. And again it makes the pain worse if they have pain.

Joanna: The other thing that’s interesting is that we see this same pattern that we saw with internalization so how much do I believe in soul ties. We didn’t see that trend for being exposed to the idea of soul ties by your family or being exposed to soul ties by your church. However, if you are exposed to soul ties by Christian media so books, podcasts—not podcasts but radio shows at the time, Christian magazines, that kind of thing—then you also see the higher rates of sexual pain with obstructed penetration with that exposure.

Rebecca: You know what doesn’t sound fun to a lot of parents?

Sheila: What?

Rebecca: Telling their kids about sex. I mean I know it wasn’t fun for you when I was growing up

Sheila: I did a terrible job.

Rebecca: You did a terrible job, but the good news for you all is that she did do a terrible job and so that made us want to do a better job for the next generation. So together we have created a course called The Whole Story which is a course that walks you as the parents through having these talks with your kids, both boys and girls, and we’ve created two different versions for each gender, a young and an older version. So the younger version is that really awkward age, the one where you’re in puberty in the middle of junior high.

Sheila: Yeah, you’re starting to get your period, you need a bra.

Rebecca: Or boys are starting to have wet dreams, and then the older one we put in because often what happens is we have these conversations once, and then we don’t have them again. So we also created a program for you when your kids are more in high school where you can have the nitty gritty conversations, get into those difficult topics, and really connect so that it’s not just giving them a book and hoping that they understand, but you’re having the ability to shepherd them in this stage of their life. The videos are recorded by me and my sister for the girls and by my husband, Connor, and a man named Daniel Baros who is a Christian medical student for the boys.

Sheila: And you can find a link to The Whole Story in the podcast notes below. You don’t need to be scared. We’re here to help. Which makes sense because it was books that really, really explained what a soul tie was, like I got it more from the books that I read than I ever did from speakers at camp or something.

Rebecca: Like Brio magazine where you at?

Sheila: So this stuff—and for me it was in all the spiritual deliverance books I read in the early ‘90s in those books, and that’s where we see it today too is we see it in the purity culture books, but we also see it in books like Soul Care which are more about—I don’t even know—

Rebecca: Deliverance ministries.

Sheila: Deliverance ministries.

Joanna: There’s (inaudible). I want to read a quote from Soul Care in particular so it says that, “Sometimes sexual sins lead to demonization.” So demonization is the term that’s used in the soul care, deliverance ministry world for being influenced by a demon but not technically possessed. I think that’s a distinction without a difference. The authors of these other books would highly disagree with me so I’m just going to let you all decide but regardless demonization—not demonic possession. “Demons can be transferred through sexual intercourse.” And so demons are literally an STI in this book which again sells better than Great Sex Rescue. The author contends that this is not limited to consensual intercourse as “sometimes demons enter through abuse. Many times people who commit acts of violence and abuse have demonic spirits, but sadly often their victims end up with demons too. Satan isn’t fair.” And then another popular deliverance ministry. This one is by Neil Anderson says, “If we sexually join our bodies to another person outside of the context of marriage, we become one flesh with that person. (1 Corinthians 6:16) This creates a spiritual bond that leads to spiritual bondage.”

Sheila: And again we are not trying to say that there absolutely is no demonic activity where abuse is concerned. I don’t think we are in a position to make that theological statement. What we are trying to say is that this language is associated with harm.

Rebecca: But we’re also trying to say there’s not evidence that this is true. There’s not evidence that demons are passed like STIs. There’s just not evidence for that, but what we have seen throughout history, and there’s a phenomena. We’re going to talk about now why we believe soul ties theology. From the beginning of human civilization, humans use spiritual words to describe what they know to be true but don’t understand. Think about all of the ancient civilizations that you study where they all believe that the famines came because the gods were angry. That is a lot more psychologically just palatable than the idea that no you have no power over this, and every couple of years there will be a famine, and your children will die. You have these ancient civilizations who are like well maybe if we do enough sacrifices and if we appease the gods and if we build a nicer temple, and we do all these things, maybe the gods will be happy and we won’t have a famine. That is actually a logical belief with the information that they had. Similarly you take ancient Galic and Celtic fairy tales. You have the epitome of this example is the changeling child. You have babies who were born human and were born perfectly normal, and then all of a sudden, they become a changeling. And they believed—genuinely believed—that fairies had come and swapped their children, and that now this baby had been switched with a changeling who looks just like their child but is not their child. And unfortunately what would often happen is these children would be left to die on hillsides because they believed they were fairies who were coming to pretty much curse the family. And now we understand regressive developmental disorders. Now we understand that actually a lot of children develop perfectly normally for a couple months or even a year or two and then they have a regressive developmental disorder and all of a sudden they don’t behave the same, and they don’t seem the same, and they don’t seem like the same child anymore. And now we have medical information about what that is. And that’s a horrible and traumatic to thing to watch. It’s horrible for parents to go through, and there was a reason why those terrible—I don’t think evil—ways of coping with it existed because it was making sense of what they couldn’t understand. And I mean you were saying even just the ways that we understood how the world is made.

