He would sooner lose almost anything than be seen as a failure.

And a person whose priorities are ordered that way will, when the pressure gets high enough, sacrifice the very things that should have been unsacrificeable, in order to protect the one thing that should have been the first to go, which is pride.

That is what Lauren meant.

In a rightly ordered life, pride is cheap and family is beyond price; you spend the pride freely to protect the family, the way you would burn the furniture to keep the children warm.

My brother had it exactly reversed.