Source: Mormonism: A Narcissistic System: Why It’s Never Enough Channel: Mormon Discussion Inc. Published: February 22, 2026 | Archived: May 22, 2026

Video: Mormonism: A Narcissistic System: Why It’s Never Enough
Channel: Mormon Discussion Inc.
Published: February 22, 2026
Duration: 34:02
Views: 6,428
Category: People & Blogs
Video ID: bjjVxX4ZfoY

Description

What if the reason you felt like you were never enough… wasn’t you?

In this episode, Teresa explores the striking parallels between narcissistic relationship dynamics and high-demand religious systems, specifically within Mormonism. Through a compassionate but honest lens, she examines how institutional patterns like shifting expectations, avoidance of accountability, image preservation, and conditional belonging can shape identity, nervous system regulation, and long-term wellbeing, especially physical health.

This conversation goes beyond theology and into lived experience and explores: • Why high-demand systems can mirror narcissistic dynamics. • How that creates codependency patterns. • Chronic self suppression and its impact on the nervous system. • Why chronic symptoms like fatigue, pain, anxiety, and autoimmune conditions can emerge in these environments. • How healing often requires moving through grief, anger, and identity reconstruction. • And why the body’s response is not a character flaw, but a survival adaptation.

If you’ve ever felt exhausted from striving, confused by persistent symptoms, or disconnected from your authentic self after leaving a high-demand environment, this episode may help you understand why and that healing is possible.

Join us at our NEW CHANNEL: @almostawakenedpodcast

Teresa will be launching her upcoming Anchor and Regulate groups beginning March 11th. These groups are structured nervous system healing spaces designed for individuals navigating chronic symptoms, chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety and mystery illnesses that are driven by stress or trauma.

These groups combine psychoeducation, somatic practices, emotional processing, and supportive community to help you rebuild safety in the body and support you in resolving chronic symptoms.

Learn more here: 👉 https://www.monarchintegrativecoaching.com/group-support

💬 Join the conversation. ❤️ Like, share, and subscribe to support this work. 💛 Donate to Almost Awakened: https://donorbox.org/almost-awakened-2 🤝 Learn more about coaching at https://awakenandthrive.org

Tags

#mormon #exmormon Boundaries Codependency High Demand Religious Systems Religious Deconstruction Monarch Integrative Coaching Bill Reel Teresa Hobbs Trauma Healing Healing safe boundaries Post Mormon Healing Faith Crisis Mormonism Awaken and Thrive Somatic Healing Mindbody Connection Support Groups Embodiment Narcissism Narcissistic Systems CFS/ME Chronic Fatigue Long Covid Pain Reprocessing Therapy Neuroplastic Symptoms Chronic Illness Mormon Church

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:01 Welcome everyone to another episode of the Almost Awakened podcast. I am Teresa Hobbs, your solo host once again. And um so I’ve been thinking about this episode for weeks. It’s going to connect to the episode that I did on codependency and Mormonism um 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. Um, the impact on the nervous system when you are in a narcissistic uh system or whether that’s a family system or a religious system. I’m going to cover um the connection to chronic illness and chronic symptoms. I’m going to touch on Utah mental health stats and um 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

1:07 take a a a perspective that’s a little bit um removed and you just start to sort of see how the system operates, you start to see these really interesting patterns. Um, I went through a a relationship where there was I had a partner who was high had high narcissistic traits and and after having experienced that and then learned more about uh mental health and healing and trauma patterns, I started to see those those patterns really clearly in people.

1:36 And then now sort of looking at the um like high demand fundamentalist religions, especially the Mormon church, through that lens, you start to see some interesting things. So, um, 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. And you know, it’s not about individual members. Because I think there are so many incredible Mormons, right? But this is about how the system behaves because narcissism isn’t just a personality trait. It is a relational pattern. And systems can embody that relational pattern just as powerfully as individuals can. So today I want to kind of slow down and really show you the mechanics of this and you can let me know if you think that this is on point or not. I just find it really interesting. Um because once you see this, you kind of can’t unsee it. Okay.