Joanna: Yeah, even like in the Bible so like the challenge is these guys who are teaching this stuff are largely pastors and understandably so. We understand that they’re pastors. You don’t see anybody—no, there are no pastors who are going hey, western Canadians, you’re planning your Rocky Mountain vacation for this summer, and you’re going to summit one of those peaks. Look out for the firmament. You don’t want to go touch the giant dome held up by the mountains in which the stars are studded. That would be a problem. You wouldn’t want to break it. Nobody believes that. Not even—the flat earthers are not arguing for a firmament again. Even the flat earthers.

Sheila: What was the show with Jim Carrey movie?

Rebecca: Truman Show.

Sheila: Truman Show where there actually was the—

Joanna: The Truman Show and nobody believes that, but the ancient Israelites 100% did, and the Bible if you read it carefully, it clearly assumes that there was a firmament because God wasn’t like, “Guys, here’s the thing. Have you heard? I know how you can do iron smelting. Let me give you the recipe. Hey, yo dog, do you want to know how to make something that will work pretty well actually as a pain reliever if you take some willow bark and boil it because then you can get salicylic acid and that’s an aspirin precursor? Let’s go.” He didn’t do that. He didn’t. Is that a thing that I would like to ask the Almighty some day? Sure. But clearly God wasn’t about giving us a chemistry handbook. However, there are things that we know from the Scriptures that are in the Scriptures that we know from science aren’t quite there, and one of the things that’s tricky today is that you have all of these pastors who don’t have psychological training really. They maybe took a couple of classes on how to do counseling in their graduate school. However, it is wildly different than—for example, I have a family member who is a counselor. I know how many hours she had to have supervised counseling before she got the go-ahead to go off and be a licensed counselor. She had very strong licensing standards that she had to have. And the challenge is that if you read a book like The Five Love Languages or if you listen to Emerson Eggerich talk in Love and Respect and you can tell what I have been listening to and reading recently, these guys talk a lot about their counseling experience. And the challenge is that these are folks that do genuinely—they have put in a lot of hours doing counseling. No word of a lie there. However, what they have not done is the relevant training to know what’s actually evidence-based and what’s not. How do we differentiate between just straight up bonding or we are ruminating in an unhealthy way about a relationship that didn’t work out or we’re having an unhealthy coping mechanism today or this is an anxiety disorder? We don’t have the capacity to do that because there’s not the education and training, and I think that pastoral counseling is a powerful force for good in the world because it’s wonderful that we have these folks who want to help people. However, in order to stay in our lane of pastoral counseling, we have to actually know what the sides of the lanes are, and that to me is a real problem with education that’s happening today regarding what are things that you need to be referring out. Grief would be a great thing for a pastoral counselor.

Rebecca: But I think also just to say I know some people get really uncomfortable when we talk about the idea that spiritual language is used to explain truths we don’t yet understand because that makes people think well you think we can just science our way out of God. And I think that actually belies what we think God is for because I don’t actually think God’s purpose is to teach us why gravity exists or why death happens. I think that—I’m not terrified of this idea of science answering questions that the Bible has wrong in some areas. Again the sky is not held up on the mountains. We just know that, and that doesn’t challenge our faith. But what I see is what would it look like if we saw our faith less as a psychology and biology textbook and more as a way to learn how to emulate the divine and the righteous in how we treat one another? Because science is not going to science its way out of be kind. Love one another. Carry your cross. Sacrifice for one another, those kind of things, but we don’t need to believe that if you have sex you are bonded with someone forever in order to take the Bible seriously because first of all, the Bible does not actually say that the way we use today. The big passage that people use is 1 Corinthians 6.

Sheila: And do you want to deal with those right now?

Rebecca: First Corinthians 6 is talking about using temple prostitutes. First of all, this was a big thing that happened.

Joanna: So big. They loved their temple prostitutes.

Rebecca: They loved their temple prostitutes, even Christian converts would still use temple prostitutes. This is how common it was. People say the world is sexually amoral today. I was like I am so sorry.

Sheila: Let me read you 1 Corinthians.

Rebecca: Let me read you literally anything in the Roman Empire.

Joanna: The number of phalluses in ancient Rome. If you are picturing ancient Rome, seriously, there are archaeological items that they found in Pompeii, it’s an oil lamp in the shape of a phallus. I’m using the word phallus in case there are kids in the car—out of which the phallus splits and additional phalluses spring forth from the original phallus. And on those new phalluses there are like pygmy people. It’s really offensive. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. I cannot emphasize enough how gross they were. They did not have lucky rabbits’ feet. You just carried around a little baby phallus in your pocket—a statue of one, but a small little—that was what you had.

