Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Almost Awakened podcast.

I am Teresa Hobbs, your solo host once again.

And so I've been thinking about this episode for weeks.

It's going to connect to the episode that I did on codependency in Mormonism about a month ago.

Now, this is the opposite side of that, which is going to be Mormonism

as a narcissistic system. So I'm going to cover how Mormonism mirrors narcissistic dynamics,

why it breeds codependency, which again connected to that other episode, the impact on the nervous

system when you are in a narcissistic

system or that's a family system or a religious system. I'm going to cover the connection

to chronic illness and chronic symptoms. I'm going to touch on Utah mental health stats and share

a little bit about support and healing. So to start out with, Mormonism doesn't just resemble a narcissistic relationship.

It structurally operates like one.

And again, I've been thinking about this for a while.

When you sort of take a perspective that's a little bit removed and you just start to sort of see how the system

operates, you start to see these really interesting patterns. I went through a relationship

where there was, I had a partner who had high narcissistic traits. And after having experienced

that and then learned more about mental health and

healing and trauma patterns, I started to see those patterns really clearly in people. And then now

sort of looking at the like high demand fundamentalist religions, especially the Mormon Church,

through that lens, you start to see some interesting things.

So if you grew up inside the Mormon culture, there may be a reason why you felt like you were

never quite enough, no matter how much you gave.

...