2:32 So I’m going to sort of go over like what what is a narcissistic system. So most people think that narcissism means arrogance or grandiosity. And I like to pick on Trump because, you know, he is the prime example of this. He whether you like Trump or hate Trump, whatever your feelings about him are, you cannot deny his narcissism. I mean, there’s so much grandiosity there. Um he is just a prime example of this. But that definition um of narcissism is kind of surface level. So at its core, narcissism is actually about protecting your image at all costs. It’s about avoiding vulnerability, avoiding accountability, maintaining superiority, constantly controlling the narrative, um blameshifting. A lot of narcissists will blame shift.

3:27 Uh and they require your admiration. And then if you uh if you dissent or or let that person know that you disagree with them, they will punish that. So these are core sort of characteristics and this goes way deeper. There’s so many different types of narcissists and we could go into all that and talk for days about that, but essentially like narcissism is um it’s a protective response to feelings of inferiority. Um and so that uh kind of arrogance and grandiosity is sort of like covering that up. So uh a narcissistic person cannot tolerate being wrong because being wrong will threaten the identity and they formed that identity to protect against that vulnerability. So again they are people who tend to deflect. Um they will reframe, they will gaslight, uh they’ll rewrite history, they’ll demand your loyalty and they will expect forgiveness without any repair.

4:25 So if we zoom out, okay, what happens when an institution behaves this way? So then you get like a narcissistic system, right? So uh narcissistic systems are going to have predictable characteristics and um so we’ll just feel into this a little bit. Okay, so in narcissistic systems, the system is always right. Harm is individualized. It’s never structural. Apologies are rare or carefully worded.

4:58 Um they focus on image management. Um and they prioritize that over being transparent. Um any disscent is framed as betrayal. And then loyalty is uh conflated with righteousness. So if you’ve ever been in a narcissist narcissistic family, you may already know that this dynamic, right? the the parent in those family systems tends to be very fragile and the children are expected to carry the shame of the parent. And I I touched on this in the episode on codependency when I was sharing how, you know, growing up I learned that it was my job to protect against any male fragility. Like I couldn’t I couldn’t allow a man to feel any sense of vulnerability. And so I had to sort of like absorb that and counterbalance that to make sure that that um that men in my life never had to touch into that. And that wasn’t a carryover from my family system that I grew up in. And also I think um now that I’m thinking about it like again I grew up in a culture of Mormonism and all of

6:10 that sort of like gets passed down into the family system. So I want to now just sort of like overlay those ideas onto Mormonism. So um the Mormon church presents itself as you know the one true church, the restored gospel, the highest authority and God’s mouthpiece. That is a grandio self-concept. Now um what happens when in the church when historical problems uh surface? Do we see uh vulner vulnerability or do we see uh shifting narratives uh careful PR statements?

6:52 The church tends to put blame on imperfect people, right? They emphasize um faith over facts and then they shame the people who are struggling who are struggling to make it all fit. So um you know institutionally the church uh uh never says hey you know we were wrong or yeah we know we harm people or we really need to repair this and fix it. Instead what the church says is the church is perfect but the people are imperfect and that is deflection.

7:25 So the system uh gets to remain pure and the individuals have to absorb the the flaws and that is classic narcissistic positioning. So when policies cause harm, well, the narrative just becomes, you know, hey, you misunderstood, you weren’t faithful enough or um you’re focusing on the negative, right? And when leaders are caught in deception, well, when leaders are caught in deception, then essentially people get excommunicated, but that’s beside the point. When uh when leaders are caught in deception, the narrative there is that um you know they were just speaking as men, you know, or uh on the flip side, it’s like when members leave, uh the narrative is oh, you know, hey, they were just offended or they wanted to sin or they were deceived or they were lazy learners, whatever it is. So, so notice the pattern.

8:23 The system never fundamentally admits its mistakes. It avoids institutional vulnerability. It avoids accountability. It reframes harm as opportunities for growth. And it expects followers to defend it at all costs. That is not humility. That I think is a narcissistic structure. So um now one of the common threads in narcissistic relationships and dynamics is moving goalposts and setting unrealist unrealistic expectations. So um in narcissistic relationships the expectations are impossible. You know you have to deny your needs and accommodate and present happiness at all times. um or sacrifice without complaining or stay in the relationship in spite of doubts that you are not allowed to voice and also you are expected to give everything without expecting reciprocity.