Rebecca: They had so—there was just so much this normalization of sexual abuse and of temple prostitutes. And the temple prostitutes were not there of their own volition. Let’s be very, very for real here. And so Paul is talking to this culture where sex is seen as just something that you do.

Sheila: Like defecating or something.

Joanna: The same word for ejaculate and urinate—like that’s the same word in—yeah, for men. That’s how (inaudible) it was.

Rebecca: And also remember this is a time where they did not have contraception. They did not. And people say they had herbs. Well, the herbs did not work 99.9999% of the time. And also a lot of them well did you know that the Egyptian would use crocodile dung? I’m like I’m sorry. So then you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of infections then. I am so sorry. That’s not the win you think it is. That doesn’t work. And the fact—and we know it doesn’t work because quite frankly whenever contraception is actually invented, it’s a big deal. But they didn’t have contraception back then so you have these men who are converted Christians who are still going and risking impregnating these temple prostitutes and when you are in a culture that does not have contraception, I am sorry, but yes, the two will become one flesh. Like you are risking that every single time. That is a big deal. That is different than God sees you and your abuser as permanently intertwined. That is different. That is not what Paul is saying, and also note that in chapter 6 he does not then give detailed instructions on how to then separate yourself in the spiritual realm from all the prostitutes that they’ve used because remember he’s talking to men who are currently and have used temple prostitutes. And they’re not saying you are forever and permanently not able to be free of this bondage and also here’s how you get free of the bondage. It doesn’t make sense.

Sheila: Yeah, because what you see too in the New Testament when Paul goes around, he goes into a new city, tons and tons of people confess Christ, they’re baptized, they receive the Holy Spirit, Paul doesn’t then do a mass exorcism. Like he doesn’t now say okay you guys are all baptized in the Holy Spirit, you are made new in Christ, but now—

Rebecca: You all have your bondage we have to deal with.

Sheila: —but now we have to deal with all the soul ties that you’ve had from all the temple prostitutes and all the sleeping around that you guys all did. It was a very sexual culture so there was a lot of sleeping around. He doesn’t then say that. He says no if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. And so a lot of this stuff that we have added is extra biblical. It isn’t found in Scripture.

Rebecca: Yeah, Paul gives very, very specific instructions on what to do if you were someone who engaged in a lot of what he called fornication, which would have been a lot of that kind of stuff. He says, “Don’t do it anymore.” It’s literally turning and changing. Do not do what you used to do. Live in the Spirit, not in the flesh. It is about changing what you do. But this idea does feel more like—I mean because Christians always get mad—it feels more like voodoo because you’re saying these special charms and special chants and special prayers that have to be done a special way versus understanding that nowhere in the New Testament is that what we’re told to do.

Sheila: I think in She Deserves Better we describe it as like a Harry Potter horcrux like it kind of sounds a little bit more like that than it does Scripture.

Joanna: But I think another thing is we forget, like if—to be very clear if I had been a mother in ancient Rome, I would have been terrified to allow my children male or female out on the streets alone at the age of 11 or 12. The pretty boys that were taken in by the Roman emperors and their wives—these were little boys who were sexually abused repeatedly. I mean it is—I cannot—the Roman Empire is my Roman Empire, and I love reading about it, but it is—think about how horrific it could possibly be in your mind, and then know that it was worse. I do not live in a place where I have to worry about my children being sexually assaulted on the street in a city. We do need to worry about our kids. All of that is true, but I’m sorry, it is different now. We’re in a different cultural context, and in that cultural context, again, Paul isn’t saying worry about soul ties. And I think that what we do as a church is that we forget the fact that Christ’s kingdom—it’s the already and not yet, but it has already come in a truly powerful way. We forget the impact that Christianity has had on this world. Because I’m sorry, it was transformative. I think that in not studying that we can get ourselves into these weird—tied up in these weird knots where we’re not actually looking at the Bible as it is supposed to be. We’re divorcing it from its cultural context and using it to prooftext. It’s hilarious. Emerson Eggerich goes on this whole anti-prooftexting rant in one of his conference videos, and yet, then he’s prooftexting all over the place. We’re not actually approaching Scripture on its own terms, and we’re not being students of the Bible as it actually is. We’re using it as a tool for our own ends, and that in fact is what the third commandment tells us not to do.

Sheila: What is the third commandment, Joanna?

Joanna: Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.

Sheila: Thank you.

Joanna: Don’t go using the power of the Almighty for your own ends.

