Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Almost Awakened podcast. I am your solo host today, Teresa Hobbs.

It's nice to be back after taking a break over the holidays, and I hope everyone got through the holidays intact.

I never assume that the holidays were always a joyful experience for people because for some people, they really weren't.

Now, I've been wanting to do some solo podcast episodes on topics that I think will help people who are either deconstructing religion or working through relational trauma and who are interested in

psychoeducation around these topics. I feel like the more you understand the why of things,

the more power you have. So that's my goal in these sort of one-sided conversations. And I hope

that you'll find the information that I'm sharing useful. So today's episode is on codependency and how religious systems offer very fertile soil for codependency to grow.

I've noticed that a lot of people in Mormonism in particular tend to have a lot of codependent patterns.

So if you grew up monitoring other people's moods,

if you learned to scan the room before you ever checked in with yourself, or if your body

only relaxes when everybody else seems okay, then this episode is for you. I'm going to be talking

about codependency today, but probably not in the way that

you're used to hearing about it. My working definition of codependency is really simple. The

definition is, I'm not okay unless you're okay. And I want you to just let that land for a minute.

I'm not okay unless you're okay. And I want to start by saying that codependency is not a flaw, it is not a weakness, it's not

being too much or too sensitive or bad at boundaries.

Co-dependency is a survival adaptation.

It develops when our nervous system learns, usually really, really early in life, that our safety depends on other people's emotional states.

So instead of staying connected to self, we learn to stay hyper-focused on other.

And this is connected to the survival wiring of our attachment systems.

If we break connection, our system tells us that we are in threat

of death. Like that, to be ousted from a group to be lost from your attachment figure or

...