9:27 Now in Mormonism you are expected to pay tithing before feeding your family. You are asked to serve endlessly to attend meetings to accept callings all callings. You’re not allowed to say no to callings, right? You’re supposed to conform sexually, politically, culturally, theologically. And if you burn out, well, you just lack faith. If you happen to question any of that, then you lack humility. And if you struggle, well, then you just need to repent. Um, because the goalposts are constantly shifting.

10:06 Um now when policies change um you’re told that they never really changed in the first place. When language softens um the doctrine still stays rigid, right? So the members of the church are always always expected to make the adjustments. It’s never the church. It’s always the members. And this keeps people in a constant state of self-monitoring, self-doubt, and self-correction. Because if it’s never the system, it’s always the member of the system. It’s always a member of the church that has to make those adjustments. And they can’t ever place blame on the church itself or the system itself. So, it has to come back to, you know, to the self. And that’s how narcissistic control works. When you’re in a relational dynamic with a narcissist, it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what evidence you bring to the table. They will flip it around and make it about you and um somehow convince you that you were the one who who made the mistake or um

11:17 caused the friction or whatever it is or caused them to behave in a certain way that might have been negative. Now I want to talk about um you know why these patterns create codependency and again I I covered this a little bit in that that previous episode on codependency. Um, codependency thrives in narcissistic systems and narcissists tend to be very attracted to codependence and they also breed codependency because they need they need that other person to erase themselves in order for them to maintain their their image, to maintain their identity. It’s like they um there’s almost like a a kind of feeding off other people. Um there’s a term I can’t think of right now, but but anyway, um they always say like uh cut off supply. Like if you’re working with a narcissist, the best thing you can do is cut off supply to them because they literally thrive on feeding off of you and your sense of self to uh to elevate

12:17 their sense of self. So dependent codependency tends to thrive in in narcissistic systems because members are trained to prioritize the system over the self to protect the image of leadership um to suppress any anger. And again anger actually arises in us as a protective response that tells us that somebody’s crossed our boundary. But in a narcissistic system, you are trained to completely subvert that, to suppress it. Um, not to listen to it and to allow the system to override your own boundaries. Um, and the system also uh trains people to override their intuition, right? And to take responsibility for maintaining the harmony of the system, which happens in family systems or in relational dynamics with narcissist narcissistic people.

13:05 That is a really hard word to say, by the way. So over time you can learn \[clears throat\] over time you can learn that belonging um is conditional that uh you have to perform in order to gain love and that um the only way to get safety is to be obedient. So, your nervous system um adapts to all of that. And you uh you know, by the way, again, not to not to um criticize or bring any kind of negativity to to people who grew up in Mormonism, but but does anyone notice how much Mormons tend to fawn? And uh Mormons are also uh very uh tend to be overgivers. Um they learn to suppress.

13:53 uh you know you become hyper responsible and again you disconnect for your from your authentic self and I want people to know like this is not a personality flaw. This is the conditioning and it can be really hard to see this. Um what makes narcissistic systems so powerful is that they train their members to defend them. And so you can feel incredibly protective of the system itself. you feel loyalty um and you feel guilt for even questioning.

14:27 And it’s interesting too because the system itself and again I’m equating this to narcissistic dynamics being in a a parent child relationship with a narcissist or being in a romantic relationship with a narcissist. They will ask you to give up your sense of self for them and you tend to um and because they’re constantly uplifting themselves and and you know amplifying their own sense of identity as perfect and never making mistakes, you can idealize that person that you’re in that dynamic with and almost almost get your sense of identity through them. And I feel like the church kind of does that too. It’s kind of like, oh well, I’m so proud to be a Mormon because it’s the one true church and my identity is linked with this system and it’s perfection and I’m striving to uh be good enough within this system, but I gain my sense of identity through being attached to this system. So, because of that, you can feel very protective. You can have a lot

15:30 of loyalty. Um, and any kind of questioning can feel like betrayal and that is not an accident. uh that is structural. So again, narcissistic systems create dependency just like narcissistic relational dynamics create codependency and they can make leaving feel catastrophic because once you have created your sense of identity in in connection to that person or that system, when you decide that you want to walk away, it feels like your entire sense of who you are is has been ripped out from underneath you.