Rebecca: And to bring it back around what I see with the soul ties theology is you have people who are experiencing very real psychological ramifications from past sexual activity whether it was consensual or not. Maybe you were madly in love and your boyfriend dumped you, and you never got closure. And you’re thinking maybe it’s not that I’m just not able to get over him. Maybe there’s a soul tie. Maybe it’s not in my control. Maybe it’s not because I haven’t done the work. Maybe it’s not because of the I should “have” been doing. Maybe it’s something that’s totally out of my control. That’s actually a comforting belief because it gives you an achievable goal of I just need to break the soul tie with the right prayers. But remember a couple weeks ago, we talked about this idea of ruminating and how it makes it feel like we’re doing things and we’re actually not. I worry that soul ties are doing the same thing where we’re giving things more power than they have and as a result we’re finding it rewarding to get stuck in that mire and go around and around and around.

Sheila: Can I give some examples of like—innocuous isn’t the right word.

Rebecca: Less extreme.

Sheila: The less extreme talk about soul ties. So I have a couple of clips from John Eldredge’s podcast. John Eldredge wrote Wild at Heart, and he and his wife Stasi and another guy—I forget what the other guy’s name is—but they have a three-part podcast series on soul ties. And what they’re talking about is the fact that we can bond with people in healthy and unhealthy ways. And I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that, but what you notice in the clips that I’m going to play for you is that they really are assigning very spiritual language to things that don’t necessarily need to be described that way and can actually hold us back when they are described that way. So let’s just listen to this basic one about sexual soul ties.

John Eldredge: Most people find that they cannot find sexual wholeness until they bring and pray the cross of Jesus Christ between them and everyone that they have been sexually involved with prior to marriage or outside of the marriage covenant. And then having done that, the fruit of it is so beautiful—the freedom, the restoration, the wholeness.

Sheila: Okay, that’s kind of typical. Now here’s where he gets more into like what happens when you experience that heartache that Beck was talking about. 

John Eldredge: Someone that you were once in relationship with—a guy that I canceled had a very intimate—not sexual—but intimate romantic relationship in high school with his first girlfriend, and years later in his marriage he couldn’t get rid of her letters. He couldn’t let go. There was still some part of him that was literally back in that other relationship. They were knit together, and that was only once he severed that old bond—really severed it—that he was finally able to move with freedom into a whole-hearted relationship with his wife, with his new relationship.

Rebecca: This is a perfect example of using spiritual language to describe something that we understand. You know what it’s called? It’s called just heartache. It’s called not being over someone. It also might not be about the girlfriend. It might just be about being young and wanting to be 15 and in love again. It might be about who you were at the point of that relationship, and you know what? If you’re holding onto something, we know that is a sign that you haven’t let it go yet. And okay, so we got rid of the letters, was there something huge and spiritual that happened? Probably not. He probably just actually took the step and be like yeah I’m not that 15-year-old in love anymore or however old he was when he was with this girl.

Sheila: Yeah, and I’m going to decide to put it behind me now.

Rebecca: Exactly. It’s perfectly normal to do those kinds of things. Like I had a couple little trinkets from guys who I had liked and who liked me over the years, and when Connor and I started dating, I got rid of them because of course I did. That’s just pretty normal. It doesn’t mean I had soul ties I had to break. It was just like oh yeah this is weird to have stuff from a guy I flirted with.

Sheila: But there’s also been studies that show that your first relationship when you’re 14, 15, 16, that first big crush, that first big romantic relationship you have, does affect you in greater ways than often later ones because it’s the first time you’ve felt that way, and it feels so big because you’re just starting to have these feelings. And so we don’t need to make quite as big a deal out of this. Now I need to say like John Eldredge is not trying to say that you’re ruined for life, and the way that they describe you getting rid of soul ties is—

Rebecca: Much more reasonable.

Sheila: —more reasonable and going through a prayer, etc., but what I’m concerned about is again we’re using language that we don’t necessarily need to use, that spiritual language that can sound comforting, but what we found in our study is that it can actually be quite threatening because it tells you this is way more serious than it needs to be.

Joanna: It takes sex, and it makes it a threat to your immortal soul. And that’s a big problem.

Sheila: But even this one where there wasn’t sex, where there was just this heartache—yeah.

Rebecca: I think the big thing is when we give something more power than it has we make the monster ourselves. If a big thing that we work with our kids which has helped a lot with their emotional regulation skills is we ask them okay is it a big deal? And then they have to think about it, and sometimes it is a big deal. Okay, if it’s a big deal, that’s fine. We can have a big reaction, but usually they’re like no it’s objectively not a big deal. I’m like okay then we have to figure out how to calm down then because we’re not going to make this a big deal if it’s not a big deal. That is a bad use of our energy. We need our energy for the big deals, and that’s what I want to tell people like John Eldredge here where he’s talking about. Is this a big deal? So he kept letters from his old girlfriend, and he was like yeah actually that is weird, and that seems like I’m holding something. I’m going to get rid of those. Do we need to make this a huge spiritual issue or is this just bro had letters and he realized that’s showing something about my subconscious we’re going to actively—I don’t mean repent as in it’s a sin, but the actual act of repentance is to turn and walk the other way. I don’t mean that it’s a sin to hold onto old letters. I don’t think it is.

