The one thing I am ashamed of, maybe even hate myself for it the most, that carrying the shame or guilt about it makes me a bad person. The shame is not morality, it’s cowardice. People are not going to get a gut feeling to trust me, they won’t follow me. And I am never going to be free. Guilt is masturbation of the Ego: It keeps you the center of your own pity party! I rob everyone around me of a stable leader, or a present parent. I have used pain as a disguise for virtue. If belief becomes mandatory, truth is a liability. — Chase Hughes
I was transcribing a Chase Hughes video into what was supposed to be a gratitude list, and instead I filled the page with his teaching — that shame isn’t morality, it’s cowardice, that guilt is masturbation of the ego, that pain gets used as a disguise for virtue. And then, underneath all of it, almost as an afterthought: if belief becomes mandatory, truth is a liability.
I didn’t understand that last line right away. I just knew it was true, the way certain sentences land before you can explain why. It took some sitting with it to see that it wasn’t really about cults or regimes or anything far away from my own kitchen table. It was about every room I’ve ever tried to control.
Here’s what I mean. A belief goes mandatory the moment it stops being allowed to be tested. Not stated as a rule — nobody hangs a sign that says you must believe this — but enforced anyway, socially, quietly, through what happens to the person who says the true, inconvenient thing. You don’t need a doctrine and an inquisition. You just need a family, a group, or a shop, and a leader who has more invested in being right than in being accurate.
I’ve been that leader. More than once.
In my marriage, there was a version of “we’re fine” that I needed to be true more than I needed it to be accurate. Madeline would name something real — a way I’d shut down, a promise I’d let slide — and some old wiring in me would hear it as an attack on the story I was maintaining rather than information I needed. I wasn’t punishing her on purpose. But the effect was the same as if I had been: the belief stayed protected, and she paid a small tax every time she told me the truth. It took three mornings of just praying and actually listening — not defending, not fixing, just hearing her — before I understood that the cost of her honesty had been mine to remove the whole time.
With my kids it was worse, because kids don’t have the language for what’s happening, they just learn the rule. I know there was a season where the unspoken belief in our house was something like Dad is doing his best and that’s not to be questioned, and a kid who said the true thing — that hurt, that scared me, that wasn’t fair — wasn’t met with curiosity. However gently, they learned that the belief was load-bearing and their honesty was optional. I think about the fish on my arm, the survival mechanism I built as a boy, and I recognize it now in my own kids’ silences. You don’t get free of that by deciding to be more honest. You get free of it by making the room safe enough that someone else’s truth doesn’t threaten anything you need to keep standing.
In the rooms of AA, I’ve watched this happen to other people before I ever caught it in myself. Someone gets sober, gets some time, gets some respect — and somewhere in there, “I have this figured out” quietly becomes mandatory. Not announced. Just assumed. And then a newcomer, or a sponsee, or someone with real time who’s honest about a slip or a doubt or a resentment that hasn’t cleared, becomes the problem instead of the information. I’ve sponsored people long enough to know how tempting it is to want them to affirm my method rather than tell me it isn’t working for them. The program only stays alive in a room where the truth is safer than the belief. The minute it’s the other way around, you don’t have recovery anymore. You have a performance of recovery, and everyone’s reciting lines.
And at the shop — I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t part of how I managed people for years. When you’re the only decision-maker, “the way I do it is the right way” doesn’t have to be spoken out loud. It just has to be the thing an employee learns not to question if they want an easy day. I’ve had guys who could see a problem with how I was running something and sat on it, because raising it cost them more than staying quiet did. That’s not loyalty. That’s a mandatory belief doing exactly what mandatory beliefs do — protecting itself at the expense of whoever’s closest to the truth.
What gets me is that none of this required cruelty. It just required me caring more about the belief staying intact than about what was actually true. Shame does that. So does guilt, which is really just shame keeping itself company. The journal page had it right before I did: guilt keeps you the center of your own pity party, and while you’re busy performing contrition, you’re still not available — not as a husband, not as a father, not as a sponsor, not as a boss. You’ve robbed the room of a stable leader or a present parent, and you’ve done it while looking like the most remorseful person in it.
I don’t think the fix is trying harder to be honest. I think it’s noticing, in real time, when I need something to be true more than I need to know what’s true — and letting that be the signal to get curious instead of defensive. The tell is always the same, in a marriage or a meeting or a shop: watch what happens to the person who tells you something you didn’t want to hear. If they get smaller, the belief was mandatory. If they get heard, there’s still a chance the room runs on truth instead of ego.
I’m still the long way home on this one. But at least now I know what to watch for.