16:08 You don’t know anything. you. It’s catastrophic. It feels horrible. It’s very, very painful. And so that can keep people inside the system for a long, long time. Now, here’s the part that I love talking about because it’s my own experience and this is where my expertise is. I want to talk about the body consequences. Um, because this is really important and it’s it’s so common. It’s so much more common than people realize. So, most people don’t connect these dots. And I want to share how chronic nervous system activation isn’t sustainable.

16:45 Um, our nervous systems are supposed to move into activation and then deactivation. So we go through these different cycles of activation and deactivation, activation and deactivation. And if we don’t get to that deactivation, we will sustain chronic activation. And that can um that can show up through, you know, uh states of anxiety or feeling like we’re always on or feeling stressed out or burned out. Um, and those types of patterns, chronic nervous system activation are are driven when we are in systems that make us fear uh that we’re always unworthy or when we have fear of um eternal consequences or fear of losing community if we step out of alignment or fear of disappointing God. The fear of external of of eternal consequences was a big one for me because that permeated everything I did. It was like every action I took I felt like there was a constant uh eternal consequence for that and I didn’t know how to fix that. There was so much pressure on trying to live

17:55 right so that I could be okay in the next life because it, you know, Mormons teach you that basically this life is just a tiny little snippet and then there’s eternity, right? And everything depends on how you’re living in this life and that is so incredibly uh pressuring, you know, and so that was always on my mind. And so that can keep your stress response activated and online all the time. you don’t get to come through um you don’t get to experience a deactivation cycle. And so um yeah, so you’re constantly in that state of activation and and high stress.

18:32 And also in these systems, a lot of times um anger and grief and fear aren’t allowed. So they get suppressed and they go underground. And those emotions that that go underground become physiological and they can show up as chronic fatigue. They can show up uh as like CFSME type syndromes, hyper sensitivities uh where you have like chemical sensitivities or food sensitivities or like reactions to uh you know allergies and stuff like that. You can have um that kind of ties into mass cell activation syndrome.

19:13 People can have uh long COVID, chronic pain syndromes, autoimmune disorders, anxiety disorders, and depression. Um, it’s interesting because Utah ranks near the top nationally for depression and suicide according to organizations like the Mental Health of America and data from the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. And it’s important to recognize that, you know, obviously correlation isn’t causation.

19:45 But what I do know is that high demand religious environments create physiological pressure and they don’t give people autonomy. So pressure without autonomy creates dysregulation and disregulation over time becomes illness. These are not character flaws. They are physiological survival responses. And it can feel like your body’s betraying you when suddenly you have all these symptoms that come up and you don’t know what’s causing them and you feel like you’re falling apart. But your body isn’t betraying you in these situations.

20:19 It is literally just trying to communicate with you. And so for a lot of people um the body will become the place where all of that suppressed truth will finally get expressed because if you couldn’t say no externally, your body your body will eventually say no internally. And I’ve I’ve shared this with a lot of clients who I work with because the a lot of people that have chronic illness or uh chronic symptoms like this tend to have a hard time saying no and so their body will say no for them. So fatigue becomes their boundary or pain becomes uh a kind of signal for them or shutdown becomes protection and it can feel devastating.

21:03 Um, for those of you who don’t know my story, there there’s a an episode on the Almost awakened podcast where I share that fully. Uh, where I went through complete and total shutdown, became bedbound, had severe chronic illness and chronic symptoms, and I had to figure out how to work my way out of that. And it was a very long and tedious process. Um, but it’s why I’m here today. Uh, so if you were raised in a system that taught you to push through or to sacrifice more or have more faith or serve harder, when your body stops cooperating because of all that pressure, it can feel like failure. But what if it isn’t failure?

21:45 What if it’s actually an invitation? Now, it may not be the invitation that you asked for. It never is. Um, and it may not be an invitation that feels fair, cuz it’s not that either. But it is an invitation. It’s an invitation to meet the parts of yourself that were never allowed to exist. So, it’s asking you to meet the fear, the anger, the grief, the confusion, and betrayal, and the exhaustion of performing goodness.