Joanna: No, I think it can be perfectly fine.

Rebecca: If it’s not affecting you, I don’t actually care.

Sheila: Sometimes you might think your kids might want to see them.

Rebecca: Oh, I have kept all of my letters to my friend Emily about the boys I had crushes on and how I was going to marry them because when my child is 11-years-old, I will show them to them and I’ll be like, “You are making yourself look a fool. Look what I did.” Are you kidding? Don’t worry. My children will not be raised in shame around dating, but you all know what I mean. If an 11-year-old is about to try and propose to someone, I would be like, “This is what your mommy thought.” But this is the situation. You can also just realize is it a big deal? If it’s not, we don’t need to make it a huge, spiritual issue. I think that a lot of the time this desire—and I’m not saying about John in particular or anything like that. My personal opinion is that John Eldredge is just a very poetic man and finds a lot of meaning in a lot of things. I’m not talking about John. I’m talking about people who listen to the podcast. The people who might be listening. There’s often this—when we are insecure in our faith and if we are not sure where we stand on things, it’s really easy to go deeper and to actually overdo it as a show that we are actually very good Christians.

Sheila: Yeah, because if you listen to their podcast, they have you having soul ties with friends. Like any time you’re talking to a friend and then you take on their emotions, like if they’re really down and so you take on their emotions—

Rebecca: It results in a soul tie?

Sheila: —(inaudible) soul tie that you have to break. It really gets you into praying constantly about this. Here’s another example, and I think this one is important. This one’s not about relationships—romantic relationships but instead about a man with his mother.

John Eldredge: His father passed away when he was a young man, and his mother turned to him as often happens for emotional support and that kind of thing. But the problem was it carried on over years, and he really actually ended up becoming a kind of surrogate spouse to her. He really kind of took the place of her husband emotionally, spiritually, even financially. And what happened over time was a very deep kind of bonding took place there that was never meant to take place between a mother and her son. Yes, a woman and her husband, right? But here you have the capacity for bonding in this woman being attached to her son, and he couldn’t get out of it. He didn’t feel like there were things he couldn’t ever bring up with his mom. There was a distance he didn’t feel like he could create there. He felt trapped in the relationship because there was this very powerful clinging bond that had been established in their relationship.

Rebecca: I’ll take enmeshment for $400.

Sheila: Exactly. What they’re describing is enmeshment.

Joanna: Emotional incest is what it’s called.

Sheila: Yeah, and there are psychological terms for this. We don’t need to call it a soul tie. We just need to say no, he’s emotionally enmeshed with his mother. And licensed therapists can really help you with that. This isn’t something which just needs a prayer, and that’s the other thing that concerns me is some of these things are actually quite serious, especially things like sexual abuse which are often used again in the soul tie. You don’t just need a prayer. You don’t need an exorcism. You need trauma therapy.

Rebecca: The other thing too—and I do want to say—because a lot of people say yeah I did just need a prayer. And I’m better. I’m like yeah because prayer can act as the catalyst that again turns us to not the sin level of repentance but the actual act of I am now changing the way I live my life. You accidentally behavior therapied yourself. That’s how prayer often works. It’s like we remind ourselves of what our center should be. When religion is used properly, it actually does function very similarly to therapy in its best sense, but it’s only when it’s used properly. That’s one of the reasons why religiosity is so beneficial is you kind of in essence do a lot of the steps of therapy on your own. You question okay what is the truth here? If you’re using the Bible in a healthy way, you can say I know that I am loved. I know that I should be treated well. I know that I should not be asked to do things that make me uncomfortable. If you’re actually reading the Bible in the way that frankly the story actually tells it versus the way that it’s given from very biased viewpoints it’s like no, I am a beloved child of God. And I do not deserve to be treated like this, and then you decide I’m not going to let this mother who is being unhealthy take all of my energy because I really feel called to help this family I know where the husband is now disabled after a car crash and can’t find a job. Like you figure out things that you can do, and you move towards beneficial things and because of all that prayer that’s helping ground you and position you towards what you want to do, it’s not necessarily because you had a demon that you had to excise—

Sheila: Of that you had to break a spell or something.

Rebecca: No, it’s that you make—

Sheila: It’s not magic.

Rebecca: It’s that you made a decision and you followed through. And that is a gift of prayer, and that doesn’t mean that prayer doesn’t work. That is a gift that God has given us. That is something that is not—because I often feel like if it’s not a fairy tale, it doesn’t look like it could have pixie dust surrounding it, we think that it’s not spiritual enough. And what if just the act of healing and growing is in and of itself spiritual?

