Speak and Die

On courage, cowardice, and the execution of thought

Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash

I grew up Mormon — also known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

My parents were profoundly devout, particularly my father. He was also a free-thinker. These two ways of being—faithful and intellectually independent—were in constant tension, and that tension became a source of deep and ongoing pain for him.

I was raised to think for myself. Ironically, that inheritance would be what eventually unraveled my own belonging within the faith as well.

I remember vividly the day my father disagreed publicly with a church leader. He wrote for the local newspaper and hosted a radio talk show. It wasn’t long before he was “called in to speak with the brethren.” To publicly criticize church leadership was against the rules.

He was punished. They revoked his temple recommend.

For those unfamiliar, a temple recommend is the pinnacle of Mormon life. It is your permission slip into the temple, the holiest place on earth for members—a place believed to be essential to salvation and eternal family belonging. Losing it is not just an administrative penalty. It’s a spiritual exile. You are, symbolically, barred from heaven itself.

My father had a choice: shut up, or die.

I watched my mother beg for leniency, pleading with the leadership to reconsider. She believed if they just listened, they would see he was a good man. A faithful man. Not a threat. She imagined reason would prevail.

My father knew better. He walked out of the clandestine disciplinary council and said, simply, “Go ahead and take it.”

He chose freedom of thought over belonging.

I won’t tell the rest of his story—that’s his. But the stage was set for me. I saw what courage actually looked like. And years later, I would need that same courage to leave the faith he still clung to. It fractured our belonging to each other, but it was the only honest path forward for me.

I became the kind of person who cannot—and will not—support spaces where you are forbidden to think or speak freely without punishment.

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It’s 2 a.m. as I write this, and I keep jolting awake—ruminating, angry, gutted. I’m still reeling from witnessing the murder of Iryna Zarutska, from the school shootings, from the killings of the two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota—even their dog. And now, the execution of Charlie Kirk. I have felt a dark, societal tipping point.

There are so many layers to this that strike at the root of my being. The more I peel them back, the more I see the same shadow I first glimpsed as a child—the rot that forms wherever speech is policed by fear.

I have an allergy to intellectual cowardice. To emotional reasoning masquerading as morality. But more than anything, I have an extreme opposition to the silencing of dissent.

I think it’s part of why I became a therapist. Therapy, at its core, is the radical notion that you can say anything—and someone will listen, without flinching, and attempt to understand. That is not just psychological safety. It’s psychological oxygen.

Therapy is built on the belief that what we repress becomes pathological. The antidote is speech. Name what is inside. Say it out loud. Watch how your body reacts. Sort through it. Only then do new choices appear. Who do you want to be, now that you see what you think and feel?

The more we speak and listen, the freer we become.

Which is why this murder wasn’t just a tragedy—it was an evil. Not only the death of a human being, a husband, a father. It was the public broadcasting of a message:
Speak certain words, and you will die.

And suddenly, you see the shadow surface:
Some people think that’s okay.
Some people think killing people for their words is justice.
Some people think erasing people—physically, socially, relationally—for their ideas is virtuous.

This isn’t only a left–right problem. I have lived inside nearly every ideological space—political, social, religious—and I can tell you: the impulse to execute people for wrongthink exists in them all.

We see it statistically on campuses, where conservative students are punished at far higher rates. But I see it more quietly, every day, in families, friend groups, and faith communities. People excommunicating each other not with bullets, but with silence and contempt. Cutting each other off, relationally, for saying the “wrong” thing.

It’s the same impulse. It’s execution, just in slower motion.

And most insidiously, we often do this in the name of “protecting our peace.”
Children cut off their parents. Parents disown their children. Families fracture. And we wrap it in self-help language and hashtags, as if we’ve done something noble.

What a joke.
What a sleight of hand.

We ruin lives in the name of creating peace.

As Carl Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Those who deny their shadow will be ruled by it.

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To bring your inner life into the open is one of the most dangerous acts a human can attempt. It will inevitably collide with the inner lives of others. That collision is the engine of growth. It can refine us. It can change our minds. But only if we are willing to engage it—with courage and distress tolerance.

It is a painful skill to learn: how to stay present with your own emotions while standing in the presence of someone who disagrees with you. In those moments, you face a choice. Will you build the inner resilience to tolerate the discomfort of disagreement, invalidation, and difference? Or will you lash out—silence, punish, and coerce—until the other person disappears?

Either the tyranny of your shadow will rule others, or the light within you will hold your shadow at bay.

And right now, we are killing each other off in the process.

The refusal to hear ideas we fear is not moral courage. It is moral cowardice dressed in righteousness.

And there is a particular kind of cowardice in avoiding those we disagree with.
I can’t tell you how much it disappoints me to watch so many well-known voices and influencers speak only to those who already agree with them. They build echo chambers—self-reinforcing bubbles of cowardice and narcissism—and then mistake that insulation for strength.

Charlie Kirk was the opposite. He went directly into the open and said what he believed. He invited debate. He didn’t demand agreement; he risked dissent.

Do not forget: that is courage.

And every attempt to transform our universities into intellectual “safe spaces”—where students are shielded from disagreement instead of strengthened by it—is not protection. It is the soft edge of tyranny. It trains fragility, not fortitude. It teaches fear, not freedom.

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I anticipate I’ll be asked if I support or condone Charlie Kirk’s ideas themselves. One follower even asked me, in good faith, “Do you believe he was a good person?” That’s an interesting question to ask a therapist. Do I believe he was a good person? Do I believe you are a good person? Do I believe I am a good person? He was a human being—a mixture of light and shadow, as we all are. As I’ve listened to his ideas (by no means comprehensively - I didn’t follow his work closely), I’ve agreed with some and disagreed with others. And quite frankly, these feel like strange qualifiers to reach for when we should all be able to agree on this much: murdering someone for their ideas is unequivocally wrong.

If disagreement justifies death, then none of us are safe—and none of us are free.

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As a therapist, my work depends on the opposite of censorship. It depends on creating a space where people can drag their raw, unpolished, sometimes offensive truths into the light—and not be cast out for it. Healing requires that we risk being known. It requires the bravery to speak and the strength to listen. If I flee the room when someone says something I despise, I’ve abandoned the very heart of my profession.

We cannot heal what we are unwilling to face. We cannot grow what we are too frightened to name.

And if we sacrifice dialogue on the altar of safety, we will inherit neither safety nor truth—only silence, and the tyranny of our own shadows.