22:18 Healing from chronic illness or chronic symptoms in this context isn’t just medical. It’s actually relational. It’s identity work. It’s nervous system repair and it’s trauma healing. And I want people to really really understand that healing is possible. I was at places in my experience that I didn’t I I couldn’t believe the symptoms I was having and I didn’t think it was possible to ever come back from that.

22:48 But I did. And not only did I heal from the chronic symptoms and the chronic illness patterns, but I healed in ways that gave me more capacity to live my life in a more authentic, meaningful way. And I look back on my experience with gratitude because I never would have been able to meet those things had I not been um \[clears throat\] stopped in my tracks and been forced to do it. So healing is absolutely possible. You can learn to restore safety in your body.

23:24 You can um develop self-rust, more capacity for joy. You can uh learn to have more emotional range where you learn to be comfortable with emotions, comfortable with sensations in your body, comfortable um managing and dealing with uh activation and um what we call anxiety. Um and you can learn to develop more of an authentic identity. So a lot of people who start addressing things like this can see symptom improvement as a byproduct of nervous system healing.

24:00 um when the body no longer has to carry suppressed threat signals, it can finally shift out of chronic survival mode. Um and that kind of healing, it requires something that high demand systems will never teach you. And that is that you don’t get to bypass the hard stuff. You get to go through it. And it’s very confronting. It’s hard. Again, we’re told that we should suppress that, run away from it, not address it. But the way to heal is is the way to get out of that is through. Right? So, we move through the grief, we move through the anger, we move through the identity loss and learn how to create a new authentic identity, we move through nervous system dysregulation into regulation. And we move through the terrifying process of learning how to trust ourselves.

24:54 um sometimes for the first time because a lot of us I don’t know I don’t know I’m trying to think of like you know if you were uh at your youngest stages before you were before you were told to disconnect from yourself if we ever had that selfrust I don’t know but uh so for a lot of people who were raised in Mormonism it’s learning to trust yourself for the first time and on the other side of this whole process um again people often discover something unexpected it’s not just symptom relief But you can uh recognize a new sense of empowerment of life satisfaction, of freedom, of play, and of joy that isn’t based on performance.

25:35 And you find this sense of self that isn’t based on approval. So, I want to share a little bit about how I help people because this is work that I do every day. It is my life’s calling. It’s what I’m passionate about. So, I love talking about it because I love seeing the changes in people’s lives. So I work with people who have developed chronic symptoms after years of self-uppression, uh religious trauma, chronic stress, trauma of all kinds actually, um who have uh typically codependency patterns, attachment disruption patterns, um and uh and a disconnection from from their self. So, these are people that typically are navigating chronic fatigue syndrome or what’s known as me, uh, long COVID. A lot of times people can have like mystery neurological symptoms that um have never gotten diagnosed uh or they just have they have no diagnosis because they’ve run all these tests and everything comes back, you know, normal.

26:36 a lot of people uh that tend to have chronic pain or fibromyalgia. Um IBS situations and autoimmune conditions and uh nervous system dysregulation and essentially any if you’ve ever gotten a diagnosis that starts with functional in the beginning that uh tends to be uh aligned with this mindbody stuff. So when I work with people I don’t it’s not about forcing the body to behave. It’s not about um fixing things. It’s about changing the relationship to your body. So, I use approaches with people like um nervous system regulation, pain reprocessing therapy, sematic awareness. Um I help people understand how to process emotions naturally. It’s not something you have to go seeking or searching for.

27:23 I don’t dive into trauma processing. I help people understand how to meet what’s what’s unwinding in their systems in the here and now. Um, I offer people uh a lot of education um and help them understand how to practice trauma-informed mindfulness, which is so powerful. I’m I’m such a geek about mindfulness. Um, I help people understand how to reconstruct identity, how to uh do uh boundary work, and how to bring um and develop and build more self-compassion.