Sheila: I want to get to four specific issues with soul ties in a sec, but can I read what we said in She Deserves Better about soul ties? Because we did have a whole section on it.

Rebecca: Sure.

Sheila: So this is how we kind of summed it up because in the context of this we were saying that the whole idea of soul ties actually can keep people from growth because Becca is talking about how when religiosity is used in a good way, you grow. But this can actually keep people because we can think we’re being punished forever for something we did. So we talked to women for instance who they had sex before marriage. They figured that they had this soul tie that they had something that was broken in them and then they get married later and their sex life isn’t great, and instead of thinking oh this is something we can work on and improve, they figure this is just what happens because I have a soul tie because I did this thing in the past. So we saw that over and over again. So here’s what we said. “The soul tie theology claims that the reason that you can’t get over heartache is because of spiritual oppression and permanent neurological rewiring. And it says that even if you don’t feel sad, you will never experience the fullness of a great sex life with your spouse without a big exorcism or prayer of deliverance. Interestingly Jesus didn’t seem to get this memo since he didn’t perform an exorcism on the Samaritan woman who had had five husbands. We’re not saying that people can’t undergo spiritual oppression because of relationships. We’re merely saying that claiming that you can never be truly free or experience God’s best for you because of past sins does not match with the gospel of the God who came to give us life and give it abundantly. And this soul tie theology has real world consequences. We hear from many women who married their husbands simply because they’d already done the deed, and they felt their fate was sealed. I married my husband because we had sex. I believe that I literally could not marry anyone else because we were married in the sight of God and to not stay together would mean stealing from whomever I would later marry. And in God’s eyes, I would never truly be married except to the guy I slept with.”

Rebecca: And that last quote was from a woman that we talked to. It wasn’t you.

Sheila: Right, right, and we heard this over and over again. So let’s just sum up and let’s look at the difference scenarios of how people can relate to the soul tie theology or what people can be experiencing. So first of all, I think the soul tie theology can simply be talking about having a broken heart.

Rebecca: You’re just really sad and you feel like you’re connected with them still. You feel like they’re still a part of you.

Sheila: And you’re still obsessing over them. You’re still dreaming about them, and so you’re thinking well I just must have a soul tie. You could just have a broken heart. You could just be going through a lot of sadness, and it may not be that there’s thing happening in the spiritual realm that needs to be broken as much as you just need healing, and you just need time, and you just need some healthy coping mechanisms. And you need to get out in nature and walk more, maybe need to volunteer. 

Rebecca: Yeah, there’s things that take your life and rebuild it without that person.

Sheila: The second one which I think is really problematic when we talk about soul ties in this context is people who have trauma because I think soul ties have been used to explain extreme trauma. We saw that in the book Soul Care that quote that Joanna read earlier about the demonic oppression that comes during abuse and that so much of this—it’s like okay but maybe we need to be talking about the real trauma that happens during abuse, and we need to be talking about evidence-based therapies to get people through that rather than just telling them they need an exorcism.

Rebecca: Because evidence-based therapies do work quite well.

Sheila: Yeah, things like EMDR.

Rebecca: Tapping.

Sheila: Tapping, different bio feedbacks and internal family systems. There’s a lot of therapies that show great efficacy and work really well in terms of sexual abuse. There’s book like The Body Keeps the Score or Hilary McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body that talk about how trauma is actually stored in the body. And so how we need to help our body move through that trauma to experience freedom and I think understanding that God created our bodies in such a way that it does hold trauma and why it holds trauma and like why that’s actually really interesting the way God created our bodies. Like we don’t need to see it as a negative thing. It can actually make you understand God better. This doesn’t mean that we’re turning away from the spiritual when we start talking about trauma. It actually means that we’re understanding better how God made us the complexity of us, how our emotions work. Like these are all good things, and so when we’re saying get trauma therapy, don’t just get an exorcism, we’re not trying to say don’t be spiritual. We’re trying to say as you understand trauma more you can actually get more spiritual.

Rebecca: And we are saying—at least I am happy to put my name behind this—if you are someone who is still going against the modern research in these areas and is pedaling very pseudo religious like kind of mystical spiritual babble like this idea that demons are passed through sexual intercourse and using spiritual language to obfuscate what we know to be true from science, I do think that Joanna is right. We’re taking the Lord’s name in vain there, and that actually is a real problem because you are causing harm to people because you are hiding the truth from them by giving them this big, red herring in its way. And I’m quite firm on that. The same way that—it’s just very easy to—sorry to use this word—demonize people who are having difficulties in these areas if we say well that person just has been demonized. Of course, they can’t get on top of it. They’re demonized. They refuse to do the work. They refuse to have this happen. It’s like don’t allow yourself to start labeling people as demons versus not. And I know there’s going to be people who are offended by that, but I’m just—the risk is too high. So many people have been hurt. So many people have been spiritually abused. I’m sorry. Look at the cases coming out of a lot of the charismatic churches that do this stuff.

Sheila: Robert Morris.

Rebecca: The stuff that’s coming out of these churches is just wild because you can get people to do a lot of bad stuff if you convince them that they have a demon. It’s a very easy way to make them the outs. Again remember that we used to literally leave babies to die in the elements because we were convinced that they were fairies which is just another word for demon in essence. This is a big deal so let’s not take it lightly.

Sheila: Okay, then there’s the people who they just simply remember. Okay, they had a sex life with someone else before, and they have memories because we do have memories. And so maybe some of these memories come up at inopportune times, and it’s not that they’re necessarily holding onto this person. 

Rebecca: You just have a functioning hippocampus.

Sheila: Yeah, and this can be really problematic especially if you’re on your second marriage or maybe they had—whatever it might be. If they had a really good relationship sexually before and now you’re married to someone else and for whatever reason things aren’t going as well, and so you tend to compare. And people can talk about soul ties in that context when that isn’t really what’s going on. What’s going on is you have a functioning memory, and you need to figure out how to deal with that dynamic in your relationship that you’re in now rather than just going through an exorcism.

Rebecca: Because we’re not talking to people who are like my previous partner did it this way, and you’re not as good as her. We’re not talking about people who are being cruel about it. We’re talking about just the fact that you have a brain, and the same way that if you had two pieces of lasagna you would compare them in your brain. Like that’s just how it works.

Sheila: And this is a reason that people said hey don’t have sex with a lot of people because you don’t want to compare. In a lot of ways, I think that is valid.

Rebecca: But also—

Sheila: But some people are widows.

Rebecca: Most people die.

Sheila: And you are going to remember things, and so it’s like how do you learn to compartmentalize those memories and not bring them into your current relationship?

Rebecca: Yeah, and especially for people who are widows, you don’t want to forget your first love. You don’t want to forget your—people who are married to—especially people who are married to widows or widowers understanding that you can’t ask them to forget their first spouse. That’s not right. That’s not kind. I’m sorry. You married someone who had a previous spouse. You kind of—that’s part of the deal.

Sheila: Because often that person is the parent of their children too.

Rebecca: That’s very common. Like I also think once again because we have been taught that sex is this huge deal and that sex creates soul ties, if you do this they might think of someone else and compare, and that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. Like everyone knows don’t be weird about it. There is a level but at the same time, you have to understand this is just how humans are and maybe we’ve been taught this is something to be afraid of in a way that is unrealistic and out of proportion with the actual threat. I do think that there’s a benefit to like having—to not having to worry about this but at the same time like does it need to keep you up at night if there is someone who is good and not making it our problem but you’re like what if he might be comparing me to someone he slept with in high school?

Sheila: And this kind of brings us to the next one which is what if someone had sex in the past with a bunch of people or maybe one, whatever, they had sex in the past before they met and married you, but nothing much happened. Like they’re not overcome with heartache. They’re not traumatized, and they don’t even really have a lot of memories. My concern is that because of all this soul tie teaching their spouse isn’t able to believe that.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s so common. We get these messages all the time.

Sheila: My husband has this major past, and he says he really just doesn’t think of these women anymore, that it’s totally different with me because they were just bodies. But with me it’s actually making love, but I know that he has all these connections, and I know that he has given part of himself away, and I know that—so he’s like yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m totally here. I’m showing up. I’m loving you. I’m enjoying you. But she can’t accept that because of what she’s been taught. He can’t accept that because of what he’s been taught.

Rebecca: I think one of the hardest things to deconstruct and come to an understanding of is the dichotomy of it’s just sex, and when you’ve been raised in purity culture—like at some point we do have to realize this is not as big of a deal as we’ve been told. But at the same time, sex is sacred. Those are two competing beliefs which is that sex is sacred and needs to be held, needs to be treated well and not done flippantly, and it is a way that people have used to hurt one another. And it’s also a very profound way of bonding with people. Like understanding the gravity of sex and also being able to put it in its place and be at the same time it is just sex is a very hard thing to do especially for people who were raised in purity culture. The reality is that the vast majority of people who have past sexual partners it does not affect their current relationship.

Joanna: Yeah, and our stats bear that out. Having sex before marriage is not a death sentence. If anything actually, the studies that we’ve done so far is actually that having sex before marriage helps—is associated with lower rates of sexual pain. So it’s not the death knell of your relationship.

Sheila: And this doesn’t mean that we are saying that you should all have sex before marriage, and it doesn’t matter. What we’re saying is that we can make the argument that sex is sacred and needs to be for a committed relationship without having to do all the fear tactics, and the reason that we think—because we’ve done a lot of—Joanna especially has done a lot of work  on the stats on this—the reason that we think that having sex before marriage often leads to lower sexual pain is not because waiting for marriage is bad. It’s because the way that we are waiting for marriage is bad, and the way that we are doing sex once you get married is bad.