27:56 Um, and so through that process, I help people teach their nervous systems that it is safe to feel and that it’s safe to say no or yes, that it’s safe to exist outside of performance and and how to actually identify and trust their own internal signals. And so as safety increases, a lot of people start to notice um different shifts. So they can feel more energy, they can feel less symptom intensity, greater resilience, more emotional capacity, um more capacity to deal with stress because I teach people how to complete stress responses, how to be with and process through stress activation so that it so that it discharges from the body and releases and they can come back into to greater states of regulation. And this also helps people to um come into a deeper sense of aliveness. And it’s not because their body um it’s not because they were fighting with their bodies, right?

28:56 That’s the that’s the paradigm that we’re taught is that we have to fight with symptoms that our symptoms are the enemy. Our body is the enemy. And I teach people a new way of being. That their body is not the enemy and you don’t have to fight with it and you don’t have to fix it. It’s it’s more learning to be present with and showing your system how it can process through all the activation and all the stored emotions that have been locked in your system and not in a way that’s really scary. I do this with people um in a very titrated uh gentle way because this this this um process doesn’t have to be excruciating. It’s not easy and it is confronting and we do have to learn to sit with discomfort and move through that. But we can do that in a gentle way. So, I want to share a little bit about some groups that I’m going to be launching. Um, I’ve created some upcoming groups called Anchor and Regulate that’ll start March 11th. And

29:52 these groups are designed for people that are navigating chronic symptoms, chronic pain conditions, chronic illness, or nervous system dysregulation from the lingering impact of either chronic stress or trauma. Now, they’re not therapy groups. Um, and they’re not spaces again focused on fixing you. They are structured healing containers, I guess we could call them, where um I’m going to be combining psycho education with sematic tools um teaching people about nervous system regulation practices and and they’re going to offer a lot of space for supportive connection. So each of the group meetings is going to include um you know a small portion. So the meetings are going to be like 90 minutes long and 30 minutes of that is going to be on me teaching psycho education and offering people these experiential practices and then the rest of the hour is going to be held for Q&A so people can ask me questions about their own personal experiences. There will be space for people to reflect and share about what

30:55 they’re going through. And so you’re not just going to be learning concepts, you’re going to be learning how to apply them inside your own body and life in practical ways. Um so the focus is on helping you to feel safer in your nervous system to understand your symptoms through a mindbody lens and to gradually build trust with yourself. Now the groups are going to meet uh again for 90 minutes over uh every other week.

31:18 So I think they’re going to be on Wednesdays and it’s going to be every other Wednesday over a 10-month period. And the cost for the groups is $60 a month. And anyone who signed up for my groups will also get a discounted rate for any additional private coaching sessions. I wanted to make these groups accessible for people because not everybody who’s going through chronic illness um especially if you’ve lost the ability to work, which happened to me.

31:42 Um you can’t always afford one-on-one coaching. And so I wanted to offer something that was accessible uh for people. And so it’s just going to be $60 a month and it’s going to cover a 10-month period to give people a container that helps them to slowly integrate new information and learn to practice that in between meetings that we have. Um, if this is something that resonates with you, you can click on the link uh in the show notes um to sign up.

32:10 Now, um, if you take one thing from today’s episode, I hope it will be this. You were never broken. Your system has only been adapting in its attempt to keep you safe. And sometimes the body’s collapse or shut down or sometimes I call them glitches is not the end of the story. It can actually be the beginning of your return to yourself, which is such a beautiful thing. So, I hope that you will keep that close to your heart, that you will understand that if you’re going through difficult physiological symptoms in response to chronic stress or trauma, that sometimes that can be an invitation back home to yourself.

33:04 I want to thank everyone for supporting the Almost Awaken podcast. It’s so helpful if you can like the episode. Um, I’d also like to invite people to subscribe to the new channel on YouTube at Almost Awaken Podcast so that we can bring these episodes to more people. Bill and I are trying to move the podcast um from the Mormon Discussions channel to its own channel. So, please like, subscribe to the new channel um and help us support this so we can give this out to more people. All right, thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone.

33:37 Thanks for tuning in to the Almost Awakened podcast. For more tools, \[music\] resources, and real talk about conscious living, visit almostawwakened.org. \[music\] That’s almost awakened.org. Your \[music\] resource for waking up.