Rebecca: Yeah, and for people who haven’t listened to our podcast or haven’t read GSR yet—that’s The Great Sex Rescue—haven’t read it yet, our hypothesis is that think about who is having sex with only the person—because a lot of what we looked at is people who only ever had sex with each other, did they have sex before they were married, or after they were married? If you are someone who has never had sex before and you only have sex with each other before you are married, why did it happen? It’s probably because you’ve been making out for nine days straight, and you are so aroused you genuinely feel like you can’t stop versus if you wait until after you’re married, there’s a good chance that you’re only having sex because it’s my wedding night. I have to now. That is a wildly different dynamic, and so the issue here is arousal. It's that if you have sex before you’re married you’re way more likely to be aroused is what we think is going on. So again we don’t—I don’t want to minimize people’s pain if their spouse is actively comparing them to past partners, is being a jerk about it, is being you feel insecure. I also think it’s really tricky because we hear from women a lot where they say listen I know I am not the problem. I have orgasmed with all of my other partners, but my husband won’t get me there. We have heard that from women as well, and I think that’s really hard for men to hear because then he’s like well where does she know that from? And that can be hard too, and so I just think this is—I don’t want to discount the discomfort and the pain that people can feel in this area, but I just do feel like I don’t know how we can have a healthy discussions about this if we have an overinflated sense of fear and anxiety around sex that is not healthy because we’ve been raised in a very biased group which has primed us to be on high panic alert and not be able to have normal conversations about this.

Joanna: Everything that you’re describing, Rebecca, these are really challenging conversations to have. None of them have anything to do with soul ties for the reason that these conversations are hard. They’re just hard because they’re tricky situations. They’re not hard because of soul ties.

Sheila: Yeah, and that’s the important thing. As we’re wrapping up, I wanted to share this one thing is that I went looking on the internet for secular ways to talk about difficulties with bonding. Bonding where you don’t want to bond and then when you have bonds that you need to break. And there's a lot of talk in domestic violence circles about the idea of trauma bonding. How you can bond in traumatic experiences with your abuser, and then it talks about how to break those bonds, and I have an article which I will put the link in the podcast notes, but it’s really interesting the action steps that they have are very practical. I wish sometimes that in the church we could do more of that instead of hyperspiritualizing which doesn’t necessarily serve us well.

Joanna: That’s the idea of penance right? And not like you sinned so therefore you should do penance. That’s not what I mean, but I mean the idea of hey there’s something broken, let me fix it. That is the practical steps here. Oh, this isn’t working. What is the practical thing I can do? We need to get back to that kind of an idea as opposed to what I need to do is pray this particular prayer to unlock this thing, and if I do that, then I have to go, and I have to go and interview all of my family members about their pasts so that I can know if I’ve gone back far enough and I’ve broken all of the bonds, and then I will feel better. That doesn’t make any sense.

Rebecca: If you have to ask your great-grandma Mary about whether or not she had sex at 15, I think you’ve lost the plot. I’m just going to be really honest. It’s too much.

Sheila: Now sometimes understanding our grandmothers’ stories can help us understand family dynamics.

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Sheila: But that is different from feeling like there’s an exorcism that needs to happen.

Rebecca: My pastor needs to know.

Sheila: Listen, people, to wrap up. Here’s what we found is that the idea of if you have sex with someone, you are bonded in the spiritual realm with a bond that will affect you long term and that can only be broken in the spiritual realm, that is a harmful belief. It is a harmful belief, and we need to find better ways of talking about things like trauma and bonding and heartache, etc. so that we can help people get over very real problems without adding spiritual language that doesn’t necessarily help. So there you go. You can find more in our book She Deserves Better and The Great Sex Rescue, etc. Before we go, June is coming up, and I am going to be taking June and July off of the blog. I will be on my Substack which I just started. There’s a link in the podcast notes if you want to subscribe. It’s totally free. I’m keeping it free, and I just do one post a week, and I’m going to be posting some of our biggest posts ever on my Substack in June. We will still be doing the podcast in June, and next month so the four podcasts in June, we’re going to be tackling in each one some of the biggest questions we’re asked about that we don’t have a single podcast to point people to. We have like five different podcasts where we talk about this so we’re going to just do each in a single podcast in June. It’s going to be super fun. We’re going to do headship. We’re going to do dating, a lot of things coming up in June, but we won’t be on the blog. And then July I’m taking both of them off for summer vacation and will be back in August so we will see you next week for The Bare Marriage Podcast. Thanks for joining us, Joanna.

Joanna: Happy to be here.

Sheila: Thanks, Becca. Check out the podcast notes for all our links and have a great week. Bye-bye.

Rebecca: Bye.